I love going to bookstores. I love the browsing. I look at art books although I never buy any. I love to check out coffee table books, although I don’t buy those either. I do buy a lot of novels, classics, science fiction and historical books.
Since I now have a Kindle, when I enter a bookstore, I feel pangs of guilt. I am going in there and I am not going to come out buying a book. I know that right when I walk in. This didn’t used to be the case. I never knew if I’d end up buying something, and that somehow made my time in the store more legitimate.
I can’t walk into Amazon and browse. I want to. But the web site is not good for that. I can’t feel the paper. I can’t look at pictures.
Now I am a bookstore mooch.
Self-inflicted wound. Toss the kindle and get back to your roots. But we’ve had this argument before. So what I want to know: why would you KNOW that you’re not going to buy? Not everything is available on Kindle. And there is no law saying that you can’t moonlight with real books late at night when your fingers have tired of the cold plastic touch of the future.
Well, that’s just it. It’s not like a decision. It just happened, and without expecting it, without realizing it would happen beforehand, the experience of going to a bookstore has changed fundamentally. Let’s see how it plays out over a few years.