Books Without Batteries

Bill Henderson, co-editor of Book Love prefers books without batteries.  While we too like the physical book, you can visit our webstore to purchase ebooks for most devices.

"Books Without Batteries:The Negative Impacts of Technology
What a savings in our forests, right? Wrong.
By Bill Henderson
Apr 11, 2011 Publishers Weekly

The recent onslaught of e-readers was announced with a veneer of the best of intentions. The book needed improving, said one maven, who also sells diapers and soup online. An MIT visionary predicted that in five years we will read almost no paper books—just digital devices. The book would become a relic, a collector's item, the e-experts agreed. And of course with the death of the book, our bookstores and libraries would wither and die.

The e-experts said that in the future all information and literature would be available on the device of the moment (sure to be replaced by the device of the next moment). You may never have to leave the comfort of home or bed. The latest bestseller—indeed, millions of out-of-print books (you didn't know you needed that many)—could be had at the click of a button. This was billed as an improvement.

Lots of people are making lots of money telling us this is for our own good. Tweeting away, we never stop to think. In fact, we may be losing the ability to think.

In The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains (Norton, 2010), Nicholas Carr notes that after years of digital addiction, his friends can't read in depth anymore. Their very brains are changing, physically. They are becoming "chronic scatterbrains... even a blog post of more than three or four paragraphs is too much to absorb."

Carr continues: "For the last five centuries, ever since Gutenberg made reading a popular pursuit, the linear, literary mind has been at the center of art, science, and society. As supple as it is subtle, it's been the imaginative mind of the Renaissance, the rational mind of the Enlightenment, the inventive mind of the Industrial Revolution, even the subversive mind on Modernism. It may soon be yesterday's mind."

Because our brains can no longer think beyond a tweet, we can't write well. And we can't read well either. The idea of reading—let alone writing—War and Peace, Bleak House, or Absalom, Absalom! is fading into an impossible dream.

In any case, what serious writer would create exclusively for an e-reader? It's like farting into the wind. Writers hope, mostly in vain, that their work will endure for a few years or even centuries, in handsome printed and bound volumes. Why bother at all if your words are to be digitized into instantly accessible and disposable battery-dependent gas?

Some think that the e-reader will save trees. Soon, according to a recent New York Times article, we will possess over 100 million e-readers. What a savings in our forests, right? Wrong.

Here's what an e-reader is: a battery-operated slab, about a pound, one-half inch thick, perhaps with an aluminum border, rubberized back, plastic, metal, silicon, a bit of gold, plus rare metals such as columbite-tantalite (Google it) ripped from the earth, often in war-torn Africa. To make one e-reader requires 33 pounds of minerals, plus 79 gallons of water to refine the minerals and produce the battery and printed writing. The production of other e-reading devices such as cellphones, iPads, and whatever new gizmo will pop up in the years ahead is similar. "The adverse health impacts [on the general public] from making one e-reader are estimated to be 70 times greater than those for making a single book," says the Times.

Then you figure that the 100 million e-readers will be outmoded in short order, to be replaced by 100 million new and improved devices in the years ahead that will likewise be replaced by new models ad infinitum, and you realize an environmental disaster is at hand. We will have lost a chunk of our planet as we lose our minds to the digital juggernaut.

Here's what it takes to make a book, which, if it is any good, will be shared by many readers and preserved and appreciated in personal, public, and university libraries that survive the gigantic digital book burning: recycled paper, a dash of minerals, and two gallons of water. Batteries not necessary. If trees are harvested, they can be replanted.

I co-edited Book Love—a collection of observations on writing, reading, and the tradition of printed and bound books—for those who still love books. Books are our history and our future. If they survive, we will, too. Books, readers, writers—on this tripod we keep the faith

Happy Belated Birthday to Ferlinghetti (founder of the other City Lights)

FROM The Writer's Almanac 3/24/2011

What Is Poetry?

Thursday was the birthday of poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti, born in Yonkers, New York (1919). His father, an Italian immigrant, died before he was born and his mother was committed to an asylum while he was still an infant. Ferlinghetti spent part of his childhood in a state orphanage. A French aunt took over custody of young Lawrence and moved him to France. After a few years, they returned to New York, where his aunt got a job as a governess with a wealthy family. Then his aunt took off, abandoning her nephew, but the family liked the boy so much that they took him in.
Ferlinghetti had access to good schools, went to college at the University of North Carolina, and then joined the Navy during World War II. He was the commander of 110-foot ship. He said: "Any smaller than us you weren't a ship, you were a boat. But we could order anything a battleship could order so we got an entire set of the Modern Library. We had all the classics stacked everywhere all over the ship, including the john. We also got a lot of medicinal brandy the same way."
He moved to New York, then Paris, and then settled in San Francisco. He loved the North Beach neighborhood, full of Italian immigrants, and he decided to open a bookstore there. In 1953, he opened City Lights, the first all-paperback bookstore in the country. It became a center for the Beat poets, and also a publishing house — City Lights Press made its name publishing Allen Ginsberg's "Howl."
Ferlinghetti wrote: "I have a feeling I'm falling / on rare occasions / but most of the time I have my feet on the ground / I can't help it if the ground itself is falling."

UNC Prof. on Airports and Their Cities

From WNYC's Brian Leher Show: John Kasarda, professor at University of North Carolina Kenan-Flagler Business School and the co-author of Aerotropolis: The Way We'll Live Next, along with fellow co-author and journalist Greg Lindsay, talk about the way airports are becoming their own residential and business hubs.  Listen to the interview:

Aerotropolis: The Way We'll Live Next

While we do sell eBooks at City Lights, we booksellers share a personal preference for the printed variety: new or used, owned or borrowed.  LibraryThing members recently had an interesting discussion of how the concept of personal libraries is changing with the advent of virtual books.  Do you really own that book you just downloaded, or is it just a rental? 

A Sad Day at City Lights

The extended bookstore family is grieving the loss of a very dear friend.  Our beloved shop cat Charlie died suddenly this afternoon (1/7/2011).  He was a young and apparently healthy cat and had been his usual friendly self all day.  He had just ambled over to a favorite napping spot, when he cried out and stopped breathing.  While we chose not to take him to Asheville for necropsy, we can only assume that some congenital weakness gave out, and thus ended his all too short tenure as an exceptional bookstore cat.  

 

Just a little over a year ago a customer, who had recently adopted Charlie from ARF, suggested we give him a crack as bookstore cat, a position vacant since Miss Kitty’s passing in April 2008.  We considered his name to be auspicious, since the bookstore took it's name from from the Charlie Chaplin movie.   It took about ten minutes for Charlie to start acting like he owned the place; he was a very self-assured kitty.  Visiting children (even energetic three year olds) and dogs didn’t faze him… he gave every creature a chance. He napped, ate and played with the best of them. We will miss him very much.  Memorials may be made to CatMan2 or ARF. 

 

 

Cutting for Stone

Cutting for Stone is a breath-taking first novel, full of rich incident and visceral (often literally -- it is about a family of surgeons) detail. It is epic in scope, and covers an operatic range of emotions.  In the year since it came out in paperback, bookclubs in the area of devoured it and found it generated a lot of discussion.

Give a book-a-month.

Here's a sweet gift idea for a loved one who adores a good read: a local gentleman has set up a book-a-month plan for his wife. Each month she can select a book she wants to be charged to his account. We also sell gift cards (which can be purchased and redeemed on our website), but this struck us as a nice twist on the idea.