Okay this post is completely off the topic of my normal style of discussion here but I truly feel that something has to be said about the way technology is significantly becoming the destruction of the publishing and book industry as we have known it to be in the past. It seems more and more we hear about book companies like Borders and Barnes N’ Nobles closing down stores and filing bankruptcy. People seem to be genuinely concerned and some even outraged at the thought of there being no more book stores.
We can sit and blame the decline in the economy all we want for this drastic shift in the publishing and book store industry all that we want but that is not what believe is at the heart of the problem. It is Kindles and Nooks and any other e-reader device that allows for people to download books electronically instead them going to a book store and purchasing a book and reading it the good old fashioned way. Yes they may in fact be convenient and easy to have the ability to tote all your books around without having to actually physically have to carry all of your books around but look what and who it is hurting. I for one think that it is just lazy to read books that way because that is not how books were originally intended to be read, but that’s just my opinion.
People who buy into the whole Kindle and Nook propaganda are not thinking about the fact that if everyone is buying their books this way, what need is there for a book store. If the book stores begin rapidly closing down, if no publishing company is going to publish writer’s books anymore due to the lack of need for the physical books, then hundreds and thousands of people are left without jobs, and people (like me) who actually love book stores and don’t buy into the electronic way of reading won’t have an outlet to go to. In an economy that is already suffering, what would this destruction of the publishing world and book industry do to those people that will end up jobless? For those who are Kindle and Nook lovers, have you thought about the industry that you are helping to destroy.
In the area I live in, there aren’t really a lot of book stores within range that I can go to except the Borders and now I hear rumors that due to the lack of people who actually buy books these days they might be closing their doors soon. With gas prices being what they are I can’t afford to drive a lot of miles away just to be able to get my books and to be able to go sit and work on my writing. I am a writer who hopes to have many novels published in the course of her lifetime and with the way people are taking book for granted I just may not get to do what I have dreamed of doing since I was six years old all because people want to be lazy and can’t appreciate the value of reading a book the way they were meant to be read. What is the need to carry around hundreds of books at a time for when you can only read one at a time anyway (or 2 if you’re one of those speed readers)? All I ask is that people who buy into all of that unnecessary technology start to think about the people they are really hurting with it. Okay I’m done now. I needed to get that out there.
Jimmetta Carpenter
Writer/Editor
The Diary: Succession of Lies (Now Available)
Writing as “Jaycee Durant”
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