The digital age kind of depresses me

I've been thinking about this for the last few weeks as we have been discussing literature and writing in the digital age, and today we talked about it more in my Print Publishing class today and it made me kind of sad.

Remember the movie "You've Got Mail"? I love that movie. And as I watched it a few weeks ago, it made me sad to see the irony of it. Tom Hanks puts Meg Ryan's adorable neighborhood bookstore out of business with his book superstore a la Borders, but they still find love in the end. If they were to make a sequel to the movie it would now involve Hanks's huge bookstore declaring bankruptcy because of the "big bad" Amazon and the eReader revolution (and hopefully they still love each other).

I love the new technologies of today. Call me a traitor to the good old fashioned bookstore, but I love Amazon, I own a Kindle, and I love the modern resources there are to writing about literature like blogs and on-line forums. But I just wish that it were possible for me to still enjoy these things without Borders or Barnes and Noble to have to close stores or declare bankruptcy.

We talked about the future of print publishing today in my class, and it gave me a little hope for publishing. My favorite point of my Professor: novels still have a chance in print publishing because when you go to the beach and want your cheap reads to enjoy, are you going to take your fancy ipad and get sand all over it? I don't think so! What about giving books as gifts? Will people rather get a book electronically? That's an interesting thing to think about as well.

So I guess that we will just have to wait and see. In the meantime, I plan on going to Borders this week to purchase my beach read novels this week for my honeymoon (!!), and maybe buy another kindle book to read on the airplane over there. So it's win win, I guess.