M. R. Bailey

Novelists are an adventurous breed. So are their readers.

For readers, all that is left after the decline, fall, and selling-off of Borders bookstores down to the fixtures, is grief. And memories of what a bookstore can mean to our quality of life. So many of my favorite weekend moments were spent in the stacks at my local Borders. Knowledgeable sales staff, friendly fellow explorers on the path to enlightenment picking through towering shelves of books, looking for one book, discovering dozens of others that informed new directions in their journey.

Sales of e-books surpassed sales of physical books earlier this year. This isn’t a trend. We all know that our relationship to the written word is evolving. Schoolchildren totally get it; why carry a heavy backpack of textbooks when they can carry all the texts they will ever need in a featherlight tablet?  So what is the value of ink on paper? Sentimentalism?  For some, perhaps. For many, it is something deeper, much like the preference for live theater over cinema, or cinema over television, or television over netcast. For some, it is a physical connection, a tactile interaction with the process of reading. Like peeling back the layers of clues in a good mystery.

So what is to become of the book loyalist? Where is s/he to go? There is Amazon, of course. And Abe’s, Powell’s, Tattered Cover, Book Barn, B&N and others. Those are distant purveyors. The wandering weekend explorer has fewer options.

Karen Hayes and Ann Patchett open Parnassus Books. Photo: Josh Anderson, New York Times

Now, in an interesting new reaction to digital media and the vanishing bookstore experience, we have the novelist opening a book store, a bricks and mortar emporium of the printed word. Whether Ann Patchett’s new Parnassus Books in Nashville is the start of a new stage of publishing and distribution, or a quaint exhibit on the timeline of literature’s evolution is to be seen. I hope it is the opening sentence in a powerful and engaging new story.

Related link

Julie Bosman | NYT:  Novelist Fights the Tide by Opening a Bookstore

Child is Father/Mother…

Despite the rancor at town hall meetings across an increasingly stressed America, there is some very good news coming from a hopeful source: high school students and rising college first-year students.  While so many adults are indulging in anti-social rage against change, their children are quietly learning, preparing, observing and developing their personal life plans.  From the look of things, they are choosing change, seeing promise in lifelong learning, knowledge as infinite, and following discovery where it leads as long as it results in good – for themselves, their families, their communities and their planet.

In a related article by Tamar Lewin about the rapidly diminishing importance of textbooks in high school education, there is an intriguing subtext that made me sit up and pay attention – students are relating to the world they are inheriting in a productive way that contrasts with their elders’ approach.  If you get a moment, read In a Digital Future, Textbooks Are History (NYT, 9 Aug 2009).

Good Times

Just as when the IBM personal computer arrived (1981), Steve Jobs introduced the Macintosh with GUI (1984), the venerable Selectric and Selectric II became obsolete, and a universe of entrepreneurial and artistic opportunities opened to writers, the Kindle, Sony Readers, iRex, Lexcycle’s Stanza and other downloadable readers have opened doors to a new world of publishing possibilities. While the major players sort out the e-Publishing landscape, engineer the infrastructure, and build the new e-pub world, we writers are exploring, beta testing, and blazing new entrepreneurial paths … all while continuing to write, write, write. This is a good time to be a writer, don’t you think?

♦

Kindle UPDATE – Kindle vs. B&N Free eReader:  See David Pogue’s PERSONAL TECH column, “New Entry in E-Books a Paper Tiger,” in the August 6th edition of the New York Times.  Barnes & Noble’s new e-reader offers PC access to e-books.  The eReader tablet itself is promised for later.