Fifteen years ago, getting past the parking lot at Blockbuster’s Kahala store was a lesson in driving patience and avoidance of traffic hazards.
Now comes word that the video rental chain will remove its physical presence from the stand-alone building under the trailing edge of the H-1 freeway, another once-thriving business eclipsed by the whirlwind of technology.
Older folks might recall the exciting newness of being able to watch a movie at home in their jammies for a little more than the price of popcorn and Pepsi at theater concession stands.
Flopped on their couches, they could start and stop the video at will and enjoy the film without the chatter of others or the shushing and stink eyes from those who demand silence from opening credits to postlude.
They might remember developing a strategy for snapping up the latest releases, scanning the returns counter upon first entering the store and only then moving to the racks for less desirable offerings.
Netflix and online streaming have elbowed aside tangible entertainment for virtual products.
It’s not a bad thing. Convenience and ease certainly trump the time-consuming exercise of schlepping to a brick-and-mortar film depository for something to fill the vacant hours of leisure.
Some might disagree, like the 50-year-old Kaimuki man, a self-described “dinosaur” who told the Star-Advertiser that he likes the real thing, that he likes browsing.
The opportunities for book browsing will drop next year when down the street from Blockbuster, Barnes & Noble will withdraw from Kahala Mall, giving over its space to yet another discount clothing store.
Having driven out independent booksellers and its big-box counterpart, Borders Books, Barnes & Noble finds itself confronting the brawn of online booksellers, dominated by Amazon, and the swelling world of e-books.
Maybe the dinosaur label applies to me, too, but e-books haven’t captured my fancy, at least not yet. In time, when cardboard-and-paper publications disappear because the economics of printing, shipping and stocking further collapse profit-making, I may be forced to read words from a lighted screen.
But I will miss browsing. It is an adventure on its own, maybe not so much in ferreting around for a DVD, but definitely in looking for a book.
There’s a particular thrill in gliding past stacks to catch a title or cover design that intrigues, of opening to the first page and being enchanted by the first sentence.
More often than not, the gems I found didn’t receive attention in journals or reviews, didn’t rate notice from the Michiko Kakutanis of the literary media, which mostly feature known authors or ones who are marketed for buzz.
Online bookstores follow the mainstream pattern and their mechanisms aren’t suited to browsing. For one thing, they require choosing a category of books as specific as crafts, as broad and as vague as fiction and literature. The huge range of offerings is cumbersome and limiting, not good for browsing.
A bookstore cannot carry 500,000 titles in its memoirs and biography section as a website can, but if ease and convenience are the measure for browsers, it’s better in my book.
