I’m here, but . . . not. I’ll explain tomorrow. It has nothing to do with the fact that my wife went to a B. Dalton’s store that was closing and selling EVERYTHING, and picked me up a copy of a book I didn’t now existed – Nicholas Meyer’s account of directing Star Trek movies. Well, sure, yes. He’s not my favorite director, but when I think of the movies he made I love them all, even if “Time After Time” gave us Cuddly Smart H. G. Wells instead of the bloodless statist he became.
B. Dalton, by the way, was one of the first big book merchandisers; started here in Minnesota by the Dayton department store. Barnes and Noble bought them, and they’re closing them all. The first store, I believe, was in Southdale. It stayed around long enough for me to see my first novel on its shelves. The space is now occupied by the Apple Store, where I can call up my work on their computers.
Anyway: there’s the morning topic. It’s two-fold; choose either. Or both!
1. Favorite directors.
2. Are bookstores obsolete?
Back tomorrow; have fun.
Pass it along, if you wish
137 Responses to Wednesday, Dec. 30
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@hpoulter
nah. I prefer having the book in me hands. easy rewind, easy close, etc. I do like having books on audio, so I’ve got my ipod for that.
That’s easy; Blake Edwards and Chuck Jones. Those boys knew comedy.
@Amanda
One word (or is it two?): Powells.com.
What absolute nonsense.
It doesn’t matter how strongly your author friends may feel about it. The law and common sense are against them and you. Research the “first sale doctrine”, which the first commenter mentioned. You certainly can’t make copies to sell, but you ABSOLUTELY may lend or resell the copy you bought. Recent innovations under which electronic media are “licensed” rather than sold have not overthrown this principle.
I’m not sure why the comment about libraries doesn’t “deserve” a response. If your novel theories about the meaning of copyright were anything like valid, libraries would be illegal.
What’s really changed over the years is the idea of books, displayed in a prominent place in someone’s home, being a status symbol or a measure of the smarts of the inhabitant thereof. I know many people (ok, my wife) who have rows and rows of hardcover fiction in bookcases that will never, ever be read by them or anyone else ever again. The whole idea seems to be, “Hey, look what I read 25 years ago!” Yet there are people like me who will constantly re-read great non-fiction like Bryson’s “A Short History of Nearly Everything” because I learn and remember something new every time I pick it up. Same with a Lileks offering – it never gets old. I say: Never judge how “well-read” someone is (or how much useless trivia they know) based on what’s how many books are on the shelf.
Sorry, I see you are saying “you aren’t breaking any law”. I was misled by the all-caps THEFT in your comment.
I still say – let them get over it. You can’t go screaming at people that their legal behavior is THEFT and not sound like a crank.
“BTW – e-books suck as far as I am concerned – I stare at a computer screen all day – when I go home…”
@Matt – It’s not like reading a computer screen. It is not backlit like a computer (so is readable outside). The text is the same as a book, only you can adjust the size.
I swore I would never buy one. But I downloaded an iPhone app that had “classic” books on it. Started reading “The Invisible Man” for fun while on a conference, on that tiny little iPhone screen. Realized I was so into the story I had forgotten I was reading on a device and then bought a Kindle. It took a week for me to “lose” the Kindle as I read, but it is so natural, much less cumbersome and I can check a definition while I read. And I’m someone who will go to Portland, Oregon just to spend the day at Powell’s Books.
It’s really, truly unbelievable.
@efurman
I don’t see the prevention of any sale going on here. Lending a book to someone is not stopping a sale. The book was paid for, I already paid for the book. The author got his(or her) money from that sale. If I re-sell the book, I’m simply getting some of the money I put into the purchase of that book back. I’m not making a duplicate of the book and selling it, unlike the case of copying a CD or DVD. (Which is absolutely wrong).
If I buy a print from an artist, hang it on the wall, and then a few years later sell it, the artist isn’t out anything. The same number of prints exist as before. Should I charge admission to my friends to look at the painting and give it to the artist? I don’t think so.
As to not having an author sign a used book, here’s my experience: I bought a used book. I read it and re-read it for many years. I finally met the author and I told him how much I enjoyed that book. The book was dog-eared and old, and there was a newer edition out. Did he immediately demand I buy a new copy or threaten to punch me in the nose? No. On the contrary, He happily signed that book. He was thrilled I kept it so long.
As to the point about libraries, you can’t respond to it, because it shoots down your point entirely. Each time a book in a library is checked out is a lost sale, by your own argument. Do you honestly think that people should pay the author each time they lay eyes on their words even though they bought the book in the first place?
Also, should all books come wrapped in sealed plastic, so no shoppers can look at a page or two? Or whould you charge 10 cents a peek?
This whole discussion demonstrates that “pure” capitalism, just like any “pure” ISM, is both impossible and looney.
I was in B&N the other day looking for books by Joan Aiken and having no luck. I spotted an older lady (I’m 50) who I figured might be able to help. She had never heard of her. One click at Amazon and I had dozens to choose from.
Who has the better customer service here?
PS: I also bought another Bible, which I fortunately was able to find on my own. It would have been too disheartening to get yet another puzzled look had I needed to ask about another author who no one seems to have heard of these days…
Don Siegel is one of my favorite directors. Among many others, he directed the original “Invasion of the Body Snatchers” (1956), the little-known, but wonderful Walter Matheau thriller “Charlie Varrick,” Clint Eastwood’s “Dirty Harry,” and “The Shootist,” a poignant Western that was John Wayne’s last film.
Check out King Vidor’s output in the late 1920′s and you’ll see he was an essential force in guiding motion pictures to the level of panache that we take for granted today. “The Crowd”, “The Big Parade”, “Show People,” and early talkie “Hallelujah” — all terrific films. Vidor deserves a shout-out.
Oh … and he directed the Kansas scenes in “Wizard of Oz”.
“Time After Time.” Great movie. Aprapos of your previous entry, a preferred scene is when Malcolm McDowell visits McDonald’s. He’s fascinated by the tabletops. “What kind of wood is this?” he wonders as he caresses the Formica. Also fascinated by “fries.”
Directors: The Cohen brothers get a lot of credit for “Raising Arizona.” The camera angles are awesome like when Nicolas Cage scrapes his knuckles on the ceiling of his mobile home. Likewise, Tarantino gets kudos for the eyeball scene in Kill Bill– another mobile home fight.
Tarantino’s like the 70′s band Boston– he and they didn’t put out a lot, but what they did was awesome, mostly. I haven’t seen “Unglearious Bastages” (or however it’s spelled) yet, though.
Bookstores? No opinion. Haven’t been in one in years. Go to the library and buy at Amazon all the time, though. Smith’s Food and Drug has a big book section right up front, too, next to the trendy coffee stand.
_@_v – call me strange but i tend to watch movies for the stars or the story… not necessarily for the director. as for books, i doubt kindle is gonna have the stuff i tend to buy. unless they have copies of 1948/9 utica city planning reports (i have two volumes)
books are king. ebooks are ephemeral.
got a lovely little read, “House of Cards,” for Christmas. about how the crooks and schnooks trashed the economy, mostly told through Bear Stearns.
would not have had it if my sister had to go online. but in the bookstore, caught her eye, able to leaf through, walked right to the registers with it.
Bookstores are nearly worthless. I love books, but any visit to a bookstore ends in frustration: they don’t have what I need, don’t have what I want, and for all their pretensions at being intellectuals, cater to the least common denominator. You’re more likely to find a book on “magick” than on, say, Greek myths.
In contrast, online I can get what I need, find 90% of what I want (unless it’s just plain not for sale anywhere), and have it delivered to my door.
Powells in Portland is still a place of delight to me.
Other stores, not so much.
B&N…table full of Twilight knock-offs. In the stacks, with them, Wuthering Heights.
Heathcliff could give Edward a few lessons in neverending obsessive love.
Sure, two volumes, but what, no supplemental appendix? C’mon!
#1: Easy: D. W. Griffith. He invented almost all of the grammar of ALL films (closeups, tracking shots, dolly shots, etc.) [Disclaimer: lanczos: M.A., Radio-TV-Film, Film History]
#2: Bookstores: Not so easy. I don’t think anyone has mentioned Dover Publications, a firm that reprints out-of-print books in ULTRA-CHEAP paperback editions. This includes MANY(!!!!!) technical books, older novels, childrens’ items, etc. Okay, okay, they’re not on acid-free paper, and not going to last 400 years. But maybe Dover Publications is the future of “bookstores”…
_@_v – my 1950 albany/rensselear urban area report has the supplemental appendix – with strip maps!
I think the traditional bookstore has gone the way of the old-fashioned soda shoppe, with perhaps the exception of the more locally-owned bookstores, or any bookstore specializing in used books. In some cases the locally-owned bookstores are trying to match Borders or B&N, by being connected to a local coffee shop or other similar business. There is a bookstore over in Carrollton, GA, which is about 10 miles south of me, that is connected to a coffee shop. The last couple of times I had gone in there, I had to enter through the coffee shop, and when the owner of the bookstore was on vacation, the owner of the coffee shop would ring up any purchases at the coffee shop register. Of course, the family could have owned both, so it really didn’t matter.
BTW, Borders or B&N are not really bookstores in the classical sense. They don’t sell just books. The correct name for them would be “media retailer”, since they sell books, CDs (not just audiobooks, but music CDs), DVDs, and other forms of media.
@Patrick
I do know that if I don’t want to go all the way to Harry’s (Whole Foods) for the complete line of “Burt’s Bees”, I can always run over to Borders…
Obviously people aren’t going to admit that they’re doing something wrong, so I guess we’re done here, but a pair of Parthian shots:
*If you have to cite the letter of the law to justify your behavior, then you’re admitting that your morality is questionable.
*There’s nothing special about physical property that makes ownership of it any less arbitrary than non-physical property. If I have a banana, then there’s no magic power that keeps a bigger monkey from beating me up and taking away my banana. Sure, maybe Monkey Government has declared this to be illegal, but that’s a government decision and not some inherent aspect of bananas.
My answer to 1) Yes
My answer to 2) Luis Bunuel and Terry Gilliam
Directors: Keaton, Welles, Capra, Houston.
Bookstores: Will only survive if they are able to offer service to find things you can’t get with a simple search on Amazon, B&N or Border’s websites, etc. Perhaps if they offer KIndle or Sony e-book service (dead screens, worn out buttons, battery replacement, etc)… of course, if the e-readers really take off, the price should drop to the price of a good hardcover, so if they break or wear out, replacement would be a snap. Question for anyone with one now- if you have your library stored on one, and it dies, can you reload your collection for free? Can I store a backup on a hard drive in my home office/ library? or will efurman have a cow?
@grs
grs- if you want your flying car, you’ll need to be willing to give up a foot:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IsFfBB2W7IA
“Question for anyone with one now- if you have your library stored on one, and it dies, can you reload your collection for free? Can I store a backup on a hard drive in my home office/ library?”
I have a 1st generation Kindle. I have 2 backups for it; one is on an SD card that is in the Kindle slot; the second is on my computer. (The newer Kindle has more built in memory and no card slot.) When I hook up the Kindle to my computer, I can see the internal memory like a USB drive.
But my personal backup is more for files that I got from miscellaneous sources or freebies from manybooks.net; Amazon keeps track of what you buy from amazon.com and you can re-download those books if you need them. They even suggest you can erase a book to clear memory space and then retrieve it later to read again.
@DensityDuck
Oh, please. You have yet to justify in any way the argument that re-selling or lending a book is wrong. You assert it as if it is the most self-evident gospel truth in the world, which it isn’t, and you haven’t supported that assertion. Citing the law is what’s known as evidence, I’m supporting my argument with it. Where’s your evidence? My argument is based in law, long-standing custom, and common practice. What buttresses your argument?
By your lights, the used bookstore down the street is a den of iniquity and should be closed. Why? If the publishers think that they’re stealing from them, why do they still supply the store with new books to sell?
Using your monkey example, this small, local, independent store is the little monkey. Simon&Schuster, Harper Collins, and all the other publishers are the big monkeys. Any one of these houses probably has more in house lawyers than that store has ever had employees. They could easily sue the store, and force them out of business due to the sheer costs of defending the lawsuit. But they haven’t. Why?
i don’t have the time and patience to wade through all the bookstore comments, but i will tell you, the question has been answered. The interent SAVED bookstores, rather than driving them out of business.
Sure, giant bookstores are gobbling up some independent sellers, but on the other hand, I have purchased many a book from a small shop in middle America where I NEVER would have gone to look for a particular title.
Enter a title (or author, or whatever you are interested in) and that book turns up for sale somewhere. These small sellers are actually doing better than ever, because their wares are now part of the global market.
Books, and bookstores, won’t be going away. They will change.
There will always be someone willing to pay three grand for a printed first edition. The fact that you can download the same book wirelessly doesn’t mean the printed version is useless. It may in fact, make it more rare, more valued.
To a reader, or collector, the concept of owning a digital copy, a reading (physical) copy, and a don’t-even-open-it-or-look-at-it first-edition copy is entirely reasonable.
1. Too many very good directors to pick just one, but I agree with those who have named Hitchcock and John Ford.
2. Back in the ’70s, I worked for Kroch’s & Brentano’s in Chicago, which billed itself as the World’s Largest Bookstore. That chain went under due to bad management and the onslaught from B&N, Borders, etc. Now the Internet and e-books are on the verge of killing the big chains as well. I live near a Tattered Cover, and the lefty politics of the staff is palpable and unwelcoming and downright icy if you’re looking for anything by conservative authors. All in all, I don’t have a lot of optimism for the future of brick-and-mortar stores.
After packing up & storing a dozen boxes of books and magazines last week, I’m ready for an all digital read 2010.
I’ve been working at Barnes & Noble for the last five years. The current joke me and a particular manager share is how, based on the changes we’ve already witnessed just in the last two or three years, Barnes & Noble will no longer be recognizable as a bookstore within the next decade. He says we’ll be the world’s largest cyber cafe, with a pizza kitchen to die for; I suggest that we’ll be a dinner theater. My friend the manager is more correct, I think. The Internet has already killed in-store music sales and the time is distressingly short before the same thing happens to movie sales, the bandwidth problem being very, very close to no longer being a problem.
eReaders are more than just a passing fancy, and while “regular” books – wonderfully tactile, immune to problems that arise from dropping them on the ground and so on – are still years, perhaps generations, away from going the way of the dinosaur, the e-reader is HERE and will not go away. Once the bugs get worked out and the technology gets better, I’m already looking forward to the inevitable disappearance of the magazine section (can’t happen fast enough for me) and genre mass market piles. Again, it may take a decade or so, but it’s going to happen.
Take a walk around your nearest large-box bookstore. Sure, we’re still selling books, but we’re also selling lots and lots of . . . other stuff. Box kits, games, food and drink at the cafe, increasing amounts of cooking paraphernelia.
So I rather believe that bookstores as BOOKstores are obsolete. People who go to book stores in order to look for books and for no other reason have, by and large, already learned to just say “heck with it” and shop on-line. The future Glenn Reynolds predicted a few years ago in his book where he discussed the concept he called the “third space” – a place that is neither home nor an official place of “work” but is somehow the worst of both (my interpretation) where slobs can hang out and use $80 dollar photo books as coasters for their [censored] lattes, where stacks of firm, ass-sized books in the bargain section serve as ad hoc chairs, and the music section serves as a nursery for their hyperactive children – has pretty much come to pass.
And it sucks. Worse, it ain’t gonna get better. That’s just economics at work. The dollar has spoken, and when it wants cheap stuff it goes on-line. When it wants to just hang out, it goes to B&N (or Borders, or wherever).
Man – that got bitter. Well, working at a bookstore today will do that to a guy. And don’t get me started on the freakin’ bathrooms. Honestly – learn how to flush, America!
[grumbles incoherently]
Yes. The general market bookstore is dead.
Consider:
you have x000 feet of shelf space holding inventory. That inventory ranges from highly specific, ie Eschatological Implications of Christian Symbolism in Narnia, and varying freshness dates, ie Programming Perl 2.75. Along with Garth Merenghi’s 1x2nd NYT bestseller and the hardbound output of the latest Republicrat flak’s media payoff.
Now you’ve got all this inventory stocked, just hoping for somebody who needs that specific title walking in the door, but now, people looking for things with high degrees of specificity order online, and computer books were the very forefront of the ebook wave.
This is less problematic for specialty bookshops, which, like comic shops, can rely on a community customer base to an extent.
As far as authors who view used book sales as theft go, I’m sure many of my favorite authors hold many views that I find similarly foolish, but I try not to let it color my enjoyment of their work.
I bought the Nicholas Meyer book (10$ for Nook, 14 for Kindle) and right near the beginning, we’re told Walter Mirish produced “more hit movies than George W. Bush has had war crimes.” Oh good lord–talk about a fly in the jello mold.
Beckoning, there’s more to come. The book’s a good read, but Meyer drops political comments in to the mix for no good reason.
<>
Ditto right back at the liberal side of the aisle. It’s ALL crap, left, right, and at all points in-between.
Sorry – bit too impolite there; my apologies. Holidays are interesting for us retail types. The political books, though, are mostly useless nonsense written for the sole purpose of preaching to the choir rather than trying to engage those of us in more serious need of political repentance. Or whatever. The odd exception exists, such as “The Looming Tower,” but they are rare.
1. Don’t have one
2. Not yet! I like B & N and Borders, but prefer smaller independent ones. In Montpelier,VT we have
Bear Pond Books which is still my favorite. I couldn’t live without libraries and bookstores. I do use Amazon occasionally.