Borders going out of business! — Page 4

That was my biggest pet peeve when I worked at a bookstore. I worked at a Border's Express which was a mall bookstore. No chairs, no cafe - just books and shelves. Every day there would be people laying on the floor (particular in the manga and graphic novel sections) breaking the binding on the books and blocking actual shoppers from getting to the shelves. My hands were tied because my managers allowed it. The culprits were always teens/kids and they'd rather the kids be there than somewhere else. But, I would draw the line at any kid under high school age being alone in the store.

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If Borders sold pot, they would not have gone bankrupt.

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"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."

Namo, you are my hero. I loved this sentiment.

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To think that the people who profess allegiance to the touch and feel of a book will somehow stem the tide of a cultural shift is naive and laughable. Those people have proven to be fickle. They change their minds--180 degrees!--within moments of touching their new Kindle or iPad. The fall in love with their devices--with the same passion they used to say "I love the touch and feel of a book." Now they say "I LOVE my Kindle!"

I don't think it's fair to say that everyone who says they love books and yet owns an e-reader has switched "180 degrees." I was resistant to having a Kindle for a long time, because, yes, I love books too much. Then I tried one, and I thought, hey, this is kind of neat, I sort of get the appeal. Then I moved halfway across the country, and became someone who travels a lot -- and someone who, when doing so, travels with a lot of books. Especially as a grad student who was taking weeks-long trips and needed to be on working vacations. My parents gave me my Kindle as a gift; it's not something I ever would have purchased for myself, but yes, it's pretty cool, and yes, I do love it. But has it replaced the purpose for actual books in my life? Or, worse yet, the passion I have for them? Absolutely not. More often than not when I buy a new book, I still buy it in its "real" form. But the Kindle is great for things that I want to read yet don't necessarily feel compelled to have on my shelf, or for a copy of War and Peace that is not only free, but weighs absolutely nothing. It's great for being able to take multiple books with you when you travel. I have a lot of duplicates between my shelf and my Kindle, and I expect to accumulate more, but I also find that I use them largely for different purposes. And sometimes I experience a lot of conflict over which way I'd like to own a certain book -- that doesn't exactly say I've switched sides. My apartment is still covered in books. I still fall asleep with them piled up next to me. A bookstore is still one of the best places you can take me. All of this to say that it's not an either-or situation for everybody. Why can't someone love and use both? (Not to mention that I also think it's a completely different kind of love expressed in each of those sentiments.)

Yes, maybe some people are fickle and do a complete 180. But not all. Switching over in part, or incorporating both into your life isn't a 180, and it isn't full abandonment. My books are still as precious to me as ever and one of the most intimate extensions of who I am. My Kindle will never, ever out-and-out replace real books for me, as cool as it is.

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Updated On: 7/21/11 at 11:37 PM

How did you find out?

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Good, so we can go hate dead-tree books happily ever after. I always knew we were ~meant to be~.

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No, I saw someone on here use it just the other day! And I think it was used as a sincere insult! I found it totally devastating, and yet so absurd that it was just comical.

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"Dead-tree books" has been around for a while now.

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Can e-readers be referred to as "petroleum product books", then?

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I'm sure some of them are lube books.

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I prefer to think of them as electric carbon footprint books.

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