Amazon Angst
There's an interesting essay on Literary Hub, "Against Amazon: Seven Arguments, One Manifesto," by Jorge Carrion. It's more venting than manifesto, but deeply human and obviously deeply felt. It's an argument for books and bookstores and against the speed-driven, impersonal, robotic likes of Amazon.
Need I say that I love bookstores? Not the huge ones with the fake coziness of seating arrangements and coffee shops, but real ones with a real, probably not rich, owner somewhere on the premises. There used to be a wonderful such bookstore in Baltimore, the Peabody, which even sold beer you could drink as you browsed. In Rochester, NY, where I grew up, there was, near the Eastman School of Music, a one-room bookstore run by Mr Weiss - I knew him for years, and he was never anything but Mr Weiss - who knew books and book people, and who would also let a very young buyer buy a ten-dollar book on time. When young, I collected first editions of Edna St. Vincent Millay and collections of 1920s poetry. He learned to save such books for me. I got over that interest and finally gave the collection to a university, but I moved on to fishing books and, whenever I returned home, checked in with him. The last time, in his old age, he was closing the store, but he disappeared into the cellar and returned with a box, saying he had bought it once upon a time and forgotten it. So we opened it together, and it contained a dozen fishing books, some of them relatively rare ones from the early 19th century. The prices that he had paid for them in the 1940s were penciled inside them - 4 and 5 dollars. I asked him what his prices were now (in the 1980s). "You've been a good customer. Those are the prices for you." He wouldn't be dissuaded. He said something about their going to somebody who would take care of them. I took most of them and still have them.
That was what a bookstore should be. And a bookstore owner.
Carrion talks about the smell of actual books; this is especially true of old books. And the feel - the weight in the hand, the texture of the paper. These are appeals to our human senses, appeals that satisfy beyond same-day delivery or lower price, beyond Kindle convenience.
I read this week that audio-book sales are up among under-35 buyers, and some publisher is going exclusively to audio. This to me is ominous - the threat of a world with fiction but without books. Voices but no literacy. Could we bear a world in which nobody could read because machines would do it for us? Some Silicon
I hear something on that score and I think of Mr Weiss, who loved books so much that he spent his life helping other people love them. Real books.
I think I'm with Carrion in wishing that Amazon's influence were less pervasive, less successful. We need the humanity of the real book, which has odor, heft, texture, wisdom - just like another human being.
Need I say that I love bookstores? Not the huge ones with the fake coziness of seating arrangements and coffee shops, but real ones with a real, probably not rich, owner somewhere on the premises. There used to be a wonderful such bookstore in Baltimore, the Peabody, which even sold beer you could drink as you browsed. In Rochester, NY, where I grew up, there was, near the Eastman School of Music, a one-room bookstore run by Mr Weiss - I knew him for years, and he was never anything but Mr Weiss - who knew books and book people, and who would also let a very young buyer buy a ten-dollar book on time. When young, I collected first editions of Edna St. Vincent Millay and collections of 1920s poetry. He learned to save such books for me. I got over that interest and finally gave the collection to a university, but I moved on to fishing books and, whenever I returned home, checked in with him. The last time, in his old age, he was closing the store, but he disappeared into the cellar and returned with a box, saying he had bought it once upon a time and forgotten it. So we opened it together, and it contained a dozen fishing books, some of them relatively rare ones from the early 19th century. The prices that he had paid for them in the 1940s were penciled inside them - 4 and 5 dollars. I asked him what his prices were now (in the 1980s). "You've been a good customer. Those are the prices for you." He wouldn't be dissuaded. He said something about their going to somebody who would take care of them. I took most of them and still have them.
That was what a bookstore should be. And a bookstore owner.
Carrion talks about the smell of actual books; this is especially true of old books. And the feel - the weight in the hand, the texture of the paper. These are appeals to our human senses, appeals that satisfy beyond same-day delivery or lower price, beyond Kindle convenience.
I read this week that audio-book sales are up among under-35 buyers, and some publisher is going exclusively to audio. This to me is ominous - the threat of a world with fiction but without books. Voices but no literacy. Could we bear a world in which nobody could read because machines would do it for us? Some Silicon
I hear something on that score and I think of Mr Weiss, who loved books so much that he spent his life helping other people love them. Real books.
I think I'm with Carrion in wishing that Amazon's influence were less pervasive, less successful. We need the humanity of the real book, which has odor, heft, texture, wisdom - just like another human being.
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