I felt a little sad about the closure of the last Times Bookstores outlet in Singapore. But just a little. I was also glad to see the bookstore chain leave the scene with dignity and pride.
When I was in primary and secondary school, I would spend hours before or after classes browsing magazines and books at Times. I will not fib and say that I learned so much about the world from my bookworm activities – I was mostly reading tech magazines, horror fiction and admiring the ultra-heavy software training guides.
Anyway, you’d think that I would be sentimental about the ongoing death of bookstores. No, quite the contrary.
Bookstores have served us well for hundreds of years, but the medium for reading has moved to digital (despite the protests of book lovers about “the smell of paper”.). I bought the Amazon Kindle e-reader in 2010 and even though it had a dinky small screen without backlighting, I managed to finish Stephen King’s The Dark Tower series on it (7 books, 1.35 million words), as well as The Lord of The Rings (3 books, 480k words).
Not the most reading pleasant experience then, but I began telling everyone that the print medium was going to get displaced by digital. People didn’t believe me because the technologies were too primitive in 2010. Today, we have fricking sharp displays on our devices and computer monitors (4K OLED is the bomb), you can buy anything online, and most content is published digitally now. I don’t ask my NTU students to go to the library to photocopy books because I already screenshotted the pages for them.
I have one big concern though – where are parents going to buy children’s books? Will children’s books still be published in print? Despite my penchant for all things digital, I still advocate for minimal screen time for toddlers and young children.
E-ink readers are the answer here, but their development has been lagging for years. I am waiting for my Remarkable Paper Pro e-ink device to arrive. It will read PDFs well on a large e-ink display, but it has no access to Kindle or Overdrive ebook platforms. I have Dr Suess’ The Cat In The Hat in my Kindle library, but I would much prefer to show the printed version to young kids.
Thank you, Times, Borders, Book Depository and MPH. You were a big part of my childhood and you bowed out gracefully like the gentle closing of a hardcover book.