Wondering Wednesdays

Wondering Wednesdays is a new feature I’m introducing here at the blog.  Monday Miracles, Tuesday Tips and Thankful Thursdays having been so helpful in providing a little structure for coming up with ideas.  With a Friday Finding appearing last week, it seemed like Wednesday could have a theme, too.

I started out thinking it might be Wednesday’s Woes (and we may detour into that some weeks), but it seemed a little less woeful to devote this post to things about which I am wondering.

This Wednesday, I am wondering about book sales.

When I was a kid, I loved my school fair every year.  It wasn’t the rides or the goldfish toss or the occasional celebrity appearance by Batman.

It was the book sale.

Tables and tables of used books set out in the cafeteria at five for a quarter or something insane like that.

I would spend hours looking through them, and then I would buy armloads.

And I am wondering what is going to happen to used book sales now that we are all transitioning to Kindles and iPads and Nooks and eReaders of all shapes and descriptions?

In the last few years, I have noticed fewer and fewer shelves of books at flea markets and street fairs.  Thrift stores still have them.  The library periodically (no pun intended) does a fundraiser of a book sale.

Aren’t they going to run out of material?  Won’t books–actual hard copy books–known rather snidely these days as “dead tree books”–become so rare that they will no longer be available at a quarter apiece?  Will those terrifically musty, dusty stores–where you take in a stack of old paperbacks and get store credit of one-fourth the cover price to be applied to new stacks of old paperbacks you can purchase at one-half the cover price–will they just disappear from lack of product to sell?  What about the “Take One, Leave One” shelves at marinas all up and down the Intercoastal Waterway?

I like my Kindle.  It sure makes it easier to travel with plenty of reading material.  Mine uses eInk and no back-light, and it is easy on the eyes.  I really like it.

But I can’t read it in the bathtub without worrying about dropping it, I can’t lend a book to a friend, I can’t sell those I’ve finished at a yard sale, and I will never be thrilled to discover the one Mr. & Mrs. North murder mystery I don’t own in a cardboard box in the back of  garage.

Win something, lose something.

I’m wondering if we are ahead.