It is not easy to practice bibliophilia today. Everything is obstacles. At first, the basics fail: the support for accumulating books at home. Has anyone recently had to renew their shelves? In regular stores they still call these pieces of furniture bookcases, but it is obvious that they are no longer designed with that function. In the standard models, the distance between the shelves is excessive, which reduces the storage capacity and forces the reader on duty to stack books horizontally on top of the vertical ones, so as not to waste space.
If you look in the online catalogs of the stores, you will see that there are more shelves occupied by vases, family photos, jars of fruit in syrup or crazy souvenirs than by books. The few that appear in the photos are usually art catalogs that no one opens. In some images, the books even appear stacked upside down, with their spines facing the wall, in case someone was curious about a title or an author and thought of reading it. They call this furniture bookstores just as we continue to call a hardware store that store where more plastic, aluminum, brass, copper or cable is served than iron.
There is an alternative: order the bookcase to measure, with space at floor level for art books and a low shelf for essay notebooks, so in vogue today. But this option is usually expensive and is conditioned by the shortage of carpenters.
There is an explanation for the apparent contradiction between this bookish desertification of the floors and the fact that the publishing sector enjoys reasonable health and that the bookstores (the real ones) that open outnumber those that close: probably, there are fewer and fewer homes with books, but also a minority of homes that accumulate more and more volumes, even if they have to be stored horizontally or stacked on the floor, a solution as romantic as it is unhygienic.
Because the prestige and economic relevance of the book sector is beyond doubt. In defense of the habit of reading on paper, like every year, the Edita Barcelona Forum begins tomorrow. Preceded by a well-deserved tribute to the editor Beatriz de Moura, the forum will show that the book market is a market that faces uncertainties but continues to grow. There is a faithful reading community (or rather a buying community that tends to pile up books: raise your hand if anyone who has not lost their ability to concentrate to read in recent years) and some bookstores that cheat.
The Edita Forum will be followed by the Catalan Book Week, but this month there is another call that deserves the attention not only of book lovers, but also of those who assume that reading from reliable sources is an exercise in political resistance. This is the Fira del Llibre d’Ocasió, Antic i Modern on Passeig de Gràcia.
Because it is no longer just about looking for cheap reading or succumbing to the habit of collecting old editions, but also about participating in the altruistic act of preserving the wisdom generated over centuries by humanity in the face of the vandalistic appetite of AI. As this newspaper reported, companies in this sector buy huge quantities of old books all over the world to train their AI models, once they have gobbled up almost all the data circulating on the internet. With the aggravating factor that the copies are destroyed during scanning.
The alternative? Buy, buy and buy to protect. Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451 Resistance rescued books from the fire by memorizing them, but we are talking about a time (the novel is from 1953) when humans were not yet brain-fried by the abuse of digital devices and could retain information. Today only opponents and theater actors memorize. Therefore, one way to preserve that legacy is to buy as many books as possible – first, second or third hand – and turn homes and libraries into spaces of resistance. That is, until Anthropic knocks on the door, which will all come, and makes an irresistible offer for our relics.
The decorative solution
On the 19th, the famous Strand bookstore in New York celebrates its 99 years of life. Some time ago, during a crisis that seemed to threaten its survival, one of its managers welcomed the emergence of a new type of buyer: the nouveau riche who wants to decorate the walls of his apartment with meters and meters of old books, without giving a damn about their titles or authors. Compared to voracious AI companies, these clients would deserve a guild award. At least they preserve the books they buy.
Putin signs up for the burning
What is most worrying about a war is, obviously, the loss of human life. Next, there could be – not necessarily in this order – the basic infrastructures or the artistic heritage. In this case, we must also talk about the books killed in combat: according to sources from the Ukrainian Ministry of Culture cited by Pen Ukraine, in the summer of 2026 alone, Russian attacks have destroyed more than 10 million copies, which represents a third of national production. Many are textbooks.
