But as the months have worn on, QPB’s catalogs have revealed that all is not well in the world of book sales. It’s not that sales have dropped—hardly. Americans have more ways to buy books today than ever before, with major chain stores, mail-order companies and even the Internet dealing in literary matter. But amid the massive exchange of green paper for printed paper, the value of the book itself has been eclipsed by the joy of buying it. In a society dominated by electronic media and free-spending consumers, the processes by which books are obtained run counter to the qualities books themselves espouse.

The QPB catalog is an appropriate case study. A look through its pages reveals as much about the company’s perceptions of consumer psychology as it does about the featured books. In addition to the proudly displayed selection of the month, there are pages of fiction; humor; biography and memoir; history; spirituality; self-help and science. Although many of these other categories drift in and out of the rotation, a monthly section of sensual or erotic arts is, curiously, always included.

The selection is fairly wide; in many cases QPB offers the only softcover edition of a book anywhere, and new ones are described each month. Yet not much attention is given to truly conveying the book’s character, to imparting the sort of knowledge that is gained from browsing and selective reading at a bookstore. The summaries of books for sale are abbreviated and often rely heavily on quotations from newspapers, comparisons to other books or television series, and Oprah’s recommendations. The company’s sometimes thinly disguised commercial instinct shows readers all sorts of problems they never knew they had ("most of us haven’t been properly introduced to our own knees"); it describes with laughable brevity its books’ subject matter (a geography book is described as "an entertaining guide to our world"). In this scenario, the consumer almost has to judge a book by its cover, which is so lushly depicted in full color on the catalog page.

It’s no wonder that the summaries are short and uncomfortably skeletal; the catalog exists in an age where television is king, where thoughts are edited down to appealing soundbites. Even the more extensive profiles of QPB’s wares only last about half a page, adjusted to fit the catalog’s paper budget but also to cater to an attention span shrunk by television’s synaptic pace. Those who use the catalog are readers of books, but they live in a country where the sexiness of television has taken its toll. The dominant medium has inevitably shaped all the rest.

The practice of buying books experienced a resurgence in popularity during the mid-1990s as the typical chain bookstore transformed from a slick, narrow store in the mall into a cavernous study complete with carpet, occasional live music and the intellectual aroma of coffee. Those who wanted to be cultured could, on a Friday night, forsake the less enlightened bands and movies for the new hipness of the multisensory bookstore. As other entrepreneurs recognized this studious vogue, they found new ways to market the freshly popular book: the mail-order clubs, the combination major chain/college bookstore. Now, the most comprehensive list of books to be found is on the Internet. One medium is being sold via another.

But even as the massive coffee bar/bookshops put their smaller predecessors out of business and threaten to encroach on places as famous for their independent bookstores as London’s Charing Cross Road, the book itself is under threat. As university presses publish more and more treatises on increasingly arcane subjects to thicken academics’ CVs, the "trends" we learn about through our other, more visceral media point toward an approaching decline in the use our culture has for books and the physical places we find them. These trends, we hear, are toward the ultimate supremacy of the electronic media. The first casualty on this march was the independent bookshop, its strength sapped by giants like Borders and Barnes & Noble. Next, library usage went down, thwarted by increased use of the Web as a resource for research papers and pleasure-browsing alike. Now the same superstores that local retailers cursed may be the last lights on a long road into an era where most things on paper are superfluous. Ginsberg’s despondent, "Where are we going, Walt Whitman?" at last has an answer: online, or out of business.

Despite the growth of alternative ways to actually get a book—the catalogs, web sites and the like—the book itself is clearly subordinate to a more powerful force in our culture: the image. We know that most Americans get the majority of their knowledge of politics and culture from the television, and that appearances often play a greater role than facts in people’s consideration of current affairs. But the drama, the color and the personality of image-driven TV have also infiltrated the popular conception of great literature, as demonstrated by the often prurient books the QPB catalog considers essential reading. Classics like Ulysses are frequently placed next to a talk-show host’s latest recommendation, giving, like television does, equal weight to fleeting cultural icons and truly influential ideas alike. The canon today is expanded not because of a book’s ability to distill some universal emotion or experience into immortal print. It’s done because Oprah said so.

But let us for a moment back away from the assumptions that lie between these lines and ask the question: of what real good is the book anyway? What is the need for a place of reverence where answers and romance are found between two covers as opposed to on the screen? What is the difference?

The difference lies in the fact that a culture tends to mimic the form of its dominant medium. McLuhan, Postman and others have written about how our tools relate to our thinking, how our actions are shaped by the form in which we express them. In a culture where television reigns, thinking is eventually and inevitably patterned after the medium with which Americans spend so much of their adult lives. This sort of thought comes in abbreviated surges; it is attracted to things that are sexy and colorful; it is most comfortable with quick solutions to one-dimensional problems. It mutually reinforces a culture that embodies these qualities, the kind of traits that are increasingly replacing those connected with a reading society.

As we replace with discounts the sense of reverence historically linked with the book, we lose our ability to do the things associated with reverence: sustained inquiry, silent contemplation, devoted attention. Today’s emphasis is on the marketing and purchase of the book, and the ease with which this transaction is made—not the slow filtering of knowledge through the printed page and into what Postman calls the typographic mind. In a world fast-paced enough to spawn book clubs and online ordering—methods touted for their convenience—who has time to read in the first place?

The goal, it seems,  is to get what we need as quickly as possible and in the most condensed format possible. This movement begins in the classroom, where college students are increasingly encouraged to do research over the Internet and are sometimes even required to cite a minimum number of web pages in bibliographies. Library usage has declined as a result of this push to get the latest and greatest information at whatever time of day or night, leading one to speculate on the future role of the actual, physical library building. And in the scramble for the most recent statistic, the latest copyright date, and the most up-to-date web page, we lost contact with the relevance of history. The past is hidden away in some hard-to-reach book on a dusty shelf, and the information that predates electronic media becomes obscure in the wake of our craving for speed and convenience.

The emphasis on speed and consumption rather than edification generates prolific mediated methods of actual book selection and reading. And most of the substitutes are oriented toward money-making on a broad scale. Take, for instance, the idea of a book club. This combination of words once denoted a group of friends or classmates who gathered to discuss their findings in a common text, whether assigned by a teacher or chosen by the group’s members. The emphasis was both on community and on scholarship, the chance that a new discovery would be made through the members’ sharing of impressions.

Today we still have book clubs. Yet, aside from remnants of the past decade’s domestically inclined reading groups, many clubs are the kind in which the only requirement for membership is monetary, and the meetings are carried out over the phone and by mail. The QPB and its ilk have fundamentally changed the meaning of the book club: instead of baring our literary souls over tea and scones, we trot from the mailbox to the living room with the catalog. Instead of sharing ideas, we buy.

Are quality literature and the mass market mutually exclusive? Of course not; War and Peace loses nothing of its beauty when encased in paper rather than cloth or when read by more minds than an elite academic few. But a form of communication that is much more thoughtful, deliberate and challenging than the dominant media of the day deserves more than being reduced to a commodity, an attractive relic from an earlier age to be displayed on a tabletop. As convenient an invention as our book "clubs" and online stores are, their commercial interests should not be the filter through which we choose what to learn, how to learn it, and what constitutes good writing.

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