Perishability of words

A couple of weeks ago, I shopped for one last time at Durham’s Book Exchange. The Book Exchange is a local bookstore that appears to have been selling books almost from the time that people first settled in what has become Durham, NC. Now, competition from chains and online retailers has caused this local institution, in an all too familiar story, to close shop.

The Book Exchange in order to liquidate its inventory featured large paper bags that an individual could fill with his or selections for the incredibly low price of ten dollars, something under forty cents a book. The deal was simply too good to skip.

The next day, I found myself reflecting on the number of words printed in the thousands of their remaining books. If on average, a book in their inventory has eighty thousand words, then twelve thousand five hundred of their books contain a billion words. In its heyday, the Book Exchange must have held billions of words.

Dust and must permeate the Book Exchange. The hundreds of millions, perhaps billions, of words that remain mostly feel unwanted. With many copyrights in the early 1980s and before, the knowledge found in many of those books is now out of date, scholars having updated, revised, or abandoned the opinions and analyses expressed therein. Even tastes in fiction have largely changed, leaving novels, plays, and poems in want of new owners.

In the past several years, I have read with interest several reports that major newspapers are facing consistently decreasing ad revenues. Several formerly important newspapers have recently declared bankruptcy. People increasingly turn to the internet for news.

Amazon this month announced the launch of a new, slimmer version of the Kindle, its electronic book reader. Only 1% of all books are now available in electronic format. However, experts anticipate that number will dramatically increase the next few years.

Some years ago, the waste in printing the lengthy items that I received electronically to aid my reading of them disturbed me; I intentionally began to cultivate the habit of reading those items on my computer screen. I found that this practice was both ecologically more responsible and simplified note taking.

My ruminations about words prompted my recollection of this verse from Ecclesiastes, “The more words, the more vanity, so how is one the better?” (6:11) In this electronic age, words seem even more transitory, more elusive, perhaps more vain, than in print. Yet even when Ecclesiastes was written, words had proliferated to the point that they became easy to trivialize, easy to ignore. Finding meaning in life may be more difficult in this ocean of words than ever before. Certainly choosing what to read and what to ignore is more challenging.