In five years the penis will become obsolete.
Several people have already mentioned bookstores. So I’ll talk about video stores. It’s the same appeal as a bookstore. Looking around for things you haven’t seen and weren’t even aware of. Sure you can get movies from Netflix or a Redbox but you can also get books from Amazon or Walmart - it’s just not the same experience.
It’s weird for me because I’ve lived through the whole cycle of the business. I can remember back in the early eighties when video stores were very rare and I had to drive almost twenty miles to rent a movie.
Then home video caught on and video stores were everywhere. I think the mid-sized town I lived in had a couple of dozen different places where I could rent a movie.
And now it’s on its way out. There’s one video store left in the town I live in. If that goes out of business, I’d be back to driving twenty miles to the nearest video store.
Another book lover here.
Another map lover here.
They still have them. They just include iPod docks now. Can’t decide if I want to 
or :rolleyes: over it. I guess it depends on how much you want to be attached to iThingies in order to be able to use such devices.
I would hate to think of paper maps leaving. My job is somewhat map-centric at times, and when it is map centric, it is often urgent that information be tracked quickly on said maps. We use some fairly sophisticated computer programs with maps, networked interfaces, etc. We also use a big ass printer to print off massive paper maps with things like building numbers, locations of utility and power lines, etc., which we keep on hand just in case the computer stops working for some reason.
I wonder if there is a market for an on-demand map printing service? Since the alternative is trying to get an affordable plotter printer…
I’ll see your Sleuth of Baker Street, and raise you Sam the Record Man. (And as a Torontonian, Le Ministre, you know exactly what I’m talking about.) If it was ever recorded, anywhere, anytime, there was an excellent chance that Sam had it. Heck, Sam was so well versed in music that if you saw him in the store–which was entirely possible; I met him there on many occasions–all you had to do was hum him a bit of what you were looking for, and he’d tell you who did it, and where to find it. So could many of his staff.
ITunes, Amazon, and their ilk cannot hold a candle to Sam and his staff. (How can you hum a snippet to a website?) Sadly, he and they and that record store are gone now. 
If any of you booklovers happen to like “Fantasy, Science Fiction and subculture” and find yourselves in Barcelona, please take a trip to Gigamesh (no, it has no l; it’s a reference to a printing technique). One of the reasons I’d like to work in Barcelona is having that place handy to take bigger bits of my budget than I should let it… About half their stock is foreign-language, mostly English.
One of the items on which I have dibs is Dad’s school atlas. I remember him teaching me world history over those maps which still showed the Baltic nations - and laughing sooo hard when years later those maps became current again.
I suppose I shouldn’t surprised to find other bibliophiles here.
Actually, I would have been surprised if I HADN’T found such here.
But, the proclivity to a love of maps, I didn’t expect.
I collect maps of all kinds.
Weird how we coalesce out of the billions on the Internet, eh?
I’m with you, though it took me a bit longer to completely embrace the Kindle. Nowadays it’s my first choice for anything but (as you mention) books heavy in photographs and illustrations. I find myself getting annoyed when a book I want is only available in hard copy.
I, for one, don’t miss physical bookstores overmuch. It’s fun to browse in the one independent locally-owned store in town because they carry a lot of local stuff that I don’t see elsewhere. But other than the few times a year I pop in there, I’d always rather buy online. I can’t read reviews at physical bookstores, nor can I get the first chapter free to see if I’d like the book. I can’t double-check if this author is the same guy who wrote that book that I read last year and hated/loved. I can’t easily see if Book X is the first or the third in the series, and I can’t press a button and put it on my wish list if I don’t want to buy it right now.
So yeah, I think electronic books and Internet booksellers are innovating brick-and-mortar bookstores out of existence. But in my mind, they are doing it because they are vastly superior, and that’s OK by me.
“Drove downtown in the rain 9:30 on a Tuesday night
Just to check out the late night record shop.
Call it impulsive, call it compulsive, you can call it insane
When I’m surrounded I just can’t stop…” from Brian Wilson, by the Barenaked Ladies.
You know exactly which record shop they were talking about… I know it well; I worked next door to it in the much less iconic A and A Records. At the time I was there, late 1980s, A & A sold 30% of all the classical music sold in Canada at that location. (And that location of Sam’s probably sold another 40%!) I was that guy to whom someone would hum or whistle a tune or mumble something they’d heard announced on CBC. “Do you have Debussy’s ‘Afternoon at the Farm’?” “Do you have Aaron Couperin’s ‘Rite of Spring’?” (A tricky one - did he want Stravinsky’s ‘Rite of Spring’, Aaron Copeland’s ‘Appalachian Spring’ or some piece we didn’t know about by François Couperin? In the end, he went for ‘Appalachian Spring’ because he liked the cover art; if you were going to let it come down to that, that was probably the better of our three choices.) Everyone who worked there was there because of their love of music. Several friends learned the equivalent of a B. Mus. in Music History from reading the backs of record jackets.
We had a fellow named Lars who made it his job to watch the figure skating championships and write out all the pieces that had been skated to. Sure enough, the next week people would dribble in asking ‘Do you have that piece that Kurt Browning or Brian Orser used?’ Why, yes, let me check my notes…
We were working there for minimum wage, and no benefits other than the staff discount on albums, tapes and CDs. That staff discount (essentially, we paid cost for everything. It came to 50% off albums and 30% off CDs. Plus, being surrounded by the stuff all the time was a massive temptation.) and the permission to keep a stash until next payday was what kept us all there and the company knew it. I stayed on for a couple of years while I was singing in the COC chorus, blowing just about my whole A & A’s paycheck on recordings.
And Sam’s was, frankly, even better for the vinyl afficionado. A & A was the first store to go out of vinyl and exclusively sell CDs. Sam’s had a strategy where they would buy up the inventory of record stores that closed and even if it only made it to the $1.00 table, they still did well off it. Plus going through these obscure piles of deleted and discounted records - Oh, what a dusty, smelly Heaven it was!
No, iTunes is not the same at all. Never mind that I have to edit the information so everything gets filed properly. ("No, God damn it! Pollini may have performed this piece, but Chopin is the composer! Don’t file it under ‘Pollini’, for Christ’s sakes!) Never mind that everything is described in terms of when it was realeased for iTunes. (“2008, you say? Interesting, considering that singer died in 1978.”) The entire experience of shopping for music is missing.
Oh, I miss the days of keeping a tattered copy of Schwann’s and the Schwann’s Artist Guide under the counter! The heady smell of vinyl as you first sliced the plastic off. And the quality of the recording, the warmth of the vinyl sound. CDs had too much upper register sound for my tastes; I have a theory that original instruments recordings and CDs took off at the same time at least partly because that scrapy, whiny tone out of the period instruments matched the sound quality of the CD and so consumers thought it was good.
All of it sacrificed on the altars of the Gods of convenience…
sigh books, maps, physical music reproductions… and companies with a phone person instead of a voice jail.
This! The way things are going, I may have to change my username to “Jkelly-digital-image-on-a-small-screen-which-does-allow-for-interesting-manipulation-of-pan-zoom-and-sometimes-thematic-layers-but-which-lacks-the-aesthetic-pleasure-portable-versatility-and-sometimes-size-of-a-paper-map.”
Getting married in 5 years then?
I knew that some of the Kindle/Kobo/e-reader crowd would show up.
I really can’t judge; some of my friends have one and go on about it at great length. Rather like I did with the iPod, I’m waiting until they give one away free. (My iPod came free with the purchase of a MacBookPro in some sort of back to school promotion. It’s rather like the stories my mother-in-law tells about drug dealers giving free samples in the schoolyard to start your addiction.) Yes, I now use an iPod often; often enough that I replaced that first one when it stopped working a little over a year later. But it’s by no means my favourite way to listen to music…
Same with these e-readers - I’m sure I’ll end up getting one, I’m sure at some point I’ll have no choice because Author X’s latest book will only be available in an e-format, I’m even pretty sure I’ll like one when it finally happens to me. I just resent the fact that I prefer the thing that the e-reader is replacing, and that the thing I prefer is what’s on the endangered species list.
As for real books, I love them. I especially enjoy hand-crafted books, where the paper has a texture, where the fonts have been chosen for aesthetic beauty as well as legibility. I remember when the Giller prize winning book was something published by dear old Gaspereau Press, and there was no way they could keep up with the demand. It was eventually sorted out, but what an illustrative conflict between the fast food approach of our major bookstores and a publisher for whom the physical book is as important an aspect as the work of the writer.
No, I love being surrounded by physical books, as though my personality has created a shell out of the nacre of my curiosity. Entering someone’s library is as intimate as entering their bedroom.
Privacy - though we’ll have done a lot of that to ourselves.
I agree with this. We have a deal where keeping our land line is free for the next year, so in our push to save money everywhere, we won’t have to give it up yet. However, I see it coming and it makes me sad. The sound quality is infinitely better, it obviously never drops calls and it’s easier to use / hold.
And I love my cell phone, too. Just not for actually making or receiving any calls.
I’ll go with paper maps as well. I love my new technology, and have fallen head-over-heels in love with my iPad as an ereader, and have several map apps that I like, but there’s something missing in the presentation. I find it very hard to keep a sense of spatial relationships when looking at a digital map. I liken it to looking at a large wall map through a toilet paper tube. Everything’s there, but I lose sight of the larger picture, so to speak.
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I have to jump in here and say that Netflix in Canada is utter crap! Far fewer films than were ever available at really basic outlets, and in my neighbourhood, they’re up against Queen Video and Suspect Video, both of whom have a huge selection and are staffed by filmmakers/film students.
Netflix, on the other hand, is a place I go online when I think of a film that I think the kids should be allowed to see. (My 9 year old son is incredible at thinking up films that he shouldn’t be watching yet, so I’m still very involved in the process of picking and vetting what he watches.) Hey, what about this? tappety, tap - Netflix doesn’t have it. Oh, that made me think of this other! tappety, tap - nope, they don’t have that, either.
The other thing about Netflix in Canada, and I don’t know if this is true in other jurisdictions - you can set the parental controls so that it will only show/search for, say, G rated movies. That will also eliminate all the TV shows, as they show up as ‘unrated’. Same when you set it to PG, PG13 - it’s only when the parental controls are off that the kids can watch Buffy. Fwckin’ stupid!
The worst was the day when he was home sick and I thought, what the Hell, I’ll let him watch ‘Happy Gilmour’. No, of course Netflix doesn’t have it, but it did come up with something called ‘The Orgasm Diaries’ as suggestion number 5.
Yeah, I’ll be happily walking to Queen Video and Suspect Video for most of my films for the foreseeable future.
Same as many:
Book stores. Luckily a local used book/media store is thriving, yay for Jellybeans. I also miss my local Borders store.
Paper books. I have books in every room of the house. I don’t care if they’re not green, old-fashioned, etc. I love them. I trade books with a few friends, I love the smell of paper, I think a shelf-full of books enhances every room.
Yes I have a Kindle. Thought I would love it. Don’t.
Newspapers - I missed the local paper for a while, now I don’t. News is much, much more interactive and dynamic online. Same with most magazines.
Paper maps. I have a ton of them. Along with the passing of paper maps goes the passing of understanding how to take or give directions or how to navigate without a GPS. (I also have GPS and admit I love it. But still.)
This is going to sound curmudgeonly and “get off my lawn”-ish, but: I miss not being surrounded by people with mobile phones all the time. I miss going to a restaurant, or sitting on the bus, or at a movie, and not have people yelling into their phones. I miss being out with friends, and not have one of their phones ring and “sorry…I need to take this.” I know we can’t put the mobile phone genie back in the bottle, and I even have one myself, but…sometimes I wish they’d never been invented.