The death of bookstores

So many books, so little time! 

Now where am I going to hang out? 

Within weeks of each other, the only two full-blown, legitimate bookstores in town decided to close their doors. It’s true. Bricks-and-mortar bookstores are becoming extinct. Even in a place like the Bay Area that boasts having the highest number of college graduates in the U.S. per capita, we somehow can’t manage to merit having a real bookstore anywhere close by. Once a comfortable, interesting place to browse on a Friday night date, a rainy Saturday afternoon, or a family night out, these bookstores are being swept up into cyberspace with all the other retailers who believe they can establish a comparable virtual connection to their customers.

I can tell you right now, it just won’t be the same. Sure, let them go ahead and abandon their buildings that once housed the books we cherished and try to compete with Amazon.com. However, before they become too confident about their business acumen, they should note that Amazon.com has never been a place to go, a place where we can sit down and chat casually with other book lovers. Amazon is not a place where we can literally smell the coffee from the adjacent coffee shop. I guess I can’t be justifiably bitter toward Amazon; it's merely a computer connection to books. But I can't help feeling a little resentful that the growing Internet behemoth is stealing the comforts, sounds, smells, and sights of an honest-to-goodness bookstore. 

I suppose there’s still Half Price Books, which has a great business model, but it doesn’t have the same “browse-ability” as the big-name bookstores. The aisles are narrow, the selections are unreliable, and the displays are, well, paltry at best. Nothing in HPB really calls out to me besides the reduced prices. Honestly, no one likes a bargain more than I do, but I go to a bookstore for the sensory experience, not just for the bargain. I go because I like to see, smell, and touch the freshly printed books—lots of them—and to find some little gem I can bring home and cherish. Otherwise, I could just stay home and shop on Amazon.

Another place to be around books, naturally, is the public library, which has always been my home away from home. However, over the last two decades, our library’s hours have been cut back steadily, even drastically. So, although the library may be better stocked than Half Price Books, I just can’t count on it being open for me whenever I’m in the mood to be among books. Besides, library people seem to come and go at a different pace and with a different intent than bookstore people. Fewer and fewer people are content to just be in the library. They’re in and out, most of them, locating their items and dashing back outside. I admit, I’m often one of those dashers, especially since it’s so easy to put books on hold ahead of time. Like others, I run in, grab my books off the hold shelf, whisk them through the self-check machine, and race back to my car and my life. Deed done.

Nowadays, electronic books are stealing away even the most loyal public-library patrons. For instance, my brother, an avid reader and library lover his whole life, finds he doesn’t go to the library as much anymore now that he has an iPhone and an iPad. Instead, he satisfies his voracious reading appetite with ebooks - reading material he can have at the ready. It’s hard to argue with that techie approach, I suppose, if the only goal is to have something to read.

Personally, I can’t bear not having reading material with me everywhere I go—from the bathroom to the boardroom, so to speak. A kindred spirit, Thomas Jefferson put it simply: “I cannot live without books.” This philosophy has rubbed off on my son Grant, too. Maybe because I frequently read to him during meals and baths when he was young, I turned him into kind of a book fanatic early in life. By the time he was only four years old, he would beg me to read to him all the time, including at stoplights. 

Now seventeen, he called just yesterday to see if I would run to the library for him before it closed (in half an hour!) to pick up a couple of books he’d reserved. He was having a busy day, but when I told him I’d been gone for three hours and had just got home and was tired and starving and needed to eat, he paid no mind to my plight. “But I have nothing to read!” he insisted, as if having fresh library books was his inalienable right and picking them up for him was clearly my maternal duty. In the end, he knew he could count on me because he knows I’m just as much a sucker for books as he is.

So, what can I count on? The books themselves, of course. Even if the bookstores close—even if a book disappoints me now and then—books in one form or another will always surround me, and I will never run out of books. In fact, I’ve long said my tombstone will read, “So many books, so little time.”

(In case you can’t figure out what your next good book will be, try the website “What Should I Read Next,” and you won’t run out of books either. http://www.whatshouldireadnext.com/.)