It’s ironic though, that an agnostic like me thinks physical places matter and christians are so mundane. I’m sure if church buildings went the way of the dinosaur and you all could only get the host mailed to you while you did mass online you’d be bewailing the lack of it even if it was 10 times less expensive and easier to adminstrate.

I’m always bemused when people think the death of the culture consists in losing one of the aspects of affluence we’ve been accustomed for oh, 20 years or so.

You killed the video stores, you killed the record stores, and now you’ll kill the bookstores. It’s only a matter of time before the movie theaters are next. It’s a thing that angers me deeply, because I see what happens in my area: there is no center of culture, no place just to browse and make connections. Everyone just stays trapped in their own little houses.

I so agree with the tone of this article, and I think people need to rage more. Just being able to walk to a bookstore, browse, and find titles is a joy a whole generation will miss.

So perhaps it’s not bookstores in general right now, but Borders, who are in trouble.

Those other books just sitting there are only useful in providing further information if you pick up and read each one to see what they contain — otherwise, they’re just as useless as books you’ve never heard of. And nobody actually does that, just because the books are sitting there in view in the bookstore. On the other hand, the “people also bought” thing can send you off on a trail of related books from opposing viewpoints quite easily, with the bonus that you know that at least somebody thinks they have some relevance to the thing you’re interested in. You might have to click on a couple to see what people who bought *those* books also bought, but in so doing, there’s a wealth of information to be discovered that way. And I submit that people who have grown up with web surfing are just as likely to gain information by following that kind of link trail, as people are to gain information by noticing that there are some books there, each of which you’d have to read to find out what it was about.

We gotta have our college football games and NCAA March Madness. Can’t electronically virtualize that!

http://www.teleread.com/paul-biba/espresso-book-machine-now-generally-available-in-the-us-canada-to-come/

Wow. Just asking the question speaks volumes, doesn’t it?

Once Borders is gone, it will be the library for me – and the problem with this is simply that libraries are like abandoned places in too many parts of the US.

In some cities, however, libraries have added cafes and gift stores, and are every bit as nice as bookstores.

However, the question of how things will (and should) be funded is a question that needs to be resolved – libraries are going to e-books, and that presents an as yet unaddressed (to my knowledge) economic problem: if books are moving from things we own hard copies of to merely things we purchase specific digital rights to, then why shouldn’t I just get my reading material through the library?

If a lot of people rediscover the joys of libraries, are the book publishers going to feel threatened and find some way to shut them down?

I agree with that, I was just a little taken aback by the assertion that one derives *more* useful information from walking past a shelf full of books that may or may not contain opposing viewpoints, than from an actual display of specific books that many people with a common interest in the subject have purchased.

On the other hand, I love the ambiance of bookstores. I have likely spent more time just picking up random books in the theology section and reading the prefaces than I have doing any other single thing. There is just something magical about stumbling upon a book and then realizing that this book was something that you should have been looking for all your life. The excitement of walking down the book aisles and just realizing that there are the thoughts of thousands of people just sitting compacted on a single shelf always makes me want to come back.

But spending that much time in the bookstore made me realize something. I noticed that every time I looked up, there was a different person looking at books next to me. So I would look around for the person that was there before, and they had bought their book and left. It seems that Amazon and other online book purchasing tools have set some kind of mentality, that a book just needs to be seen, bought, and brought home. It was unlikely that many of these people spent time to look at the opposing viewpoints of the book they came for, or that they even noticed the quiet ambiance of the place. A lot of people seem to have the same attitude in the bookstore as they do on Amazon.

It was likely the case that the people couldn’t find the book they wanted on Amazon, so they looked in Borders to see of they had it. And once they logged on the computer to search for the book in-store and realized they had the book, they found the exact section of the book, grabbed it, paid and promptly left.

I love spending time in Borders, Barnes and Noble, and Powell’s. But as far as price and time goes, it is just so much easier to order my book from amazon. I hope Borders will be able to make it back (luckily it is only chapter 11 and not chapter 7). I would love to be optimistic but I’m not sure if my optimism is justified. Although Dr. Baker, you make a good point about the experience of knowledge that can only be found in bookstores, I fear that that experience isn’t what most people look for. They only want the book that they came for, nothing else. Though unfortunate, this is likely the reason that Amazon has been so successful with books. They offer the simple ability to only see what they are searching for. Though the “what other’s bought” can SOMETIMES show opposing viewpoints, I found that it only found books with a similar thesis.

I hope Borders makes it, but I’m really not sure if they will.

That’s exactly what the “people who bought this book also bought” function DOES do. Imperfectly, granted, but frequently that tool will reveal that people who read the book you’re looking at read opposing perspectives.

I’m not sure the imperfect way in which the “people also bought” function is any worse than walking past a stack of books on a particular topic, about which you can’t tell anything specific, or about the quality.

And there are still libraries, which have always been the best option for people who don’t want to spend $12 or more every time they want to know more about a subject, and satisfy pretty much all of the things that Mohler finds appealing about physical book stores — usually better, because brick and mortar book stores can’t usually afford to stock low-sellers with decades old copyrights.

I will mourn the demise of bookstores as well, but I don’t see a realistic way past it. I wish I thought the optimism was warranted.