Bye Bye BAM

This morning as I was slowly reading the Sunday paper, an advertisement in the main section caught my eye.

Books-A-Million in Roanoke is shutting its doors.

The bookstores are dropping like flies that have passed through a cloud of Raid. Soon not even the chains will have bricks and mortar stores, and we'll all be ordering off Amazon.

This is not the first major bookstore closing recently. Ram's Head Bookstore, the area's largest and most interesting independent book dealer. The owners retired, closing the doors. Printer's Ink also closed its doors. Also, while it affected fewer people, Hollins University's bookstore stopped stocking textbooks.

Soon we'll be left with only Barnes & Noble in this area, which according to reports is teetering financially.

This scares me. It also makes me very sad.

It scares me because Amazon has already shown, in at least a few instances, that it won't hesitate to reach into your Kindle and pull your purchase back. And the fact that it can do that is frightening. Why should this company have the final say over what you read, what you learn, and what you think?

What if, say, the government decides that you shouldn't be reading 1984, because it might give you ideas? And you bought it on your e-reader, not as a hard copy? And then poof, it's not there anymore, so you can't go back and revisit that again. In part that's because you're not buying the actual book, you're buying a license to read the book. While the model may eventually change (thanks to litigation, necessity, and money (but not morality)), that's how things are at the moment. E-readers are also moving from their own stand-alone units to being on apps on mobile phones and tablets.

I don't know about you, but my eyes are not too happy about trying to read a long work on an e-reader, let alone on a phone screen. I have an e-reader and still prefer a real book. I don't have to plug up a real book. And a real book doesn't access my email or Facebook or have other distractions.

So I guess I'm a dinosaur. I like paper.

The loss of yet another bookstore in my area means I will have one less place to go and feel at home. One less place to browse to find things I might not otherwise read. One less way to enlarge my world. One less place to get away from it all.

It seems like everything I care about - reading, liberal arts, art, English, morality - all of that stuff has gone by the wayside. There are enclaves of writers and readers still, but more and more they are being cast aside like so much rubbish. All that matters anymore are tech inventions - being able to code is so much more desired than being able to write a strong sentence.

We are losing so much in this headlong dash to destroy ourselves that I am starting to think it will be a good thing when we are all gone. Mother Nature must be throwing up every time she looks at humanity.

I used to embrace technology but I eventually realized it was an insidious beast that eats its young. I stopped trying to keep up with the new and improved in the race to the bottom. I refuse to go there though I know now that is where I will end up in this topsy-turvey world we have created.

Books-A-Million opened its chain store in Roanoke in the late 1990s. I thought it was great. Rams Head was over on the other side of town for me, and while BAM didn't have the same stock of poetry and writing books, it carried some. When WaldenBooks closed it was nice to know there were other choices.

I frequented them all and alternated purchases between them. Each offered a unique selection, a different feel. And now they're gone.

Bye Bye BAM. I guess B&N will be next.