On Online Shopping

The beauty of shopping is in the hunt. Stalking shoes on clearance racks and flushing out a purse from the bargain bin is an occupation that many saner individuals can’t appreciate. For them, the perfect shopping experience consists of finding the sought after item immediately, and returning home before the ink dries on the charge slip. Those who hate to shop must surely love the Internet. Stick a few words into a search box, and bingo, the item you need is right in front of you, no trolling necessary. Those who love to shop must love the Internet too. It brings you riches you could never unearth at the mall. But one of my favorite live shopping activities has no comparison online, and that is the experience of used book shopping.

The library system of my new habitat has announced that they will no longer be holding their twice yearly used booksales. Instead, they have been shipping those same books to Boulder, Colorado where they are sorted, priced, and entered into a database. That database sits underneath the shopping facade of none other than amazon.com. As we had just missed the large Seattle public library sale, the revelation that we would also miss out on our own library’s sale was heart-breaking. How does one duplicate the experience of a used booksale through the Internet? If it were even possible to scan all the pages would that make up for any of it?

It seems hopeless. The beauty of the used booksale is that you never know what you are looking for. But you know you’ll find it. No search term delivers that to you, and no browser matches the tactile experience.