Recently some friends and I were talking about a new women’s magazine. I told one friend who was looking to get a copy, “Barnes and Noble plans to carry it so you can get it …oh…actually, sorry all the stores I know of are gone.”
All the bookstores are dying. Borders, as we know, is completely gone. The three former Borders stores in the town that I call home are now a DSW Shoe Warehouse, a Nordstrom Rack, and a restaurant. The Barnes and Nobles stores are now a Nike Store and an H & M. There is one boutique bookstore left in my city that I am aware of. The last time I went there, a line snaked out the door for…a TV personality.
Many chalk up the decline of the traditional bookstore to new technologies like Nooks and iPads and online venues like Amazon. Maybe so. But I also think we are a culture that just doesn’t read anymore—read books anyways. One study by the Endowment for the Arts found that the average American watches two hours of television a day and spends seven minutes reading. The same study found that two-thirds of thirteen year-olds don’t even read on a daily basis.
Um, what?
When I was thirteen, I read my weekends away, plowing through anything I could get my hands on. I would hide a flashlight in my bed so that once my mother had enforced lights-out, I would slip back into the world of literature. Every now and then she would kiss me goodnight, smile, and then rip the covers off while I laid there sheepishly exposed gripping a Nancy Drew mystery.
But yet, my own life tracks with the general American decline in reading. Everything about book reading is in decline: the number of books purchased, the time people spend reading, the number of people who even read a single book in a given year. And I fall into that category. At the end of the day, whereas I once found solace in Graham Greene or Jane Austen, I now find it in some enlightening selection of The Real Housewives, in the most recent US Weekly, or on Facebook. I am almost finished with Bringing Up Bebe, not exactly Jane Eyre, and even that feels like an accomplishment.
Perhaps the vanishing nature of bookstores has something to do with my own book-reading drop-off. Bookstores were where I escaped for quiet, to run my fingers along the clean, enticing spines of words that were inked on parchment or tapped on a typewriter, stories just sitting there for my consumption. I would browse the classics or check out the recommendations of employees, which never let me down. I would scan the magazine rack, where my own sense of the political world developed significantly by thumbing through magazines from different schools of political thought.
Some have pointed out that this form of information consumption was more balanced, whereas now a reader can use the internet to find exactly what he or she wants, filtering everything else out. We can live in our own blogosphere bubbles, expanding from time-to-time to see what others picked on Amazon when we do go to buy a book.
I miss bookstores. But here is the interesting twist. The other day I was so desperate to be around books that I went into a library for the first time in almost twenty years. I was immediately struck by how the library seemed to be flourishing. Children running to and fro. A line at the checkout. They even had the employee recommendations stand! The library is one of the few uses of taxpayer dollars that I think we can all agree on, and the localized, communal spirit it fosters is hard to emulate with anything corporate.
So maybe all this technological advancement is really just bringing us back to where we began: with musty old books that have been passed from hand to hand, waiting for someone who fell out of love with Amazon to come home.
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