I work at a Chapters book store, yet less and less people are coming in to buy books. Being an employee, I'm privy to some inside information, for instance, Chapters is no longer considered a bookstore, it is a retail store. This change in mandate came after a crisis with the Borders bookstore chain in America. That bookstore went belly-up because it failed to see the changing in tides with consumerism.
Borders was a bookstore which prided itself on selling only books, to my knowledge, it didn't have any other retail items. Last year, Boarders filed for bankruptcy, which sent out a message to other bookstore chains across North America: sell things other than books or suffer the same fate. Thus the Chapters retail store was born.
To keep up with the competition, Chapters has pulled out all the stops, along with books, we sell a plethora of gifts, electronics, toys, and games. We sometimes even sell t-shirts.
But the biggest draw to chapters is the Kobo Wireless e-reader, a machine which I fear will make the whole business of buying and selling books almost obsolete. The E-reader is a device which downloads books. It can store up to 1000 titles, it's small, easy to use with a built in wi-fi so it works anywhere with a wireless connection. How do I know all this? Because part of my job is to sell the Kobo E-reader.
I sometimes don't understand what I'm saying when I am selling this, I'm not computer savvy, yet I have read the manual and after saying the same speech in repetition, the words lose all there meaning anyway. Occasionally I get asked a question about the E-reader which I don't understand; whenever the word gigabytes is used, I track down a co-worker to finish up the sale.
Just recently the Kobo E-reader has upgraded to a touch-screen model, it has been so popular we have had trouble keeping them is stock. It's funny considering the original E-reader only came out a year ago, yet a majority of people who bought that are lining up to buy this new and improved one.
When I was first told of the Kobo E-reader, I was ignorant, I thought it would be popular but wouldn't catch on. Now I see many people with E-readers, either in cafes, on the bus, or on the street. I guess I was shocked by how many people are using it, shocked because of all the things that have succumbed to technology, books were the ones that I thought would endure in there traditional form.
Arguments can be made for music upgrading from record, to cassette, to disc, and now to downloads, or movies going from film to digital, but there's something about holding a book in your hands.
I'm a huge bookworm, I like collecting them, when I die, they will find a room filled with books, some of them probably will go untouched. It's almost a sacred thing when I open a book, I enjoy flipping through the pages before I start reading it. I like going back to passages I like, I rarely highlight in my books, although I know many people who love to do that. Sometimes I dog-ear my books, this is a controversial practice and I have been criticized many times for doing it, but it's that special relationship I have with the book, that sense of ownership I have that makes it okay.
There is also the love of seeing a used book, I could spend an afternoon in a used bookstore if I was granted the time just wondering, flipping through old books which used to belong to someone else. Sometimes you see passages underlined, the crease is bent, you could even make a story about the previous owner just by how the book looked.
As I am writing this, I've just finished a few chapters of the most recent book I'm reading, "The Mystery of Edwin Drood" which was unfinished by Charles Dickens, he died before he could finish it. The book is lying beside me at this moment, sometimes I pick it up and look at it, I look at my shelve of books behind me to see which one I will read next, also I can see which ones I have still yet to read. There's a personal quality with owning physical books you can't get with an electronic one.
Reading a book from a screen seems almost soulless to me, imagine having every book in the world, look and feel the same, it would drive me crazy. Books should have there own personality, they should be aloud to invite you in to there unique little world.
Of the list of authors I have waiting for me in the wings, there are Ernest Hemingway, John Steinbeck, Victor Hugo, Mark Twain, Steve Martin, Raymond Chandler, Joseph Heller, Edgar Allan Poe, and Henry David Thoreau, each person there,is an individual with a different voice, I'd much rather have the thrill of physically opening their books then click a button on a screen, there is an excitement to it, a romance, it has more to do with just reading the words, it's experiencing it in your own personal way, which to me is kinda special.
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