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Is Book Loving A Fetish?

April 8, 2011 /

Bibliophilia, sounds kind of dirty, doesn’t it? Well that’s how I felt, in a good way, after a pleasurable visit to Myopic Books in Chicago’s Wicker Park neighborhood yesterday. I was in the area for a meeting and had some time to kill so I started exploring the neighborhood. I love books and bookstores, so I was really happy to find Myopic Books even if I only had a few minutes to browse.

When I walked in, I was immediately reminded of O’Gara’s Books in Hyde Park, but much bigger. Shelves and shelves of books in wooden bookshelves stacked to the ceiling. Just books everywhere. I was surrounded and infused by the wonderful smells of books! I love eBooks, but nothing can replace the aroma of the printed page.

Experiencing such an emotional response, no doubt heightened by the loss of so many of my beloved Borders bookstores, it occurred to me that perhaps my love of books had become a fetish. There are fetishes for pretty much everything, so this is probably not unique. I just hadn’t noticed it before, taking bookstores for granted. Never thinking that someday they’d begin to disappear.

I was so happy that I just had to buy something! I found a copy of Masters of Doom that I knew would be perfect for my son the hacker genius. And I’ll probably get an eBook copy for myself, which interestingly enough cost about the same as the used hardcover. I’ll definitely have to visit Myopic Books again sometime!

Are Physical Books Really Dead Yet?

February 23, 2011 /

A new Amazon Kindle ad has Crave writer David Carnoy speculating that Amazon has pronounced the physical book dead. Long live the physical book! He writes,

By saying that the physical book “lives on,” Amazon is implying that it died at some point. That’s not exactly true, of course, but the messaging seems pretty clear, and expect to see more of it going forward.

It seems rather obvious that physical books continue to be printed and sold to millions of readers. But you know what? I think Amazon is on to something here. As an avid book lover, my heart has been torn by my growing love of eBooks and the accelerating disappearance of bookstores most recently due to the Borders bankruptcy.

As I sort through the remains of the store closing sale of my neighborhood Borders, I am filled with the same ambivalence about physical books as I’m sure was in part responsible for the store’s demise. I love the printed book, but these days I prefer eBooks whenever they are available, and in many cases, I am more than willing to wait for an eBook version to come out. As a result, the only printed books I buy now are graphic novels and manga because they are still mostly unavailable in eBook form, at least legally that is.

So maybe Amazon is right. Somewhere along the way physical books died, at least in my heart, but the soul of the book lives on. It lives on in Kindles, Nooks, iPads, and anything that can display the printed word. If that’s not going to heaven, I don’t know what is!

I Still Love Bookstores!

January 12, 2011 /

My favorite Chicago Borders bookstore is closing this month. After a one year extension, the end of the line is finally here and I’m very sad to see it go. I’ve always spent a lot of money on books, real paper, printed books! I love books, and the physical form of a book is still something that gives me a pleasure that can’t be duplicated in the digital form. I love eBooks too, but it’s a different and still evolving experience. My love of physical books is refined and mature.

There’s a Borders near my house which, while a wonderful space, simply does not have the selection of manga that my downtown Borders did. Manga, Japanese graphic novels, are very slowly making their way into legitimate eBook stores. Illegal, scanned translations abound on the internet, but I prefer to avoid these. So for now, I still buy these in bookstores and therein lies my problem. The closing of my favorite Borders leaves me no other choice but to buy manga online from Amazon.com. The remaining book stores in my area don’t have the titles I want anymore!

Peter Osnos at the Atlantic has written a wonderful analysis of What Went Wrong at Borders. Like many failing businesses, what was once a successful company has not thrived under the management of people who did not understand or have a passion for the underlying enterprise. Competitor Barnes & Noble seems to have handled the transition to online book selling and the rise of eBooks somewhat better than Borders.

I would like to see Borders and Barnes & Noble both survive and evolve. I still love bookstores and hope to spend many more hours in them in the future, browsing and buying books whether physical or digital in their form. It’s hard to see what form bookstores will evolve into. I suppose the era of the mega-bookstore is over. Maybe a smaller, boutique style store that blends digital offerings with physical copies of best sellers by the most popular authors, is the way of the future. Imagine a coffee shop with a couple of racks of books where one can buy eBooks on your Kindle, Nook, or iPad at a discount if you do it over the local hot spot. Barnes & Noble already does something like this in their stores, but I think the stores themselves are still too big.

Only the future will tell how this all plays out. My neighborhood still has a number of independent bookstores. Maybe it’s time I introduce them to my kids!

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