Happy Birthday, Word!

A few months ago, I did a debate at Word in Greenpoint, not far from where yo vivo con mi esposo bonito, qui es d’Espana, y mi pero pequeño, qui es Poodle-Yorkie. (Am learning Spanish! Very slowly!).

I love Word. I bet you have to pass some sort of “cool” test to work there. “No, we don’t. Because tests are inherently uncool.” That’s the kind of thing I think that someone who worked there would say. Word, word.

Some of their employees debated me about whether or not certain things would become obsolete, and they each kicked my bum. They showed up with notes and stuff. I thought that I could just get by using my book as my notes, but then I realized that they’d been able to read “my notes.” And they didn’t even have to buy the book! They could’ve just read it at the store! Damn. So, their arguments were more like rebuttals to things that I wrote and researched more than a year beforehand. In most cases, I decided my best option would be to use my turn to tacitly agree with their sides and then have my dad answer questions from the audience. I just always ask myself: What Would Amos Do? He’d yap, yap, drop and roll.

Anyway, the point is: the debate was great, Word is great, and Amos is very wise. But the original point of all this was that I was going to say that I just read that Word’s new online store will take twenty percent off your purchase if you write “Happy Anniversary, WORD!” in the comments section at checkout. The site is WordBrooklyn.com. I believe in eating local, and books are mostly made of plants. Smaller stores are so often overshadowed by Amazon, which has liberal views about shopping in my undies. But Word has so much more personality and is a much more pleasant addition to the neighborhood than another DuaneReade. Also, I believe in supporting any bookstore that has its own basketball team.

Question from the audience: Will books become obsolete?

Answer from me: There’s no way to know, but I really do think that books will become obsolete sooner or later. Probably sooner than later. A generation or so from now, I think they will seem like relics of an faraway time. The Kindle, the iPhone, and other kinds of feats of technology and design and engineering that are trying to do a job that paper seemed to do so effortlessly, are still leaning heavily on the design of books, and I think things will probably continue in that direction for quite a while. But, in many cases, it’s like a game of telephone: Most modern computers were designed so that we input information using a system almost identical to the typewriter. Because it’s something that people were used to. Early typewriter designs leaned heavily on the look and operation of the piano. Because it’s something people were used to. Pianos took major hints from harpsichords, which incorporated design elements of the hurdygurdy, which which which blah. Digital pictures are still rectangular because film was rectangular. Would CDs have been made round if records hadn’t been round? One thing builds onto the next until the innermost Russian nesting doll packs up and marries a snow globe.

I’m going to wager that my great-great-grandkids will read from left-to-right (if they speak English) on rectangular screens or tickers or whatever. The text will still mostly be dark and the backgrounds will probably white, just like printed ink on paper was. But I doubt they’ll be reading actual books like we read today.

As someone who loves books, I feel sad about this. At the Word debate, a lot of people were emotional about this subject. Thing is, I love books because I grew up with them. I was, in someway, conditioned to love them. If they yelled and jumped on the table and started swinging brooms every time I brought one home, I would’ve felt differently. My parents loved them—they’d been raised the same way. But we already know that there are plenty of kids in today’s world who can’t read, or don’t get read to, or rarely come into contacts with books at all.  There are probably more people in this category than ever before (at least, since the invention of books). Are these kids as likely to grow up to be book lovers? And what if the first kind of “book” they ever come into contact with is actually some kind of eBook? The nostalgic element of emotional attachment shifts to a new technology, just like I know plenty of people who geek out about computers from the 1980s but couldn’t care less about typewriters. Or hurdygurdies! Funny thing is that it doesn’t seem much of a loss to us in the now. And the vast majority of the people who sang the gospel of the typewriter (and scorned its descendants) are now dead.

I don’t remember what I was talking about any more.

Anyway, go to WordBrooklyn.com. Or to the actual store. Tell ‘em I sent ya! I love books. If I had one wish, I’d ask that that they live on forever as actual objects and not just as a vestigial design element. Either that, or peace on Earth.

2