Refuge & Prospect in 2012

Q: Does Russo's sell eReaders?
A: No, we'll let the other guys sell you the machine. Our expertise is books, so come to us for great e-book selections, prices and recommendations.

This little q&a appeared in an e-newsletter from Russo's Books, Bakersfield, Calif., last week. I bought the e-book edition of Arguably by Christopher Hitchens from them a couple of days ago. That seems to be how it works for me now. I purchased John Berger's Bento's Sketchbook from Greenlight Bookstore, Brooklyn, N.Y., last month after receiving an e-mail notice about something else entirely. I wanted the book, and there they virtually were.

"People hold books in a special way--like they hold nothing else," Berger writes. "They hold them not like inanimate things but like ones that have gone to sleep. Children often carry toys in the same manner." I don't hold my e-reader that special way; it's just a tool, maybe even a toy. My home is engulfed in traditional books, which I do handle with care. There's room for both. All part of the adaptation process.

Many of the communications from indies that hit my inbox during this holiday season were inviting their communities to buy e-books for new devices (and old, of course); to explore the new IndieBound Reader app; or to take advantage of e-knowledgeable booksellers on the sales floor as well as in special "get to know your e-reader" sessions hosted by the stores.

Independent booksellers are in the e-game now, exploring the potential of, and finding their place in, this evolving digital book landscape just as they have faced every other challenge that has come their way over the decades.

Maybe "landscape" is the right way to think about it after all. In The Experience of Landscape (1975), Jay Appleton introduced his Prospect-Refuge theory, seen through the lens of our oldest instincts for survival as applied to our aesthetic experience of landscape.

In the prehistoric sense of the term, when we were in caves our survival depended upon how far we were willing to venture out on the open savannah to hunt and gather. It was all about balance. Stay in the cave too long and you died. Go too far away from it and you were prey. The survivors (our great-grandparents to the nth power) found the right balance between the two and eventually became, among other things, landscape architects and booksellers.

A bookstore traditionally provides the temporary refuge of quiet and a cozy space. It offers limitless prospect within the pages of books on the shelves. But I'm intrigued by another way in which Prospect-Refuge theory can be applied to the book trade. The best indie booksellers--the ones who fended off any number of predators on the retail savannah--have always been willing to venture a little farther from their refuge to scout the terrain for opportunities to survive... and to evolve.

Consider a digital ancestor of e-books. During the mid-1990s, Voyager introduced a collection of interactive multimedia CD-ROM products, ranging widely from The Complete Maus and Poetry in Motion to Laurie Anderson's Puppet Motel and The Residents: Freak Show. I was reminded of these during the holidays when I happened to hear Schubert's "Trout Quintet" on the radio. One of the first Voyager discs I tried was an interactive version of this piece.

At the bookstore where I was working then, we carried a full display of Voyager products near the POS counter, as well as a demo computer to showcase them. We were booksellers, but some of us also became CD-ROM handsellers. I don't recall how many we sold, but having them on the sales floor sent a message to our customers that the bookshop was as intrigued by prospect as it was by refuge.

That was at least 15 years ago and the basic rule hasn't changed. The cave feels safe, but we also know we must explore the digital savannah, where some of the fiercest retail predators are roaming about. The best indies are not prey, however; they still look ahead more often than they glance furtively over their shoulders.

"At times, it can feel as if the whole planet is joyriding in somebody else's Porsche, at ninety miles per hour, around blind curves," Pico Iyer wrote in his book The Global Soul: Jet Lag, Shopping Malls, and the Search for Home. That's another e-book I bought last year. It was published in 2000, which now makes his message ancestral rather than dystopian.--Published by Shelf Awareness, issue #1637.