I'll admit it, I love my Kindle. I can get just about any book I want in minutes, and I can carry an entire library in the pocket of my jacket. What isn't to love about that? But the sad reality is that this amazing little device could be signaling the death knell of my own chosen profession of librarianship. We are entering an era where instead of traveling to a library, asking a librarian and browsing the shelves for what we need, we will instead type in a phrase, press buy and be reading our chosen manuscript in a matter of minutes. Perfect if you're a traveler on the move without room for a mountain of books and the accompanying journeys to return them, not so ideal if you're a public institution reliant on visits from the public.
I wouldn't mind the growth of the medium so much if publishers weren't intent on screwing everything up. With back catalogs all but unavailable and with not reprints in sight, my refuge for interesting reading and reference materials has often been the library and used book stores. Nothing has been done to change this. With conversion of older books being as easy as an optical character recognition scan and a cleanup pass by an editor, it seems simply incompetent to not take advantage of this.
The little toys, love them or hate them, seem to be here to stay. With Amazon selling more Kindle books than hardcovers or paperbacks (a figure doubtlessly inflated by the number of free titles available in the store), more and more are hopping on the bandwagon. Independent book stores and libraries are going to have to scramble to keep up, and the future should be fascinating. Will Print-on-Demand kiosks begin infiltrating our communities? Will we see the death of the bookstore in the coming decade? Only time will tell, but it should be a hell of a ride.
