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The last book I bought from Shaman Drum - our local academic bookstore - was called The Solitary Vice: Against Reading. It was not the last, I hasten to add, because I had anything particularly against reading (or any other solitary vice that comes to mind): rather, after nearly thirty years in business, Shaman Drum had closed - along with a number of wonderful bookstores I frequented during my Wanderjahre (c. ages 13-54). These fell prey to many forces: the recession, rising rents, and here in Ann Arbor a university-backed attempt to direct textbook orders to a combine rather than our textbooksupported independent bookstore. But they're also victims of broad changes in the means by which books are produced and consumed, all facilitated - if not necessitated - by the Internet. In age of Amazon and Kindle, the bookstore itself seems an anachronism; in the era of Twitter and IMing, so does the very notion of reading - or at least reading conceived of as a dense, hermeneutically rich, profoundly solitary activity.
This tale is usually told as one of loss - the death of the book, the end of reading. And there are genuine losses to be mourned here, not only of bookstores as a community resource - and a source of jobs for unemployed English majors but of the actual person-to-person communications that go on there. (One of the chief virtues of bookstores, as of libraries, Michigan University Librarian Paul Courant reminds us in his contribution below, is that they are real-time social networking sites, places that facilitate human-to-human encounters between like-minded readers. Indeed, I realize, Barthesian enough, how much my romantic life has been intertwined with bookstores, whether the long-gone Great Expectations in Evanston, Illinois, in which I used to browse with my college girlfriend, or Tattered Cover in Denver, where I cooled my heels while waiting for someone living in the mountains fifty miles away, or Williams Corner Bookstore in Charlottesville, whose spectacular philosophy section occupied me while my wife, Sara, was preparing class. And whatever else one can say about them, Twitter-speak and IM-talk can't be seen...