Borders, RIP

I see in the news today that Borders is closing its 400 remaining stores. I am heartbroken.
Borders wasn't done in by competition from Barnes and Noble. B&N has been in financial trouble, too. It's a shame, because this could have been and should have been a rollicking competition between two great companies that understood two of the great loves of my life: books and music.
No, B&N and Borders didn't do each other in. Rather, both were done in by far more disturbing trends. One was the onset of the Internet. A second was Amazon.com. And yet another was Kindle.

I'm so bugged by the Internet because it seems to have shortened attentions spans in a way no one would have believed possible ten years ago. "TLDR" - Too Long, Didn't Read - seems to apply to anything longer than a short paragraph. It bothers me because, admittedly, some of my trains of thought get a little long. We've become a nation of readers who think that such garbage as the Harry Potter series and the Twilight series are good writing. Never mind the cliched plots and plastic characters.
We've become a nation of self-styled "speed readers." Woody Allen had a great line about that: "I took a speed reading course. It was great! Read War and Peace in one night.

I think it had something to do with Russia."

If Amazon.com has been a reason for the demise of Borders and the near-demise of B&N, {sigh} {rolls eyes}. Bookstore browsing is a joy, and something I could do for hours if permitted. If your idea of "browsing" is browsing through Amazon (once you get out of the socks and watches), you won't be surprised by anything. You usually knew what you were looking for before you went there. You won't experience the unexpected find at a used bookstore like The Source in downtown Davenport. I found a book by Anthony diMello in a Borders in Colorado Springs. I'd thought the book was out of print. I found a copy of Montesqiueu's The Spirit of the Laws, a book often cited as being influential in the French Revolution, in a B&N one day. Who reads that? Well, if you're into things like libertarianism or maybe liberty, equality, fraternity, maybe you should. Jaroslav Pelikan's history of Christianity is something you'd probably not start looking in Amazon for, but if you're interested in the subject the display on the shelves of an actual bookstore just might interest you.

B&N and Borders have fallen victim of our not wanting to search. They have fallen victim to our intellectual laziness. Why wrestle with, say, Niebuhr or Husserl or Plato or Shakespeare or Milton or Hopkins when we can get it all in a paragraph in Wikipedia?

And what happens to poets when we can only think in one paragraph?

And Kindle? Pulleeeze. Try passing your Kindle "book" to your son or daughter. I know of someone who was reading a bio of Edna St. Vincent Millay. Her friend expressed interest in the book. The first person used a kitchen knife to cut the book roughly in half. She let her friend read the part that she'd already read; she kept the part that she hadn't yet read.

Try doing that with Kindle! But Kindle does play into our one-paragraph-at-a-time thinking. I guess it's supposed to be - I dunno, businesslike?

Thanks for hanging out for a few. Love your thoughts.

BTW, wonder if Borders will be having a sale?