A Certain Kind of Serendipity

It's not been the greatest few days for aficionados of the printed word. Last week, the Toronto Star reported that the World's Biggest Bookstore, which isn't really but no matter because it's one hell of a catchy name, may be closing in December 2013 when the lease runs out. The condo developers are already circling like vultures, because everyone knows that the best way to ensure a livable, sustainable city is to build a thirty-story green-glass condo tower on every last parcel of land.

Here on the west coast, that sort of thing is already the way things go. Yesterday Does Your Mother Know? in Kitsilano, to my knowledge the only dedicated magazine store in Metro Vancouver, closed its doors thanks to steadily slowing business, attributed to the rise of smartphones and ereaders. I'll be honest, I only ever went in there once or twice, but that's just because Kits is way the hell out of my way. I don't know of any other place in the city that sells Atlantis Rising Magazine, which with its focus on UFOs, healing pyramids, free energy, and so on is probably the single most Fortean thing on the stands. I've certainly never seen it at Chapters.

This news, again, makes me glad that I do not own a smartphone or an ereader, because it means I do not need to feel a twinge of guilt about how my purchasing habits affect the broader economy. What it does mean is that Ray Bradbury had a certain point when he said "we've got too many internets." The internet's biggest problem is easy to overlook - it's what it overturns, it's what's left wrecked in its wake by its passing.

I feel like this ties in to what I wrote about earlier this month, regarding the practical invisibility of science fiction magazines to the people who'd be most likely to buy them. Put simply, the end of physical stores means the end of a certain kind of serendipity, the end of traditional discovery.

The World's Biggest Bookstore in Toronto. You'd think I'd have a shot or two of it somewhere in those forty thousand photos, but apparently not.

When I go to a bookstore, unless I'm checking to see if the new Analog and Asimov's are finally out yet, I don't know what I'm getting or even if I'm going to get anything. That's even more true when I visit a used bookstore, the sort of place that made me aware of the possibilities that were out there to begin with. Walking the shelves in a magazine store leaves you open to discovery, primed for finding things you didn't even know you were looking for. In a store you look this way and that, bouncing from thing to thing, making discoveries you would never have thought to look for yourself. Perhaps you didn't even know they existed.

In contrast, the online catalogs I've used on the exceedingly rare occasions I've bought books off the internet - cases in which the particular book I was looking for just couldn't be found anywhere in the physical realm - have been set up with the assumption that you already know what you want. None of the online directories I have experience with are able to replicate the ease of browsing, of having your attention drawn by a particular book's spine or title or cover. Sometimes it's the unexpected finds that are the sweetest, like when I found a weathered copy of The Third Industrial Revolution in Powell's, a book that's been out of print for decades.

The migration to electronic readers takes away a lot of that. Nothing has to go out of print when it's digital, and there goes the thrill of finding something that's hard to find. So too goes the ease of serendipity. Granted, it's not like things are on the ropes yet - though things aren't looking quite as resilient as they were a few years ago.

But if places like Powell's end up closing, then we might as well just let the world wind down.

A Chip Off the Old Book

"Most importantly, putting many titles into a story makes it easier to find your place if you happen to use your book to smash an irksome buzzing fly, and you hit the fly so hard that pieces of metal and plastic go shooting out of the book mechanism, so then you are forced to put the story chip into a new reader and you cannot remember where you were.

"This happens more often than you might expect."
- James Alan Gardner, Ascending

Technological advance rarely goes in the directions it's expected to. It can be argued that today we live in a world of electronics, but fifty years ago electronics was something of an also-ran; in 1961, people looked ahead to a future of personal helicopters, space colonies, and too-cheap-to-meter nuclear power. By the same token, it's an assured bet that the future will not look like what we expect it to - while the tranformative technology that will throw our projections out of order may well exist already, it takes time for technology to mature to the point where it can really influence the world. Even when we're pretty sure what we can reasonably expect, the future has a tendency of buggering up all our neat estimations.

One significant example of this is the present-day ebook revolution. Now, the idea of an ebook was something simple, simple enough that it's been a fixture of science fiction for decades; it did not require much of a logical leap to assume that in the future, it would be easy and economical to read books on a computer rather than paper. Where those visions ended up conflicting with reality was in the details of how they worked. It's understandable, as these visions tended to emerge when the internet was less capable than it is now, and when "filesharing" was letting your colleague use the papers socked away in your cabinet.

The quote at the top, from James Alan Gardner's 2001 novel Ascending, marks one of the common ways to visualize how ebooks would be adopted into society: like books, but more advanced. Rather than going to the store to get a couple of hundred pages glued together and sandwiched between covers, you'd instead get a computer chip that contained the book, and which you'd need to insert into an ebook reader in order to use - now that I think about it, greatly similar to the way Nintendo DS games are packaged and used, though I always imagined those "book chips" as looking more like SD cards.

Heavy, ain't it?

Presuming that they come with "covers" sufficient to keep out dust and so on, a library of book chips would be substantially less bulky than actual, physical books, and far easier to move around - though considerably more vulnerable to being fried by electromagnetic pulses. A book chip-based model would also preserve the book market in the form that was familiar right up to the last couple of years. Sure, if you have a blank book chip you'd likely be able to download the public domain texts from Project Gutenberg or a Creative Commons-licensed work onto it, but digital restriction technologies may well have been in place to prevent you from downloading an ebook to one of your blank book chips. Why? Because it lessens their control.

The ebook model we've got, that of direct downloads to reader devices, has its advantages and its disadvantages. When it's working, it's efficient - you don't have to truck your butt down to the store to get the next book in the series, you can just order it online and zap it's there. That, incidentally, leads into one of the model's great disadvantages - if for some reason the company doesn't want you to have a book that you've previously bought, they can just sound the recall on their devices and zap, the book is gone. This is not just idle speculation; Amazon has already demonstrated it can do this, as demonstrated by its remote recall of Kindle-purchased copies of 1984 back in 2009. Afterward Amazon said it wouldn't do this again... but corporations say a lot of things, and Amazon is not the only ebook retailer out there. Whereas if I buy a book from Chapters, I can be reasonably confident that a couple of Customer Experience Representatives won't break into my apartment in the dead of night and return it to their shelves.

There's another thing that "book chip" ebooks gives us that actual ebooks don't - a used market. Whenever you've got any sort of physical media, you can be assured that someone out there will be in the business of buying and reselling it, sometimes to ridiculous extremes - the last time I was in the Salvation Army Thrift Store, they had for sale the CDs for Total Annihilation, a 1997 RTS computer game that would be hard-pressed to run under modern operating systems. I recognize the value of the used market; it was a used book store on Dunlop Street in downtown Barrie, a couple minutes away from my high school, that started me into things that I wasn't then able to find in the dedicated bookstores. For non-physical media like modern ebooks, though, there's no such thing. It puts a disproportionate amount of power in the hands of the producer and the provider, and not of the buyer.

I think I prefer the older, speculative ebook model because of familiarity - it provides new opportunities within a framework that's already known.

Take A Look, It's In a Book

The library has always figured prominently in my life. When I was a kid, the Milton Public Library ran a book-reading competition of sorts that encouraged youngsters to read. When I rode my bike straight into a rusty Ontario Hydro mailbox, it was because I was on my way to the Barrie Public Library and my usual route was closed due to construction. When I needed to get my high school essay just so, I'd head to the Toronto Reference Library to get that source I just couldn't find up north. One of the first things I did after signing my lease here in BC was to get a New Westminster Public Library card.

I was originally planning to write something about the forty-second anniversary of Apollo 11's lunar landing and the thirty-fifth anniversary of Viking 1's landing on Mars, but no matter how important space exploration is to me, this is something even dearer to my heart. But there's still a tie there anyway - libraries are the foundation of curiosity and exploration, those attitudes that led us to go to the moon and to Mars. Libraries are the foundation of a literate, knowledgeable, inquisitive, intellectual society. Libraries are gateways to other worlds, other modes of thinking - and especially in times like this, when the economy is approximately as stable as a matchstick skyscraper, they're vital to the poor - whether you're a kid or an adult, even if all your money is going toward food and rent and the necessities of life, the library will always let you in.

Now, though, it seems that Toronto's mayor Rob Ford and its other mayor Doug Ford have confused the smell of books with that of gravy, and they are paddling their gravy boat straight toward the Toronto Public Library system.

The Toronto Reference Library circa October 2009 - there are 1.6 million items in the catalog here.

Over the past few weeks, Hizzoner Rob has been gnashing his teeth so loudly at his inexplicable inability to find the oceans of gravy he knew flooded the basement of Toronto City Hall that I've been hearing it here in New Westminster. I mean, it's got to be there, doesn't it? After all, he promised the taxpayers that it was there, and he would get rid of it, because obviously their taxes were being wasted! However, I guess the last thing David Miller did in office was engage the emergency override that crash-dumped the city's gravy reserves into enormous bunkers fifty kilometers below the surface, so he and his brother Doug have had to look extra-hard for this gravy, lest the people of Toronto start dismissing it as a myth.

As I doubt that the Fords had the same experience with libraries as I did growing up - hell, I'd be honestly shocked if either of them had even been inside a library of their own free will in the last ten years - I didn't react with surprise to this look into their policy toward the TPL. It was more of an anger thing. This is an excerpt from CFRB 1010 that gives a disturbingly clear look into the situation: audio, and more details, are available here.

CFRB 1010: Doug also has a problem with the number of libraries we have in the city of Toronto.

DOUG FORD: We have more libraries per person than any other city in the world. I’ve got more libraries in my area than I have Tim Horton’s.

Notice: Ford pronounces "library" as "li-bary," and presumably pronounces "tomorrow" as "tomorrey," much like Homer Simpson - except I think I'd much rather have Homer Simpson as Mayor of Toronto.

It's an insightful look into Doug's psyche, and his priorities. The implication here is clear - there are more libraries in his area than Tim Horton's outlets, and that's a bad thing; that the availability of cheap-ass, bitter coffee is more important than the combined intellectual history and development of thousands of years of civilization. Toronto operates the largest and busiest city public library system in the entire world, so OBVIOUSLY the solution is not to take pride in the fact that Toronto is able and willing to serve its citizens in such a comprehensive way - no! It means there's GRAVY. Because god knows that the role of a city is to do the bare minimum possible in every respect.

I'm pretty sure I know what the Fords would really like to do to Toronto's public library system; they'd like to privatize them. Too bad we already have those - they're called bookstores. The ENTIRE PURPOSE of a public library system is to be PUBLIC; to be OPEN and AVAILABLE to the PEOPLE. Through actions like this, through their denigration of city services intended for the COMMON WEALTH, meant to ENRICH the lives of the people, they show their true colors to me - the colors of toadying ideologicals who don't care what kind of damage they do, so long as the Exalted Taxpayer has more money in their wallet.

Sometimes you have to be blunt. In that respect...

IT'S BEEN EIGHT MONTHS, ROB. WHERE THE FUCK IS THE FUCKING GRAVY?