I read with interest Larry McMurtry’s Books: A Memoir (Simon & Schuster, 2008), but from my point of view, I would be lying if I said I thought the book had very much to offer.

The book’s 259 pages are divided into 109 chapters. I was able to read the whole thing in six or seven sittings. It is an easy read, but only because the book doesn’t say very much. I found the stories rarely engaging and never very deep. They were full of obscure book titles and the names of “famous” book dealers.

Much of this should not be a surprise, since the book is about one person’s fascination with books as objects, not books as containers of information and knowledge. From page 38 of my edition:

Most young dealers of the Silicon Chip Era regard a reference library as merely a waste of space. Old-timers on the West Coast, such as Peter Howard of Serendipity Books in Berkeley or Lou and Ben Weinstein of the (recently closed) Heritage Books Shop in Los Angeles, seem to retain a fondness of reference books that goes beyond the practical. Everything there is to know about a given volume may be only a click away, but there are still a few of us who’d rather have the book than the click. A bookman’s love of books is a love of books, not merely the information in them.

Herein lies the root of my real problem with the book, it shares with the reader one person’s chronology of a love of books and book selling. It describes various used bookstores and give you an idea of what it is like to be a book dealer. Unfortunately, I believe McMurtry misses the point about books. They are essentially a means to an end. A tool. A medium for the exchange of ideas. The ideas they contain and the way they contain them are the important thing. There are advantages & disadvantages to the book as a technology, and these advantages & disadvantages ought not be revered or exaggerated to dismiss the use of books or computers.

I also think McMurtry’s perception of libraries, which seems to be commonly held in and outside my profession, points to one of librarianship’s pressing issues. From page 221:

But they [computers] don’t really do what books do, and why should they usurp the chief function of a public library, which is to provide readers access to books? Books can accommodate the proximity of computers but it doesn’t seem to work the other way around. Computers now literally drive out books from the place they should, by definition, be books’ own home: the library.

Is the chief function of a public library to provide readers access to books? Are libraries defined as the “home” of books? Such a perception may have been more or less true in an environment where data, information, and knowledge were physically manifested, but in an environment where the access to information is increasingly digital the book as a thing is not as important. Books are not central to the problems to be solved.

Can computers do what books do? Yes and no. Computers can provide access to information. They make it easier to “slice and dice” their content. They make it easier to disseminate content. They make information more findable. The information therein is trivial to duplicate. On the other hand, books require very little technology. They are relatively independent of other technologies, and therefore they are much more portable. Books are easy to annotate. Just write on the text or scribble in the margin. A person can browse the contents of a book much faster than the contents of electronic text. Moreover, books are owned by their keepers, not licensed, which is increasingly the case with digitized material. There are advantages & disadvantages to both computers and books. One is not necessarily better than the other. Each has their place.

As a librarian, I had trouble with the perspectives of Larry McMurtry’s Books: A Memoir. It may be illustrative of the perspectives of book dealers, book sellers, etc., but I think the perspective misses the point. It is not so much about the book as much as it is about what the book contains and how those contents can be used. In this day and age, access to data and information abounds. This is a place where libraries increasingly have little to offer because libraries have historically played the role of middleman. Producers of information can provide direct access to their content much more efficiently than libraries. Consequently a different path for libraries needs to be explored. What does that path look like? Well, I certainly have ideas about that one, but that is a different essay.