The end of bookstores.

A few weeks ago, with a small footnote by way of introduction, The New York Times Book Review published revamped best-seller lists that, for the first time, separately reflect the sale of e-books. The new lists were inevitable—e-books made up about 10 percent of book sales in 2010, and that number is rapidly rising. You had to read between the lines to find the real news, but there it was: To the growing list of things that will be extinct in our children's world, we can now add bookstores. Does it surprise us? Should we care?

There were booksellers in ancient Greece and Rome and the medieval Islamic world, but it was not until after the advent of printing that the modern bookstore was born. In sixteenth-century England, a license from the king was needed to print a book, and those books considered distasteful by the monarchy were suppressed; to trade in such outlawed books was a punishable offense, and yet there were booksellers and readers willing to take the risk, and these books were sold and read. The bookseller, in other words, was, from the beginning, an innately independent figure, in spirit if not by law. As the availability and variety of printed books increased, the bookseller became a curator: one who selects, edits, and presents a collection that reflects his tastes. To walk into a modern-day bookstore is a little bit like studying a single photograph out of the infinite number of photographs that cold be taken of the world: It offers the reader a frame. Within that frame, she can decide what she likes and doesn't like, what is for her and not for her. She can browse, selecting this offering and rejecting that, and in this way she can begin to assemble a program of taste and self.

The Internet has co-opted the word “browse” for its own purposes, but it’s worth pointing out the difference between browsing in a virtual realm and browsing in the actual world. Depending on the terms entered, an Internet search engine will usually come up with hundreds, thousands, or millions of hits, which a person can then skate through, clicking when she sees something that most closely echoes her interest. It is a curious quality of the Internet that it can be composed of an unfathomable multitude and, at the same time, almost always deliver to the user the bits that feed her already-held interests and confirm her already-held beliefs. It points to a paradox that is, perhaps, one of the most critical of our time: To have access to everything may be to have nothing in particular.

After all, what good does this access do if we can only find our way back to ourselves, the same selves, the same interests, the same beliefs over and over? Is what we really want to be solidified, or changed? If solidified, then the Internet is well-designed for that need. But, if we wish to be changed, to be challenged and undone, then we need a means of placing ourselves in the path of an accident. For this reason, the plenitude may narrow the mind. Amazon may curate the world for you, but only by sifting through your interests and delivering back to you variations on your well-rehearsed themes: Yes, I do love Handke! Yes, I had been meaning to read that obscure play by Thomas Bernhard! A bookstore, by contrast, asks you to scan the shelves on your way to looking for the thing you had in mind. You go in meaning to buy Hemingway, but you end up with Homer instead. What you think you like or want is not always what you need. A bookstore search inspires serendipity and surprise.

It’s a revealing experiment to put side by side bookstores and the Internet—or even just Google Books, which now offers 15 million of the world’s 130 million unique books. Both the Internet and Google Books strive to assemble the known world. The bookstore, on the other hand, strives to be a microcosm of it, and not just any microcosm but one designed—according to the principles and tastes of a “gatekeeper”—to help us absorb and consider the world itself. That difference is everything. To browse online is to enter into a search that allows one to sail, according to an idiosyncratic route formed out of split-second impulses, across the surface of the world, sometimes stopping to randomly sample the surface, sometimes not. It is only an accelerated form of tourism. To browse in a bookstore, however, is to explore a highly selective and thoughtful collection of the world—thoughtful because hundreds of years of thinkers, writers, critics, teachers, and readers have established the worth of the choices. Their collective wisdom seems superior, for these purposes, to the Web’s “neutrality,” its know-nothing know-everythingness.