The following text may have been generated by Optical Character Recognition, with varying degrees of accuracy. Reader beware!

12 - Orono Weekly Times Wednesday, October 13, 2010 Basic Black by Arthur Black Ode to the OED As sheer casual reading material, I still find the English Dictionary the most interesting book in our language. ~~Albert Jay Nock Do you Kindle? I don't. I'm a stubborn cuss who prefers the familiar heft and scent of a dead tree in my hands over a flickering, sleek and pricey space age lozenge. I like knowing that I can dog-ear pages in my book, scribble notes in the margins, highlight a passage that I want to remember, then stick the whole package in my back pocket, toss it over my shoulder into the back seat or even leave it behind on a bus and be only mildly inconvenienced. As for reading in the bathtub, soggy books can be dried out and read again. I'm pretty sure those space age lozenges aren't constructed to survive total immersion. But my reading habits, like the whole preceding argument, are irrelevant nowadays. I might as well be carolling the praises of gramophones or a stage coach franchise. As I write, Kindles, iPads and e-readers like them are gobbling up the reading market. Well, we need them don't we? To go with our BlackBerrys, iPhones, GPS's and electronic car fobs. Modern humankind just can't get enough gadgets. Makes you wonder what's in store for the book business as we know it. Consider: I just put out a book called A Chip off the Old Black. I think. Fact is, as I type, I'm still waiting to see my first copy from my publisher. Meanwhile, I check out Amazon.com and discover they're offering my book ­ at a 37% discount! How's a regular book seller supposed to compete? Amazon can slash prices like that because the company doesn't have the overhead a regular bookseller does. Amazon offers no costly downtown storefront window displays or cozy aisles staffed by friendly, knowledgeable staff. Amazon is a warehouse in the middle of nowhere. Its biggest expense is postage, which is peanuts compared to the rent and taxes and storage and salaries regular booksellers have to pony up. Ah, well. At least some things about the book business will never change, right? Like, say, the Oxford English Dictionary? There, my friends, is the Gibraltar of the English printed word. Two massive editions published since 1928 and Oxford University Press plans to publish the third edition of the iconic bulwark ­ all twenty volumes of it, in, oh, a decade or so (no unseemly rush when it comes to the OED). A reporter playfully asked Nigel Portwood, the company's chief executive, if he thought it would still be coming out in book form, heh heh. Mister Portwood said he didn't think so. He wasn't kidding. He explained that the print dictionary market is disappearing. "Falling away," as he put it, "by tens of percent a year." To hear Mister Portwood tell it, in ten years, exactly nobody will be buying hard copies of the Oxford English Dictionary. Certainly not British libraries, if present trends continue there. A 2005 survey revealed that only 16 percent of British adults visited libraries. By last year the number had dropped to 12.8 percent. It's not as if the libraries haven't pimped themselves up to be more attractive to users. They've rebranded themselves as `Idea Stores' and `Discovery Centres'. They're offering free coffee and tea, on-site job counsellors, a games room, banks of computers ­ even baby sitting services. You know...all those services that have nothing to do with books and reading. I may be weird, but I always appreciated the fact that libraries were Spartan, sombre and silent and that a stern looking gargoyle with steel rimmed glasses and a no-nonsense glare sat on guard to hush any chuckleheads who made too much noise. I liked knowing that there was a place where the only activities that were really encouraged were sitting quietly and reading. But what do I know? I'm a dinosaur. I don't even Kindle. 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