The Endangered Bookstore

                The bookstore has become an endangered species. With the evolution of electronic readers and online purchasing, bookstores have begun to die off rapidly. Personally, this hurts my soul because I’m a literary nerd who grew up with her nose in a book. I always had friends, but my favorite friends were the characters I read about in novels. I remember being in the third grade and getting to enter the Schoolastic book bus for the first time. My heart was pounding as I filled onto the mobile tightly crammed with books, shelves lining every inch of wall. We got an hour to spend in that bus, and with hands flying through pages, thumbing covers, and grazing art, it was one of the most exciting hours of my life. I picked out my first adult chapter book in that bus. It was “The Hobbit,” and I still remember the way the pages smelt. 

                I’m afraid our future children will miss out on such an adventure. With the rise in electronic media and the decline in print copies, the paperback is becoming endangered. While print books are still existent and selling, they are being purchased online through sites like Amazon and not through in person retail. Future generations may never know what it is like to physically search for books, funning fingers along hundreds of spines, all the shapes, textures, and colors snuggled back to back like soldiers of the imagination. Even though printed texts may still exist and be bought in the future, the shopping process will be detached—an experience between a person and their cold, flat computer monitor (or phone screen). One will be purchasing novels by reading lines of website text, given only a glimpse of the contents through the unfeeling scan of inner pages, unable to feel the book or see it aside its kin. 

                Perhaps I’m just personally partial to the physical interaction between man and novel—but it is not just the touching of books before purchase that is lost when the bookstore perishes. The cozy, dimly lit ambiance will fade along with the shelves. No more will be the soft jazz and the thick oak tables filled with scholars and readers will disappear and the intellectual, artistic cave that is the bookstore will fade in to nonexistence. You cannot sip a cappuccino while flipping through tabletop hardbacks, haunting music floating between isles and clinging to the backs of maroon lampshades. There is no place quite like a bookstore, and that gathering of ambiance, coffee, socialization, and paper might soon be lost forever. 

                As for the printed book itself, I do not believe that paper pages will die. While they may greatly decrease in number, the printed book is a treasured item among literature lovers and paper is beloved by its fans. There will always be collectors and print will exist to some extent no matter the development of digital novels. The places to find said paper books will, however, greatly diminished, to the point where the internet may become the only source through which to find them. Here, also, the fate of libraries comes into question. Will they continue to service the public years in the future? Will they continue in the same way they do now, acquiring new books to lend out? Or will they, too, pass into the digital afterlife and become a scan-able list of electronic copies? It is possible they could evolve into a museum like species, meant only for historic purpose. Only time will tell.