cinderwick

I recently made a pit stop into our rather large Canadian bookstore and was discouraged to find that books for “Dummies” and “Idiot Guides” and have spread over the bookshelves like our resident pine beetle attacking our pine forests. The infestation was more than I could have imagined however as almost every aisle, from cookbooks to computers, were littered with those bright yellow shiny covers breaking down subject matter into tidy snippets of residual information.

This influx must be due to the ‘want it now’ generation where people can’t stand to spend more than a few minutes on one thing before losing attention. Want to learn about Italy? You can now find out everything you need to know, not by reading a travel guide written by an experienced traveller, but by quick facts summarized by a computer, with cute little diagrams to keep your attention. These invading, generic and shoddy attempts at information could be called the Walmartizing of books.

A while ago, I noticed this invasion of Dummy books at our small,local book store where the computer section is nothing but “Windows for Dummies”. There was not one independently written book on anything other than mainstream technology.*blah*

It is discouraging to realize how popular and how invasive these books have become, while independent writers are pushed aside by these seemingly informative and digested knock-offs.  It is sad too as I realized that over time, our wonderfully diverse bookstores will become one big yellow store for dummies.