The end of browsing

Charles Rosen blogged earlier this week for the New York Review of Books on the lost pleasure of browsing, likening the experience of buying a book online -- and therefore unseen and untouched -- to purchasing a mail-order bride. Carolyn Kellogg then explored Rosen’s discussion with her own blog entry in the Los Angeles Times.

This is something I’ve been thinking about a lot lately too. Like Rosen, I used to choose books by physically finding them at bookstores, libraries or other people’s houses. (I once attended an open house for prospective home-buyers and spent the whole time I was there in the master bedroom copying titles from what was evidently the wife’s bookshelf. The house didn’t interest me much, but what great taste she had in reading!) These days, I’m much more likely to choose what I want to read based on a book review, a book blog, an interview on NPR or a personal recommendation, and order the book online from a bookstore or library. What this means is no more trawling the shelves and no more “stumbles” – no more chancing across books whose covers or titles catch my attention before I know anything else about them.

But it’s not only with books that I find a reduction in my browsing habits. As most of my friends would attest to, I’m an NPR fanatic. I used to listen to hours of NPR: when cooking or doing housework, when driving, and when out running. Then I acquired an iPod and discovered podcasts. Suddenly every single one of my favorite NPR shows was available to me as a download 24 hours a day. Telling other people about what this discovery has meant to me, I echo the famous credit card commercial: “Never again being stuck on a 7-mile run listening to Car Talk: priceless!” (Car Talk is one of the most popular NPR shows ever, and I don’t mean to knock it, but trust me when I tell you it’s one of the few forms of entertainment that can actually make a long run feel longer.)

Nonetheless, back when I used to be stuck with whatever NPR show hit the airwaves at the particular time I was out running or driving, I occasionally found myself listening with interest to something that I was initially certain I wouldn’t like. Not being a sports fan, I tried to avoid “Only a Game,” and yet dozens of times I would be stuck listening to it anyway and discover a story about a high school team facing an unusual challenge or a new book about female basketball players and find myself really intrigued. Now that I can choose only those broadcasts I most want to hear rather than “browsing” the radio, I never have to listen to anything boring, but I also never find myself surprised by things I thought would be boring (sports stories, technology stories, BBC features) but aren’t.

This is one reason I’ve refused to give up my newspaper subscription even though I know the same content in available on line. Once I can click directly on the articles I know I want to read, I’ll lose the benefit of random headlines: my eye first skimming over a headline, then going back for a closer look, then reading the entire article. I’d spend a lot less time reading an on-line newspaper, knowing precisely which topics and sections matter most to me. But I’d skip a lot too, the same things that now I sometimes plan to skip and find myself reading anyway.

Being able to home in directly on what it is that you want to read or listen to definitely saves time. Back when I used to browse the library or bookstore shelves, there were a lot of misses. Fifty pages into a book (I always make myself stick with the first 50 pages), I’d often decide I wasn’t sufficiently engrossed to continue. Now that I read pre-selected books, that doesn’t happen much anymore; I almost never waste time on a book I don’t end up finishing.

But I also miss a lot. A few weeks ago, I found myself in the unusual position of having nothing left in my “to be read” stack and nothing in yet at the library from my reserve list. So I headed to the bookstore to browse, just to see what might look interesting that I hadn’t already decided I wanted to read. And I re-discovered how satisfying it was to gaze at all the possibilities, the hundreds of books I could choose to read or not read, all the volumes to pick up, glance through, put back or keep. It may not be the most efficient use of time, but on that particular afternoon it felt great to be browsing again.