Skip to main content

Feeling Scarcity

I have not been inside a Barnes & Noble store in a long time. There used to be a Borders close to where I live and I usually went there - mainly for the experience and nostalgic reasons - it was the first bookstore  I visited when I first came to America. I had acted like a kid in a candy store back then and some of the wonderment never quite faded. Borders was like my sugar fix without the guilt or the calories.

 This is not a critique of B&N - they are doing what they have to do so they don't go the Borders way. There were some four of five titles I was interested in checking out (all related to the same subject) so I could decide which book best met my needs. My area of interest was represented in the store by one row of books in a small shelf - a dozen volumes at best. It took me a while to register the scarcity. Back when Borders was still around, I could easily get close to a hundred books on a topic, there was so much to choose from and discover - I frequently lost track of the hours I spent there. This was back when they had a local jazz band play on Friday evenings -it was a very different time. I have bought a lot of coffees at that store but usually ended up buying the books I wanted from Amazon.

 It is because of shoppers like me that stores that want to be more than showrooms for books are dying out. B&N now carries a sampling platter in their store. Maybe they will be forced to reduce their brick and mortar footprint even more when most of their customers buy online and have the material delivered electronically via the Nook. The actual store is a relic from the past that  brings some traffic in and possibly creates a connection between the physical book and the reader. But it is no longer able to be the bookstore  of the past because that would be its death sentence.

 Spending the hour at B&N reminded me of how I do all of my reading online - via my RSS feed.  Both online and in real life, we are being enabled to consume information in an endless stream on unrelated chunks. It offers the convenience of a fast food drive through and about as much nutritive value. The organization of the books on the shelves mimicked that choppy randomness of media online - there is no room for a languid pace, to explore and discover one thing at a great depth. B&N had covered over a hundred topics in a collection of a few hundred books stacked on those shelves. I could not tell what the criteria was for the books that made it to the shelf and what worked against those that got left behind - which was all of the titles I was looking for.
Labels:

Comments

Hope said…
Seriously. I miss those days of lazy browsing and forgetting the time, in a book store. I am afraid too about the future of book stores and paper-books. The e-book trend is so picking up that people have stopped buying paperbacks totally. :( I miss them.
12:33 AM
Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Cheese Making

I never fail to remind J that there is a time and place for everything. It is possibly the line she will remember me by when I am dead and gone given how frequently she hears it. Instead of having her breakfast she will break into a song and dance number from High School Musical well past eight on Monday morning. She will insist that I watch and applaud the performance instead of screaming at her to finish her milk and cereal. Her sense of occasion is seriously lacking but then so is mine. Consider for example, a person walks into the grocery store with the express purpose of buying detergent because they are fresh out of it and laundry is only half way done. However instead of heading straight for detergent, they wander over to the natural foods aisle and go berserk upon finding goat milk on sale for a dollar a gallon. They at once proceed to stock pile so they can turn it to huge quantities home-made feta cheese. That person would be me. It would not concern me in the least that I ha...
5 comments
Read more

Part Liberated Woman

An expat desi friend and I were discussing what it means to return to India when you have cobbled together a life in a foreign country no matter how flawed and imperfect. We have both spent over a decade outside India and have kids who were born abroad and have spent very little time back home. Returning "home" is something a lot of new immigrants like L and myself think about. We want very much for that to be an option because a full assimilation into our country of domicile is likely never going to happen. L has visited India more often than I have and has a much better pulse on what's going on there. For me the strongest drag force working against my desire to return home is my experience of life as a woman in India. I neither want to live that suffocatingly sheltered existence myself nor subject J to it. The freedom, independence and safety I have had in here in suburban America was not even something I knew I could expect to have in India. I never knew what it felt t...
111 comments
Read more

Under Advisement

Recently a desi dude who is more acquaintance less friend called to check in on me. Those who have read this blog before might know that such calls tend to make me anxious. Depending on how far back we go, there are sets of FAQs that I brace myself to answer. The trick is to be sufficiently evasive without being downright offensive - a fine balancing act given the provocative nature of questions involved. I look at these calls as opportunities for building patience and tolerance both of which I seriously lack. Basically, they are very desirous of finding out how I am doing in my personal and professional life to be sure that they have me correctly categorized and filed for future reference. The major buckets appear to be loser, struggling, average, arrived, superstar and uncategorizable. My goal needless to say, is to be in the last bucket - the unknown, unquantifiable and therefore uninteresting entity. Their aim is to pull me into something more tangible. So anyways, the dude in ques...
6 comments
Read more