Artisans, bookstores and the transmission of culture and heritage

July 6, 2021

What is an artisan? It's someone whose work focuses on creating something manually; someone who has a skill that is transformed into a trade. Artisans also tend to follow a particular method or process that tends not to be automated.

Globalization was made possible in many circumstances due to some measure of automation. Automated processes aren't necessarily a bad thing in moderation. Automation allows us to achieve greater volumes, speed, precision and traceability.

But changes in automation can have dramatic consequences for workers, communities and economies. These consequences cannot be disassociated from the profitability considerations that tend to drive greater reliance on automation.

Take book purchases for example. To what extent has automation allowed us to become more well-read and more educated? We can download books and have them shipped to us quickly and cheaply. We save time and money in purchasing books that are procured through automated methods. But what do we give up?

We have a tendency to think about our sustainability footprint first in terms of carbon emissions. Downloading a book electronically is certainly sustainable from a CO2 perspective in that it does not involve any manufacturing, packaging or transportation emissions (although does consume battery life and require cloud capability). But it’s not necessarily sustainable from a “true cost” perspective. Every time we download a book, we contribute to the loss of bookstores and libraries.

I was devastated to learn that Gibert Jeune closed its doors in Paris earlier this year. It was a favorite place of mine and I would often walk down on a free day and just roam the aisles. Every time I would go there, I would inevitably learn about several new things and purchase books that I had never even heard about. Why?

Bookstores promote a different type of reading and learning than downloading or purchasing books online. Rather than having our curiosity immediately satisfied, we are required to go looking for our answer.

In doing so, we inevitably fall upon other information that complements our understanding of the question and actually helps us take the question or curiosity in a different direction. In looking for an answer in a book or series of books, we tend to come away with a more nuanced answer to our question.

As humans, we are hunters and gatherers. We are wired to want to go looking for things and our brains are happy when we find them! We don't get that satisfaction through internet searching either, despite providing many other benefits to humanity.

When we ask a question to a search engine, we are satisfying a known unknown. When we look for an answer in a book or series of books, however, we are actually opening ourselves to learning about unknown unknowns in a much more meaningful way.

Bookstore owners are in many ways the artisans of this type of learning. They are there to exchange with us and bring us closer to the information we are seeking. For me, this is the true sustainability cost associated with online book sales and electronic downloads. In exchange for saving time and money, we are depriving ourselves of the experience of exchanging with this type of artisan.

Artisans, whether creators of food, objects or curators of knowledge, such as librarians and book store owners, are key to the concept of community. And artisans are critical to transmitting culture and heritage.

For those of us born in the 1980s, we were lucky to spend time in libraries and bookstores in our youth. We understood the sensorial experience of learning in this way and, more importantly, the transmission of learning and information that happens through the librarian or bookstore owner.

The real sustainability cost associated with online book sales and electronic downloads is also one of reduced transmission to our children -- transmission of culture, language, decorum, manners, social interaction, empathy -- these must all be taken into account when we think about sustainability.

It's much more than carbon emissions.

CPM