Happy Days and Sad Partings

I like to think that if we are what we eat, then we dream what we read. Our word diets contain the same food groups of fats, proteins, and carbohydrates in the corresponding mental mush of work emails, Facebook status updates, and (if we are lucky) the occasional well written article. The past few weeks some of the better writers I mentally chew on pronounced their joy of the Kindle. Amazon recently extended their offering to the iPhone. Since I am sort of making my living from that device I thought I would give it a try.

It changes everything.

There is a tendency to inflate the importance of new technology (especially from marketers since hype leads to sales), and often in the aftermath you realize for instance that a new online pet store isn’t going to be revolutionary. But occasionally things do live up to their promise. When I look at the combination of the tech that has come out the last few years - the iPhone and the Kindle - people are going to laugh about how connected we thought we were in the aught ‘s in the same way that we perhaps should have not been so impressed with our dial up speed in 1999, a 30 meg hard drive in 1989, or the Fonz in 1979. Our future selves will look back and laugh at the time when we didn’t carry our entire library around with us. Soon we will.

My stack of books that I really mean to read is being replaced with free downloaded first chapters that I really intend to read. My apartment has enough clutter of hardcover cairns, that the decorating effect alone is worth the price. But what is more impressive is that having Kindle on the iPhone has returned a joy of reading to me. Okay the joy has always been there, but what it adds is the convenience of reading while waiting for a bus or for a table. Reading alone in a restaurant looks quite sad to an outside observer, but if I flip through my cell phone, it could look to that person that I must be really important with tons of messages. I might be as cool as the Fonz (I do share his first name).

Not that there won’t be casualties of my literary shift, and last week I went to see some of the carnage. Stacey’s, the wonderful downtown book store, is closing. It was a technical book lover’s dream. Some of my happiest afternoons when I was fresh out of undergraduate was to go to its other branch in Silicon Valley with a college buddy and pour over new masterworks like Tog on Interface, Inside Mac Volume 1, and Numerical Recipes in C . We would eat cookie dough and drink Mountain Dew beforehand. The sugary jitters perhaps enhanced our eagerness, but the place was a heaven for nerds to like to read.

It closed a while back, but I kept going to the one in San Francisco. I used it as a career barometer; I treated the number of books as votes as to which technologies to explore. Java started with a bang. HTML seeped in. Design Patterns soon got its own case. During the tech boom, the computer section covered almost 2/3rds of the top floor, and while the venture funds provided the cash fuel for these companies, the roadmap/travelogue of where to go and how to build was being sold in places like Stacey’s.

The last few years the size of the computer section shrank. It wasn’t just that people were using less tech (though a good portion of people who actually need to know how to build things started being hired abroad instead of the Bay Area), but the rise of the technical wiki made the information that was published in a book obsolete by the time it hit the bookshelves. Knowledge became more democratic; a great technical writer (like Fred Brooks, Jon Bently, Daiman Conway, and Brian Kernighan) could not keep up with the communities that formed and edited themselves. The writing isn’t nearly as good, but the information is far more vast.

The store was almost empty of books when I visited, and the remaining ones weren’t as tone deaf like for instance Dow 36,000 as random like Good Places to Scuba Dive in Mexico. The bookshelves were for sale as well, and seeing the sturdy wooden cases made me tearful knowing that Stacey’s was elegant all the way down to its bones. Still I didn’t buy any of the shelves. I realized that I don’t have as much of a need for them I used to as anything other than kindling. It is a sad lament but comes with an awareness that I do need to keep up with a changing world even if that means I can't go to my favorite store to figure out how.