the problem is, I keep seeing the future happening…
Can machines select the next book for you to read? In this view of the future, a book’s DNA can be compared to your “reader DNA,” and the bookseller – no longer a human but a machine automatically channeling books to you – is guaranteed growing sales forever.
Read it all here on lindaleith.com
Bibi Tiphane 
The tirade by Slate Technology Editor Farhad Manjoo about Richard Russo’s lament in the New York Times shows the rapid disconnect between technology and literature lovers who want to preserve the atmosphere of independent bookstores. I, too, much prefer to browse through book stacks at any one of the bookstores near where I live. I find the experience of buying online similar to buying from an airport store, except that we neglect one factor: people shop for bargains and best prices. As absurd as the Amazon scheme of having people go to a physical store to scan product tags to then order online seemed, people probably did. I saw someone take pictures on price tags at a pharmacy the other day, probably in an effort to “price compare.” I just think it’s more work, and that I wouldn’t bother to spend the time for it, but I think I am the exception, and that people who do this waste a lot of time while being under the illusion of saving.
Someone originally from Cincinnati told me he hadn’t seen as many Mc Donald’s restaurants in San Francisco as you’d encounter in the midwest. Apart from the culinary sensitivity of our citizens, the main factor, I would think, is money. People have more money here, whereas the new industrial revolution has impoverished the rest of the country. And it’s not only the Internet. Those mega-stores open with a bit of political blackmail with cities that can only sacrifice their little ones to the great God.
Amazon is, basically, an Internet company. It didn’t spin off from a bookstore, like Powell’s in Portland, or Barnes and Noble’s, or your local bookstore that was big enough to open an online store. Much of its technology has been developed in the San Francisco Bay Area, Silicon Valley in particular, while there was no need at all for Engineers to be near the warehouses, or even the headquarters. The highly paid people live in the richest parts of the country, setting up systems that optimize the flow of money and merchandise. There is little difference with, say, Apple Computers, who even ships its products directly from a factory in China with no intermediate in the US. Amazon sells more than books now, just because it can.
It set the path of least resistance for consumers, who not only see the convenience, but also the low prices associated with not having to pay local salaries, taxes, and rents. To people who, like me, always root for the underdog, it’s catastrophic.
Change will occur in all areas of our daily lives. Cities without bookstores or public libraries of the welcoming kind seem to be without a soul. Its citizens are busy “working” – or whatever it is that keeps them from being conscious and connected with their world. But in the middle of the desert, the Phoenix of the bookstore or the library may revive as a gathering place. They may revise their modus operandi from maintaining stacks of books to facilitating reading through whatever devices that replace paper. They may make themselves inviting, let the users receive art and sciences in an optimal way.