Google and Bookswim Aren't Enough

Netflix will send movies to your door, so that you can avoid that pesky drive across town to the video rental store. With the appearance of Bookswim, that same convenience can be delivered in book form. Who wants to peruse shelves full of imagination and possibility at a local library, search out hidden mysteries, or mess with the Dewey Decimal system anyway? (Speak up now, bibliophiles!)

Perhaps I am a voice in the minority here in the twenty-first century, but I love libraries. I have since I was a child and my mother took my brother and me to find our summer reading list books. Posters of Winner the Pooh and The Cat and the Hat pulled me into a world of wonder that I still feel every time I walk in those familiar doors.

But here we are in 2010, and Bookswim isn’t nearly our only issue. State budgets are in crisis, and hard decisions need to be made. Libraries, with their dusty, relaxed, modest ways, are becoming easy targets of elimination.

The cozy, intriguing aspects of libraries are important, true, but the loss of that facet is not the worst problem at hand. Students are no longer learning to sift through research, to peruse others’ ideas, to evaluate, to analyze, to make up their own minds. Why not? I’ll give you a one word answer. Google. I am a huge fan of Google, myself. I fully admit this. However, if internet search engines become society’s only research tool, superficial knowledge and amateur scholars will be the norm.

Losing local libraries means losing a valuable resource for bookworms and lovers of the written word, but we aren’t the ones who will stop reading. Literacy, curiosity, and analysis skills of future generations will be the casualties.

For that reason, while Bookswim has its appeal, I will stay true to my local library. You should all do the same.

Sony Plots Death of Amazon Kindle

Doesn’t it sound like some corporate sponsored thriller? The Sony Corporation lurks in the shadows, watching Amazon’s every move, waiting, watching, breathing as softly as possible to avoid detection. Amazon has an eerie feeling it’s being watched, but every time it turns around, there’s nothing in the shadows but dust.

I can’t take credit for this blog’s title. This article is where it came to my attention:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/12/17/sony_on_readers/

Now, I, myself, will forever be a collector of tangible books. I love the strength of black letters on an off-white page, the dry smoothness of each piece of paper, the way pages stick together, the musty smell of a used-book store, the unique atmosphere of each independent bookseller’s shop, and the desire since childhood to see my own name printed on that hard-covered work. But I would be kidding myself to say that this should be the only form we as readers and writers should cling to.

Books are no longer bound by hand or bound in leather; perhaps we need to summon the courage to accept that our tomes can also be bound in bytes. I have an aversion to the Kindle in the same way that I have an aversion to that first colored leaf of autumn - the first note to break my delusions of an eternity of delight, be it hard-back books or summertime. However, I’m willing to admit that e-books could be a possibility of the future. If the next generation of readers wants digital, we can go digital. If that’s what it takes to keep an interested audience for books, by all means, let’s keep our readers happy.

I vote, though, to keep all readers happy. I’m willing to go digital if we still have those special editions still on paper – recycled paper.

Amazon’s in on the game; Sony’s fighting for their share; Google’s getting involved; how about you?