A magic lost

So yesterday I went to the bookstore. This was notable in the fact that on the whole it was a disapointing and frustrating experience.

As a kid some of my fondest memories where when Mom would take me to Schulers and I would browse the book racks. Here was where I met some of my favorite authors. Robin Hobb, Robert Jordan, Terry Goodkind, Tad Williams, Margaret Weiss and Tracy Hickman to name a few. I remeber strolling down the ailes of books, pulling out ones with interesting art work, or intriguing titles. To browse through the book flap or the back of the book to see if the story would grip me. It was exciting to find a new author this way. To fall in love with their books, and to return and buy the rest of the books writen by them. It was exciting and sometimes a gamble. But perhaps this was all part of the fun.

However, this past weekend all of that was lost. In part I blame amazon.com. It truly has changed how I shop. No longer do i just pick up any book and try it out. I find myself seeking out reviews and other peoples opinion before purchasing the book. Before I try out a new author I find myself critically examining what people say about their works. Also, all their books are right there at my fingertips. Once I decide on a new author all their works are right there, I can go all the way back to their earliest works and start at the beginning. There is no wondering if it is in stock, it almost always is in one way or another. There is no need to search endlessly through racks of books, they are all but a click away.

Compare this then to the bookstore, Borders that I went to. I was looking for "The Red Wolf Consiracy" by Robert V. S. Redick, a book that I had recently found that looked intriguing, I figured while I was there I would check it out in printed form to see if it was any good. Perhaps read the back cover, to flip through the book before deciding to purchase it. So I went to the rack but I could not find the book. I found its recently published sequal "The Ruling Sea" but not "The Red Wolf Consiracy" for some reason it wasn't in stock. So then I searched around more, but quickly got confused and frustrated with their system. I found books by the authors in two and in some cases three different spots on the rack. In many cases only the most recent works of the authors were stocked in one spot. Some had the earlier books in a second location, if you searched hard enough to find it. Most though, if you wanted the first book in their series you were out of luck finding it on the shelfs. Similarly I was interested in "Tigana" by Guy Gavriel Kay, but couldnt find it, as it is one of his earlier work, but only his most recent two or three books were stocked. It was frustrating to say the least.

Perhaps the worst though was when I went searching for a book for Caleb. Two the authors that i read, Brandon Sanderson and Tad Williams also write childerns books, such that I though would be appropriate for Caleb. So I searched in the kids section. They weren't there. I stumbled into "young adult" but they werent there. Finaly at about the time I was giving up trying to find where his books would be located, I stumbled across a section called "independent readers" where I finnaly found one of the books I was looking for. But this section wasn't in the kids section, wasn't in the young adults, it was in a third section only peripherally related to the other two.

But I digress. At the end of the day, I realized that book stores had lost their magic for me. No longer can I just go there and browse for books, I have to search and consider. Not finding the book you are looking for is too big of a let down. While I would never want to give up the conveniences of amazon.com, I still lament the loss of those childhood moments of browsing through the book racks, of taking chances on new books, and of getting Mom to pay for them all.