The New Antiquitarian

My favorite book store is out in the suburbs somewhere. It’s not be my favorite for the selection of books, but for the nostalgia tied with it. In the burbs, in a strip mall between a Target and a Hobby Lobby under a roof that leaks with each heavy snow storm. The entire landscape of Black and Read smells of decades of musk and mildew from thousands of books derived from hundreds of abandoned collections harvested out of basements all around the front range to sit in disorganized heaps throughout the store.

Mostly they are recycled bestsellers, neglected paperback purchases from grocery stores and airports,  serials of mystery novels, a few new printings of pop-books. Every now and again I find a gem – a rare printing of a great book written so far ahead of it’s time that the publisher lost their ass on and closed up shop before the next printing. Lots of leather-bound volumes, collections, things that the owner has found and picked out to mark up to prices only the most devout of antiquitarians would pay.

Black and Red keeps their lights on from the loyal fanbase of used book aficionados. Like so many bookstores, there are those who forgo their libraries and big box book sellers to read something that has been weathered by time. They sell back books they’ve finished, exchaning store credit for something new. Some collectors and sellers earn a living circulating between here and other book stores to find rare copies for clients, pawn off forgeries, or to find a second-edition they can sell on their skeezy eBay store as a first.

I can only imagine that this secondary economy is at risk of dwindling away. The new, fresh stock that lines a majority of the shelves – the books read once or twice – isn’t as robust as it used to be. As new book retailers close up shop all around the country and ebook editions consistently outsell their paper-bound counterparts it’s odd to think: one day this store will do nothing more than cycle around the same stock of books. Imagine if the books that existed now are the only books to ever exist, nothing new going into print. With each passing of the book from one pair of hands to another the paper returns a little more brittle, beat up, stained by the oils from the thousand fingers thumbing the edges before you.

 

New times, new technologies, new business models. I can’t say I hate the idea of epublishing or a life of ebooks. Sure, the romantic notion of having a home full of worn books may evaporate. But the hippie in me fears the environmental costs of printing entire runs of books on virgin paper, the glues that hold the pages together, the generally toxic process of making ink. Not to mention the fuel burned to ship and deliver each of those books.

Two years ago I was given a Kindle for Christmas. I love it. It is one of the only pieces of technology I have that actually does what it says it is going to do and works the way I need it to work. The screen which can be read in direct light without glare. Text I can actually read, a system for purchase and delivery that asks me for the least amount of time and effort.  During my tenure with the device Amazon has only made me do one software update. Not to mention I also have access to millions of free books empassioned writers put on the market.

How easy school would have been if only I had access to an e-reader. Not having to buy second, third and fifth-hand editions of stories that have been read for hundreds of years. Instead, Project Gutenberg! Purchasing science texts that would be considered archaic by the end of the semester would not have been an factor in my frequently contested pizza and whiskey budget.

The drawback? I’ll be damned if I can tell you about this great book I’m reading, and not be able to offer it to you when I’m done. Sure, the Kindle and Nook does have a built in digital lending feature, but it doesn’t work with all books. The sharing of the books is a lot less meaningful when the handing off of the pages is reduced to the transmission of invisible data whenever I can remember what your email address is.

Oh! The dangers of the ereader. Like the ironic deletion of 1984 from numerous Kindle’s back in 2009 (in all fairness, the original posted product did not rightfully belong to whoever posted it to the Kindle store). It makes you wonder, if Amazon does this, then what else? How far will the threat of random, unnanounced censorship go? It serves to remind us that the purchase and acquisition of an ebook could be easily contested, deleted, and manipulated.

Manipulated!

Someone’s favorite book remains as someone’s favorite book because it is unchanging. The plot and characters and style are there, set in ink on the page, for all of time. The only thing that changes the story is the reader. No one has a favorite blog post, because blogs change and the context of what the writer has said can change with an anonymous comment

Until now.

If recent history has handed us any lesson, it is that all digitized content is one encryption key away from becoming free, pirated content. A whole new way to steal books. Digital property can be changed, updated, manipulated, deleted, replaced.

So what will become of the romantic nature behind books? Lovers who share volumes, notes scribbled in the margins, the unique feel of  a broken spine? The smell? Lord, the smell. Who is going to say they don’t like the dusty, mildewy smell of an old book?

This deficit of printed words will probably bring about a new class of antiquitarians – lovers of old books. The collecting of books will rise to a whole new level of fetish. What are now piled on the priced-to-move table at Barnes and Noble could eventually be something worth fighting over in the not-too-distant future. Print will probably go the way of vynil. Books will be distributed digitally and the print will be an afterthought. Released years later, in a large collector’s box with gold-leaf pages. Something that only a true fan of your work would really enjoy. I tell people that Songs About Whiskey is released exclusively on the e-reader and the first thing a lot of people ask is when the actual book is coming out.

Print isn’t dead. It just needs a new model.