While reading this article I frequently felt really conflicted about how I view community and the implications that has for libraries and bookstores. One the one hand, I definitely think that the modern bookstore that literally sells the idea of community is somehow cheating us out of what real community is. Community should be a place where people come together, right? But in a bookstore chain few customers talk to each other, most read by themselves, buy something, and leave. The largest community interaction that they’re involved in is some possible small talk with the cashier, who probably doesn’t care anyway. Is this really what they are trying to pass off as fulfilling and meaningful? I was blown away by the bookstore industry when I came to Milwaukee and Madison for the first times, and I felt a jarring sense of displacement. I just did not feel comfortable searching for books in a chain store in a mall complex. There’s something about it that really turns me off, because I know that the only books that I will be willing to pay for-and they stock-are the classics, which are, anyways, free for me to use at the Memorial Library. But back to the idea of community. According to an ILS class I took, the first towns were trading centers, which to me shows an alternative definition of community. Is this idea of community really just founded upon a vital exchange of goods? Because if that is so, the library is selling some other, less historically correct version of community while the bookstore chains are selling the real thing, the real definition of a goods-based community. Which one is the real community? Perhaps it is too cliché to hate on the Barnes and Nobles of the world, but I don’t care. My ideal community involves people and books and no money, and meandering conversations and, my God, books that never made it on Oprah’s book list. So off to the library I go.
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