Book Stores

Of course everything with me is a movie, and You’ve Got Mail comes to me now. Remember when Tom Hanks puts Meg Ryan out of business and she goes to the children’s book section of his ‘Barnes and Noble’ store? The person behind the counter has no knowledge of the customer’s question, and Tom Hanks makes a great face of dismay that his store has people with no knowledge helping those looking for books.

Well, today my friend Cathryn and I were at Barnes and Nobels in Santa Monica’s 3rd Avenue street mall. We were looking for the Ted Kennedy autobiography which was sold out. She bought another book and was at the cash register where the following conversation took place.

“Do you know when you will be getting more of the Ted Kennedy book?”

“I’m sorry, what is the name of the book?”

“i don’t know the name but it’s the book he wrote about his life before he died?”

“Is it a biography?”

“You know what? Never mind. I’ll just take this book.”

“Ok.”

I used to love book stores. I loved feeling the books; there are usually only one or two of a book on the shelf and you browsed through them and the people working there did so because they loved the written word too.

I have a Kindle now (Amazon’s EBook) and that’s nice too because I can hear about a book and download it to my Kindle or my IPhone seconds later, right after the conversation. But it’s not the same as reading a page and turning it and seeing how much is left before the book ends so you can spread it out if you need it to last longer.

I listen to books on tape in my car. I will drive around an extra ten minutes (ok, sometimes longer) so I can finish a chapter before I get home. Sitting in the driveway which others say they do doesn’t quite work for me.

But there was nothing like a bookstore way back when. And, now it’s not the same. You know, B&N doesn’t even smell like a bookstore. Why is that? They have more books than the bookstores of old, but they don’t smell like books.

So, I guess the point (gads, it always comes back to that, doesn’t it?) is that there is a time for a bookstore, a time for Kindle, a time for books on tape. But if it’s time for a bookstore, they simply must fill it with those who care about the written word, or I’m not going anymore.