In the midst of this e-book revolution, fans of physical books can take heart, I think, from the story of vinyl. Because I can't resist putting things in (loose and rusty) Heideggerian terms, here goes: vinyl dropped from the center to the margin of our culture. With the advent of cassettes and CDs, and the resulting loss of everyday expertise in vinyl and record players by most non-audiophile folks, the vinyl object and the record player themselves became what Heidegger might call "present-at-hand" for most: more object than tool, bulky, time-intensive, involving the placement (and maintenance) of a needle, the flipping of the record, and so on. There's no track reordering without a bunch of work; there's no shuffle between songs on separate albums without even more work.
Of course, that's what those (like me--guilty as charged) who have become vinyl revivalists began to miss after a while. And I don't think, as others have claimed, that it was pure nostalgia. It's a return to music as a physically produced medium, rather than an invisible, abstract, one-click shuffle on a computer. It's like actually watching bow put to strings on a violin, rather than just hearing the result. And it preserves the integrity of the album as a single piece of music. Now record players are back in major music stores and as part of stereo systems (they'd all but diseappeared, except as DJ units, at their lowest point).
Books are busy falling to the margins now, but I think they may be picked up again by newer generations who grow up doing the bulk of their reading on computers and e-book readers, not just barely kept in business by dyed-in-the-wool bibliophiles like me. The only thing that scares me a bit is that books don't have the same degree of inconvenience as vinyl does, so they might, paradoxically, be victims of their own relative efficiency. For instance, I don't see videotapes ever coming back; they certainly seem a tad out of date, but there's not enough of a difference between the experience of putting a videotape into a VCR and playing it and putting in a DVD (or playing a movie on your computer) to create a demand for videotapes. VCRs just seem slightly worse, less efficient and lower-quality. There will be videotape collectors, insofar as there are collectors of anything, but there ain't gonna be a new videotape industry, as there now is with vinyl and hopefully will remain with books. In the end, I think there is indeed enough of a difference between sitting down with a physical volume, with the smell of its paper and the look of its printed words, among other lovely physical minutiae, and sitting down with an e-book, that there will always be a market for well-made, high-end editions, broadsheets, and the like, probably by small and academic presses, much in the same way that small music labels put out vinyl editions. But that could just be my old-fashionedness talking.
In any case, now I'd like to broaden my horizons a bit, and move from a pretty pragmatic discussion of music, video, and book forms, to the idea of inconvenience, or presence-at-hand, in general. Plus hipsters. Because I think those concepts are what more extreme hipsters (the word "hipster" itself is beginning to seem more like a present-at-hand, rather than a ready-at-hand, word, these days, to the point where I don't like to use it but can't find a better alternative) are after, more than the rest of us: a complete presence-at-hand lifestyle. I don't think anyone considers seeking out the vintage, the odd, the kitchy as distasteful if it's done to a moderate degree; it's an essential human instinct to be collectors, to reach for what's at the margins of our culture in order to define ourselves as unique people or subgroups. But there's also an instinct to say "fuck off" to those at the extreme, those who won't lower themselves to the everyday, shallow coping behavior that is nonetheless essentially human: those who wear sunglasses at night, who just can't have a standard haircut or new, non-destroyed jeans, who won't go to large chain stores even if they're the cheapest place to find something they desperately need, who refuse to (non-ironically) like a new Avril Lavigne song even when it's good because it's corporate music (damn it, when are we all gonna join hands and sing "Girlfriend"?)
Life can't all be presence-at-hand without a trust fund, in other words.
But as I've said, I like my vinyl, not exclusively, but for my all-time favorite records (I just got REM's first two albums on 180-gram!), and I like my thick-paged, boutique-edition physical books. And you can bet if I ever live in a place where me and my friends can have lofts, we'll send messages to each other on the legs of thoroughbred pigeons. It'll be like having thirty iPhones that poop and mate.
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