may29

Call Me Old-Fashioned, But It's Never a Good Day to Burn Books

Posted by Scalzi about 1 year ago | Permalink | Comments (4)

This used bookstore owner had too many books that he couldn’t sell – so he tried giving them away to libraries and thrift stores, but they didn’t want them, either. “So he’s burning them instead:”http://www.cnn.com/2007/US/05/28/book.burning.ap/index.html

Wayne began burning his books protest what he sees as society’s diminishing support for the printed word.

“This is the funeral pyre for thought in America today,” Wayne told spectators outside his bookstore as he lit the first batch of books…

“After slogging through the tens of thousands of books we’ve slogged through and to accumulate that many and to have people turn you away when you take them somewhere, it’s just kind of a knee-jerk reaction,” he said. “And it’s a good excuse for fun.”

Okay, you know what? That’s just stupid. I feel the same way about burning books that lots of people feel about burning flags: I find it offensive and morally reprehensible (I’m not big on burning flags in protest, either, come to think of it). Burning books is what you do when you want to kill thought, not when you want to protest its absence. I’m sorry this dude couldn’t clear out unwanted inventory, but having a book barbecue isn’t the way to do it.

Grumble grumble.

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Comments

  1. uselessness' Buddy Iconuselessness

    Posted about 1 year ago

    I guess I take a more existential stance. A book is just a bunch of bound paper; a flag is just a piece of cloth. I won’t follow the flag analogy any further because that’s opening a political can of worms that isn’t worth discussing here. However, with books, it’s the content that matters, not the pages themselves. I look forward to the day when e-ink and digital tablets replaces traditional books, provided we can secure all the old content in the new medium. Don’t get me wrong, paper books have a certain tactile and sensory niceness, and historical value worth preservation. Ultimately though, I don’t get upset at what this guy did. Except that maybe he should have recycled all that paper.

  2. Mary Robinette Kowal's Buddy IconMary Robinette Kowal

    Posted about 1 year ago

    Ugh. I read about this elsewhere and was so pissed off by it. I mean, the guy clearly didn’t try very hard to give away his books. I mean libraries and thrift stores are the wrong places—prisons, sending them overseas to the military, freecycle… Heck, just leaving boxes on the street would work. And recycling too.

  3. Annajane's Buddy IconAnnajane

    Posted about 1 year ago

    My Dad was about to pop a vein when I saw him this weekend because his town - overnight - decided to close the local library until further notice:

    http://www.townonline.com/saugus/homepage/x1918749870

  4. Robotech_Master's Buddy IconRobotech_Master

    Posted about 1 year ago

    Yeah, the fellow calls it a “protest.” But when you get right down to it, it’s really more of a publicity stunt. According to people local to KC I ’ve heard from, the store really didn’t have a good location, any parking, much floor space, or a very good selection of books available—and there’s a Half Price books nearby with more parking and better floor space.

    And here by burning a bunch of books that he would probably otherwise have just tossed in a dumpster, this particular bookstore owner gets mentioned in hundreds of papers. Pretty slick move on that guy’s part, as centuries of history have hardwired us to react in something akin to horror at the idea of burning books when we probably wouldn’t bat an eye at just tossing them. I can guarantee you several orders of magnitude more books than that guy is burning are “stripped” and dropped in bookstore dumpsters every month.

    On the one hand, I have to admire the guy’s chutzpah. On the other, I have a hard time seeing what the big deal is about burning ‘em instead of just tossing ‘em.

    In a larger sense, though, I think the writing is on the wall for used bookstores; people are becoming savvy to the fact that the Internet has a much better selection of both new and used, and they don’t have to spend the gas and time to browse through shelves that might not even contain what they want.