Borders and Babel
The above is a picture of the Borders store near my office. The ground floor of the place looks like a tornado has ripped through it, the basement is as you see above – empty shelves (also for sale, contact our administrator!) and garish posters and people creeping around like they're raiding a tomb.
No doubt the world of publishing is changing, and the delivery method of bookification is undergoing a radical shift. I've had a few conversations with local indis, and they seem to be faring better than the chains, probably owning to customer loyalty and the intimacy shopping at a smaller store can bring. Minds out of the gutter peoples, I'm not talking about a Happy Ending™ with every purchase. It's kinda like going to your local bar and ordering "the usual". I used to have a local where I could just walk up to the bar and the dude behind it would pour me a Kilkenny without me even asking, and then he'd take me out the back and….
Anyways, I digress…
Dymocks (our other big chain down here) is still kicking, and wandering past the rows of DVDs and CDs in my dishevelled Borders, I couldn't help but think they kinda dropped the ball. I'm unsure how they thought they were going to compete with big music/DVD chains, particularly given the shrinking nature of those markets due to online selling/piracy. But the point of all this is, as we seem to move closer towards an age of electronic delivery and consumption, and the notion of a bookshelf becomes more antiquated, I start to feel like a really old bastard.
See, I like BOOKS. I like the feel of them, the smell of them. I like collecting them, looking at them on my shelves. I like admiring the cover art, having the ability to read without a recharger or getting told by the stewardess "excuse me sir, all electronic devices must now be switched off, didn't you know our nav' systems are so crappy a fucking KINDLE can make us drop out of the sky".
One of my fondest memories of being a kid was when my mother used to drop me off at a newsagent (kinda like a newsstand/bookstore all in one) in the mall while she did the grocery shopping. I would've been maybe ten at the time. I used to hunker down in the book aisle, pick a Stephen King book off the shelf, flip through 'til I found a "good bit" and lose myself for an hour. And I kinda wonder how kids are going to get into books in an age where they only exist as files on a computer. Or what happens when those computers stop working. When we convert all our information into a format that can't be interpreted without a secondary device(you only need your eyes to read a book) and set ourselves up for another Babel event.
Actually, that sounds like a neat idea for a book…
