Raises the question: what is a book?

I own a kindle. So does my wife. I buy books for it. I also steal books for it.

I also own a lot of atlases.

Weird, that. In this era of Google Earth, I own three atlases. I also own a very expensive coffee table book on Kowloon Walled City, I own a ridiculously rare book on nuclear weapons, and I own a first edition of Paolo Soleri's Arcology.

Further, I own three copies of Tobe Hemenway's "Gaia's Garden" - two print and one digital. I own the digital version of Bill Mollison's Permaculture manual, and I own the legit, horse-choking 800pp textbook as well.

None of that shit was available at Barnes & Noble.

The rare books were bought off eBay or bought from Powell's, which has figured out how to survive the internet era quite nicely, thank you. There are still marvelous bookstores I support that focus largely on local authors and local content. Finally, I bought a PDF off the author two days ago because in his opinion, 100% of $15 kicks the tar out of 30% of $10. I guarantee he isn't selling as many copies as he would on Amazon but I'll bet if he printed out a few copies, leather bound them and sold them to gift shops in the right places he'd do better than dealing with Amazon. That's how I ended up with this monster, one of 75 copies, mine for the cover price of $65 a full 5 years before I'd ever heard of "Amazon" (and in Seattle, Amazon ran radio ads long before they ran banner ads).

The purpose of a "book store" used to be to connect you with the written word. It is now to connect you to physical objects that you wish to hold on to. The volume of dead trees being sold is going to go down immensely, and I think that's good. The number of book stores? Well, look at record stores. I wouldn't open one.

But I think books are here to stay.

Whenever I see a publisher decrying the death of books I remember the labels decrying the death of music. Yeah, MP3 was the death of the music industry but bands still tour.