The Vanishing Bookshelves

As a reader, it’s an arduous task to skirt the bear traps of – to coin a phrase – ‘waxing sentimental’ about the aroma of print, the tactile pleasure of holding a book and the act of curling up with it in one hand (and the customary steaming cuppa or smoking cigarette in the other) . All of this may soon become shared memories if bookstores go out of business. However, this article will argue why we need to preserve our oases of print in an increasingly digitized world for a different reason – one that isn’t underpinned by sentimentality.

With the burgeoning online trade in books, most notably led by Amazon, Flipkart et al and the availability of e-books on hand-held devices like Kindle, bookshops are becoming endangered with alarming rapidity. The extinction may not be imminent but it does seem to be a crisis looming in the not-too-distant horizon. It isn’t difficult to discern why the online shopping portals enjoy such popularity. The lure of discounts, ease of access to titles and the convenience of having the purchase delivered to ones doorstep (invariably free of charge) contribute to their success. Kindle and other portable devices enable one to carry several volumes – indeed entire libraries – in a backpack. The odds are stacked against the physical volumes but let me try and put forth a defence.

First, all online portals assume that the customer ‘knows’ which books, either the title or the author, he wants to purchase. That can happen in a traditional book store too – when one has been recommended a certain title. However, what the portals take away from the reader is the, may I say, amazement of serendipitous discoveries – one made by cursory browsing of titles on shelves and the pages contained within. On one particular trip to the nearest Crosswords store this author acquired a copy of The Actual by Saul Bellow, Serendipities : Language and Lunacy by Umberto Eco and India’s Politics : A View From The Backbench by Bimal Jalan – a novel, historiography and political essays respectively. There can possibly be no algorithm designed to throw up such variations for a reader on any search engine of these online portals. There hasn’t been one until now but I am willing to be persuaded otherwise. Presently, Amazon offers the customer a choice of books under the titles ‘Frequently Bought Together’ and ‘Customers Who Bought This Item Also Bought’ – both either list other works by the same author or works of other authors on themes related to the prospective purchase.

Most portals provide a brief synopsis of the books and/or positive reviews that the volume may have garnered. This can have a particularly debilitating effect on the sale of books by lesser known writers and academics whose work might be just as, or perhaps even more fascinating, than those heading the dubious best-seller charts.

Websites also allow the reader a peek into the first few pages of a particular title. This is what is commonly called a ‘preview’. But that in itself is not a necessary condition that may sway a reader to buy the book or otherwise. On the other hand one may come across a sparkling bit of wit or a mesmerising paragraph half-way through the book while aimlessly browsing in a bookstore.

Take these lines for instance:

“It is the only instance in all his correspondence of an effort to understand and express his innermost self. And something is expressed, understood, forgiven even, if not in the lines themselves then in the spaces between, where an extraordinary and pitiful tension throbs.”

These words appear bang in the middle of John Banville’s brilliant novelette The Newton Letter. Admittedly, the sentences were read without a context but one could still infer its significance in relation to the title of the story. It led this author to not only read this book but all three of the Revolutions Trilogy of which The Newton Letter is the third volume.

What is really going to sound the death knell for bookstores is perhaps not the enticements of discounts online bookstores have to offer but the discounting of intellectual curiosity on our part. Our reluctance to gaze at titles on bookshelves and to sit on low stools in dingy nooks – crowded by titles and scented by the musty odour of aging pages –  that will be the undoing of small book houses. Ultimately it will not just be the bookstores that will be the casualty of digitization; the collateral damages will include the pleasures of chance discovery, physical pursuit of an obscure title and the privilege of meeting people wit shared interests.