One very superficial way of looking at the present is to
think that everything is changing very quickly and that the pace of change is
only set to increase. The problem is we view progress as a straight arrow. This
is because—after God and Joe DiMaggio died—our religion is technological
progress. I am wary of all religions, but I'm particularly suspicious about secular ones.
Take the closure of Borders, for instance. Aha, the naïve
technologist tells us: The book is dying. The sale of books is a moribund
business. No one will read within 30 or 40 years, right about the time we are
uploading our brains into Kurzweil machines. And if any reading occurs, it will
be done from a screen. Although by then advances in speech software and optical
character recognition will mean that most of our “e-reading” will probably be
auditory. We will be listening to a computer program simulating the voice of Al
Pacino as it reads to us A Tale of Two
Cities (“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times… HOOAAAAH!”).
Unless, of course, we get our reading material uploaded immediately into our
brains, a la The Matrix (“I know Dostoyevsky!”).
But that is not how technological change works. People who
don’t know anything about literature or history extrapolate from their present
time. And usually they get it wrong. Dead wrong.
Let’s return to the closure of Borders. For readers not
familiarized with the United States, it was a mega-chain of bookstores similar
to Barnes and Noble. (For a cultural reference, Borders and B and N were the
real-life equivalent of Tom Hanks’s Fox Books chain in You’ve Got Mail, which ended up mercilessly crushing Meg Ryan’s little
children’s book shop.) Now, of course, the Borders bankruptcy is driven by
changes in the book industry (although massively bad management also played a
part). The thing is “change” is such a pedestrian category for looking at
society that it is almost tantamount to saying nothing. Open any history book
at random about any period and you will find that “the thirteenth century was a
time of upheaval” or “the Iron Age brought about a revolution in the way human
beings lived.” Whenever I read a sentence like that in a history book, I wish I
could throw the damn thing at the lazy bastard who wrote it. It is such a tired
trope. “You will not bathe twice in the same river” (because both the river and
you are not the same). It was probably already a commonplace thought by the
time Heraclitus wrote it in Ancient Greece. Yes, change is the substance of
humanity and society. Tell me something I don’t know, Einstein.
As a bibliophile, believe me, I will not mourn the passing
of Borders. Chains like that seemed intent on hiring the most ignorant
sonsabitches they could find. The disappearance of seven-foot piles of books by the latest
spazzmo or in-the-closet-but-fooling-no-one celeb who placed third or fourth on
“American Idol” are nothing to lament. The passing of Borders means that another
example of vulgar, mass commercialism has gone on to meet its forefathers. That is
nothing to cry over.
Instead, the really interesting development is that
independent bookstores still exist. In the naïve vision of the technological
determinist, e-books and Amazon should have blown away first small bookstores
and later Borders. But it was Borders, with its mega-balance sheet, its bloated
ranks of middle managers, its relentless commoditization of the book, its
ruthless exploitation of razor-thin profit margins to squeeze competitors… yes,
this monstrosity was the company that bit the dust first. In the mean time, better-managed competitors and smaller
bookstores are thriving in the midst of this soft version of the Great Depression
we are currently living through. The New York Times reports the following:
Barnes and Noble, the nation’s largest bookstore chain, said that comparable store sales this Thanksgiving weekend increased 10.9 percent from that period last year. The American Booksellers Association, a trade group for independents, said last week that members saw a sales jump of 16 percent in the week including Thanksgiving, compared with the same period a year ago.
That is the really
fascinating development. The likeliest thing is that the retail book industry
will be a barbell. Amazon will be one of the dumbbells, sucking up revenue like
a vacuum cleaner and driving down the prices for everything. Behind Amazon will be
a bloated Barnes and Noble, huffing and puffing under the weight of expensive
rental contracts as it tries to reinvent itself as a tech company. And, on the other end
of the barbell, a smaller dumbbell will consist of thousands of tiny, niche
bookstores, providing a service to local communities. So, please, go out and
celebrate. Buy yourself a book from your local bookstore staffed by one of
those impossibly arrogant people who inexplicably still work at a bookstore. Luxuriate
in the rudeness of their snooty contempt. Reality is always more interesting
than ideology.
(For an essay making a similar point to
mine, visit this blog. Our naïve ideas of the past and the way
technology changes things are at the heart of the misperceptions described
there as well.)
Miguel Llorens is a freelance financial translator based in Madrid who works from Spanish into English. He is specialized in equity research, economics, accounting, and investment strategy. He has worked as a translator for Goldman Sachs, the US Government's Open Source Center, and H.B.O. International. To contact him, visit his website and write to the address listed there. You can also join his LinkedIn network by visiting the profile or follow him on Twitter.
Miguel Llorens is a freelance financial translator based in Madrid who works from Spanish into English. He is specialized in equity research, economics, accounting, and investment strategy. He has worked as a translator for Goldman Sachs, the US Government's Open Source Center, and H.B.O. International. To contact him, visit his website and write to the address listed there. You can also join his LinkedIn network by visiting the profile or follow him on Twitter.