Roger -
Ah, the local bookstore. I was in KMart yesterday to pick up a
prescription, so I wandered the book/magazine aisle for a few minutes.
A pretty humbling few minutes it was.
Ah, the corner drugstore run by your uncle's best friend! Now we have
KMart/WalMart/Walgreens/CVS/... and where there *is* a corner drugstore
it is filled with dusty, outdated product and the children of the
ancient pharmacist are waiting for him to die so they can sell off the
(now quite valuable) 400 sq ft hole in the wall and retire to the
Caymans or Santa Fe or somewhere cool.
There are still a handful of (albeit smaller) independent bookstores in
SFe. But probably not because of most of us! ABQ's Bound to be Read
went down but I think (I don't shop for *anything* in ABQ) Page 1 is
still up and running as are dozens of small bookstores. Denver has 3 or
4 branches of Tattered Cover and many small (mostly used or specialty)
bookstores, and Portland has the classic Powells with multiple outlets,
as does (probably) every middle to large city in the country.
It used to be that where you found one independent bookstore, you
found several more just down the street or around the block. They
thrived on eachother's existence, they along with the cafes, coffee
shops, pubs and customers formed (nod to Owen) an ecology. Today you
might find their dusty signs still hanging in front of boarded up
windows... The swamp is drained and now it is dying. Will we miss it?
KMart's book section is not the most representative place to be browsing
books. It wasn't in 1976, and it is even less so now. Neither is
WalMart's. I remember the glee I felt when the likes of B. Dalton,
Walden, then Barnes and Noble, Hastings, and Borders popped up. Huge
selections, discounts left and right! YAY! and I remember how sad I
felt when the small independents (often with local and/or specialty
interests presented) started closing (withering in the shadows of these
giants). BOO! Then Amazon fired up. YAY! and then even the big chains
went down in *their* shadow. BOO!
Darwin at work. Too bad for all of them, they were apparently not fit!
But it is *we* who define much about the fitness landscape... so really
it is... "be careful what you ask for". We now have our e-readers
tucked in our metrosexual bags while drinking our double-mocha non-fat
latte's with an umbrella on top, wondering why they don't serve it in a
real cup nor provide us with comfortable seating, nor co-locate with a
nice newsstand or bookstore (Downtown Subscription lives! Albeit no
longer downtown.). We will throw down $6 for something we could make at
home for $.50 and yet we cry when authors and publishers want to get
paid (so they can continue to write and publish, and of course, put
money in OUR pension funds through our investments in them, the
bastards!). Or am I mixing apples and orangatans again?
We are like mountain men Jim Ragg and Bartle Bones standing at a bend in
a river in the Rockies, scratching our asses, asking "where did all the
Beav' go?", "When we first came here, we trapped hundreds of them every
year right here on this very bend!" , "They'se gots more scarce every
year, and now you can't hardly find a one of them!", "what are we gonna
do?". ARE we like this? Sometimes I worry that we are!
Nostalgic Rant aside, this is an important issue in my mind, and it
doesn't give over easily to either extreme (Information just wants to be
FREE!) nor (I wrote/invented/created it and by gawd, nobody but nobody
can think that thought without my permission and profit!).
And to a great extent , WE, the authors, coders, and investors in the
stocks of these big companies (that we love to hate) are the ones
creating the landscape. I *think* this is what Glen was touching on in
the first place? The commons, what do we want it to look like, how do
we establish and maintain it, etc.
Perhaps this is partly what our own Doug Carmichael is on about with his
GardenWorldPolitics.com ?
- Steve
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