Fahrenheit 451
I love books. As in actual, tangible, printed books. And recently I had the privilege of roaming a particular bookstore spanning an entire city block, a literary mecca four floors high teeming with over a million books standing strong on twelve foot shelves.
Powell’s City of Books, Portland, Oregon. So nice to see you again.
And now, (commencing obligatory Halloween portion) I imagine for a moment this mighty vessel of ideas empty, a dusty, ghostly warehouse where bumps in the night compete with hot, hissing rat droppings; or worse, a space where imagination and creativity once ruled transmogrified into an Urban Home or Duvets Unlimited or wherever the undead mass-consumers converge these days.
Because, apparently, there’s a spooky future out there where the printed book is extinct.
Okay, okay, it’s hyperbole, maybe, but reading this article from Publisher’s Weekly about major publishers rethinking their commitment to printed books took me to a dark place.
As a writer trying to get published traditionally, as in an analog Bryan Hilson book on the shelf in a bricks-and-mortar store, this is not welcome news. There are financial implications as well, which the above article gets into, but here I’m going to approach the issue as a reader.
I’m no technophobe, I’ve got a Nook (and a Kindle, egads!) but to me there are few greater pleasures than losing one’s self inside a bookstore, encountering, picking up, and flipping through paper pages, not your computer/tablet/smart phone’s best approximation of such. Seriously, browsing on the internet is not even close to a real shopping experience. Even at Duvets Unlimited.
How do you feel about this, fellow readers? Are you okay with physical bookstores (and maybe even libraries?) becoming a thing of the past? Do you accept that all things media inevitably will exist solely as digitized goods? Or are you ready to raise up your hardcovers and reading lights in defense of these invaluable institutions?
Some scary things to consider, my friends. Happy Halloween.
Although it is this blogger’s mission to develop content that will tap into a niche but hopefully ever-expanding audience, he sometimes can become so consumed in writing what HE wants to read he doesn’t take into account WHO he’s writing for. Neglects the very people who, if properly stimulated by his output, could launch his blog to the next level like they were shooting it out of a T-shirt cannon, past the book publishers’ mezzanine and all the way up to those glassed-in luxury boxes where the glitterati of Hollywood assemble (and probably have sex), and then eventually HE will be played by Amy Adams in a hit movie based on his galdang blog galdangit.