Although the playwright Tennessee Williams wrote several of his best works while living in the Big Easy, aka New Orleans, our recent trip there has us thinking otherwise.
- It is very hot and humid and difficult to focus on anything besides staying cool.
- There are no book stores. We asked the concierge at the large Riverwalk mall where we could find a bookstore. Nothing in central New Orleans. She wanted to send us over the Mississippi River to one of the only remaining Barnes and Nobles bookstores in the region. Clearly not an indigenous culture of readers here in NOLA.
- Why write a book if there are no readers? Rather sobering and made us think about why we are choosing the media material book to communicate our JCP ideas. Is there a future for books? Will people reach to a book for new ideas and new learning? Or Google it?
It’s a fair question. What do the users want? A book to hold and be able to fold and write in the pages? An electronic book contains the same content yet it is different. With search engines we a have vast amount of information at our fingertips, immediately.
Another attentive concierge at the Riverwalk mall, after listening to our conversation, added helpfully that there is no bookstore in downtown New Orleans, but there is still a library! Whew.
I guess we were a little amused and relieved. Though later we asked ourselves why we still want or need books, we when have Kindles, PDFs, audio books and all the other fruits of the digital age.