[ Link: http://flavorwire.com/254434/the-20-most-beautiful-bookstores-in-the-world ]

The thought that places like this might start disappearing made me take a good hard look at my Kindle, love it though I do.

On a related note, I was chatting about digital publishing with the very well-read Tea is for Tara earlier today and I got to thinking about the effect digital reading is likely to have on traditional libraries.  The library next to my primary school (where I learned to read) closed down last year – I held back a sniffle when I walked past and saw it closed down.  It’s hard to be emotionally detached when it comes to books – they elicit an emotional response from almost everyone.  People get remarkably attached to books.  I’m a huge case in point; my bookshelf is full of amazing books that I’ve never been able to bring myself to throw out over various moves.

I guess it’s a dinosaurish attitude but it’s hard not to feel a pang of sentimentality, nostalgia, even sadness at the thought of some future generation whose first magical and formative experiences of reading might not be through a paper book in a library or a book corner in their year one classroom, but rather through a beautifully-animated Dorling Kindersley iPad app or something similar.  I don’t think it’s unreasonable to say that books will never disappear as a medium, but the way people consume a lot of the material which is currently the preserve of the bookshelf is changing day by day.

Libraries, I think, will suffer rather a lot in the crossfire of the changes that publishing is going through.  I don’t have a library card, and it’s very unlikely that I’d go out of my way to get one at this point.  I use friends’ recommendations and the internet to decide what I’m going to read.  Amazon gives me the first 10% of it for free, and when I’m done with my sample and faced with the choice of walking 10 minutes to Battersea Library to look for and withdraw a specific book that might not be there and then have to make a return trip there a week or two later to return it or pay £5 to own a digital copy the book permanently…  honestly, even if I knew I’d never re-read it, I’d lean towards the digital option.  It’s too easy to impulse buy eBooks.  The instant gratification is totally killer.  And bottom line, since I got a Kindle, I definitely read more than I used to.

So, I stand by my position as a literary hypocrite.  I feel sad that ebooks are killing small publishers and libraries, but I don’t plan to give up my Kindle account any time soon.