Losing Contact?

The Washington Post ran a story recently on the troubles facing the Borders Books and Music store chain. The story's hook was that, even as Borders helped revolutionize the way people bought books, it failed to see subsequent revolutions and is now in a very perilous position.

The original Borders owners developed software in the 1960s and 1970s that tried to predict which books would sell, and then stocked those books. Their success led to Borders stores popping up around the country, with an even bigger expansion following the chain's sale to Kmart  in 1992. Their problem now is that Amazon has refined the predictive-buyer gimmick to the point of suggesting books to each individual person based on what they've bought. Even though their suggestions are often, in my own experience, ludicrous, they take better care of the dead-tree book buyer than Borders did. Ebook readers chopped another significant percentage of the buying public away from the notion of the big-chain bookstore, and Borders has been late to that game as well.

I've noted just how sad it can be to enter a Borders store these days and see so much empty space where there used to be things like shelves, books and music. Perhaps the blizzard we're currently enjoying has made me melancholy, but the Ebook phenomenon especially makes me morosely reflective. I recognize the convenience of having many texts stored in one device, and of the space it saves in the home and elsewhere. The same idea is, I think, behind the failing sales of CDs and other physical forms of recorded music in favor of digital versions.

I confess nostalgia for things like real books and real CDs and albums -- even though I sold the LPs because there were too many and they weighed too much for someone who moves every few years. And maybe that drives my questions, but I think only partly. If I owned an Ebook reader and just bought books via that format, what would I have when I was finished? A file of data -- and Amazon's dustup with its Kindle owners from July of 2009 demonstrates that I don't even have the file of data if they don't want me to, their promises to never ever ever do that again notwithstanding. Some folks suggest that this desire to have physical books or physical copies of music represents materialism, and I agree, but probably not the way they think.

If this kind of feeling was just another form of greed or being possessed by possessions, then something that reduced it or replaced it would be good. Except that most of the time, it seems to me like the materialism surmised as the culprit behind overstuffed bookshelves isn't too different from the materialism that shows off whiz-bang toys that replace overstuffed bookshelves.

The kind of materialism I confess to focuses on the material nature of things like books, CDs or albums. They are physical things, and in a way they embody something. I can see, touch and in cases where the book has been left in my gym bag too long, smell them. They represent another person's thoughts or creative work, and the solidity of their respective media gives a reality or embodiment to those thoughts or creativity that I just do not get from purely digital copies.

An iPod is an iPod. I listen to all kinds of different songs on it. But an album by, say, Keely Smith is most definitely not an album by Nick Cave. I will hear only one or the other depending on which physical copy I have decided to play. Even if one or the other artist has recorded a song the other has written (something which has not, to my knowledge, ever occurred concerning Ms. Smith and Mr. Cave), their respective albums embody their work in a way that files stored on my iPod don't.

I'm no Luddite here; I own an iPod and I have digitized most music I own. I love the convenience of an iPod shuffle when working out at the gym, especially when the TVs show Joy Behar deadening the minds of all who hear her words or Oprah celebrating her own wonderfulness or Dr. Phil proclaiming his own special brand of advice like the emperor's new judge and jury. But I'm in a line of work that considers embodiment important, especially when it comes to that li'l ol' thing we call the Word being made flesh. And I don't know that the pendulum needs to swing so far away from physical copies of things that we reduce everything to just a bunch of ones and zeroes in a bunch of files.

So maybe I'm just too cautious, but maybe it wouldn't be the worst idea in the world if we slowed down a second and thought this through. It'd kind of stink if we found out that, in a quest to have no things, we instead wound up with nothing.