Borders going out of business! — Page 3

I never said that. Really. But your point is valid. Most people with ebook readers are avid readers. My hold out was I hate reading documents on computers....I hate the back lighting. It wasnnt't until I saw a friends Kindle that I realized SOME ereaders totally different.


I love the feel of my kindle in my hands...sometimes in a cover sometimes naked. I often find "dead tree books" (what ereaders usually call traditional books) too cumbersome to read. My ereader feels the same in my hands weather I'm reading Abigails Pogrebin's essay on Merrily We Roll Along or War and Peace.

I don't miss books at all -- because I'm still reading them.

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Amoeba is doing really well in L.A. and S.F. Thriving, actually.

Uh, no they aren't. They are sitting on literally (I'm using it correctly there) millions and millions of dollars of inventory that will never sell. And like a Border's store a few years ago, an Amoeba store is filled with people talking to the staff, wandering around, reading magazines, looking at CDs. They are a privately held company so they don't release any data but my retail eye sees trouble.

I recently bought an iPad but have not bought a book for it yet. I keep thinking, come the collapse, when suddenly there is no electricity and Tina Turner is wandering the desert where Maine used to be, I will be like Burgess Meredith in The Twilight Zone before he broke his glasses: happy to escape the threat of marauding, looting and murdering gangs into the world of printed literature.

Eventually, when I become one of the billions no longer receiving a pay check and who therefore will not be able to afford to replace my shiny electric technology every few years as its planned obsolescence demands, when I have nothing left to toss onto the blocks of detritus that some future Wall-E will organize into dead plastic and metal sculpture tributes to a culture that once was, I will still have a few good books to read by daylight to take me back there, because there's no place to plug in a magic screen even if, by some miracle, they still work more than five years after they were purchased.

Of course, the escape into books will happen before I am murdered for having no useful skills to contribute to nomadic societies in the post-apocalyptic world. Maybe I'll die happy upon rereading Michael Cunningham, for instance, inside an abandoned tractor trailer, my very own home at the end of the world.

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I gotta say ... bravo, Namo.

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Can you put that in an eBook and sign it for me?

Wait, I gotta reboot ...

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eBook burnings?

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I think it'll just be a bunch of people gathering in an angry mob and deleting files. Kind of anticlimactic but at least it's safer.

Yes Dolly I heard that too. I am glad they reported it. I would say 15 of the people I helped at Borders (and 99% of the really demanding ones) wrote down information and went home to order the book I helped them to find.

And as for Amoeba I know they have significantly cut back staff. I know their stock is stagnant. I know they have had periodic cash crunches. That is not good.

Namo, can I buy pot from you?

Since an iPad is nowhere in my near future and I have tried reading on a Kindle and didn't like it, I will be reading actual books for a while to come. I doubt if I will ever get an ereader. I held off on a cell phone until I had to get one in January. I had no choice. I just started texting a month ago because I needed it for work. I do not have a data package on my phone and don't really see the need for one.

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I've shopped at Borders in Columbus Circle since 2005. I ALWAYS find myself there and I find the staff there MUCH more friendly than Barnes and Noble Union Sq, so I am sad to see it go. I wish I could say that it takes me by surprise, but it doesn't. The selection used to be FAR better and I would purchase often, but for the past couple years, the selection - particularly in theatre (which I usually purchase from Drama Bookshop, admittedly) and gay non-fiction. gay non-fic used to be an entire bookcase, lately it has been down to one or two shelves.. and they ALWAYS rearrange the location of sections and don't always change the visible signs for them in a timely manner. I LOVE the selection of close out cookbooks and I've purchased a good number of them, but it is ALWAYS the same selection... and they started to cut back on discounts in store some too, which was off putting for many...

To the poster who asked about long-term effects of prolonged reading on a screen- I suffer from moderate to severe ophthalmic migraines (visual symptoms, visual triggers) and am utterly incapable of reading on a computer screen for more than 15 minutes at a time. If I try to do it any longer than that I wind up with a migraine headache, muscle spasms, and sensory hallucinations (not pleasant). It is quite inconvenient, as it means all of my online readings for grad school need to be printed off the computer, even though most of them are 200 pages in length or more. So the movement from paper books to online/digital books is one that I'm not particularly looking forward to.

That being said, the Kindle (the only ereader I've tried) does do a good job of minimizing those effects. I've been able to read on a Kindle for up to half an hour without any adverse effects (so double the time I can spend on a computer screen). It is definitely easier on the eyes than a traditional screen or anything that uses a backlight, but for those who are sensitive to these type of things it still isn't the best option. Even though I'll grab my Kindle to take on the subway with me when my purse won't fit a book, I've only ever gotten public domain books on it. Any book I buy I still buy in paper format.