Apparently Steve Jobs and Apple hate Amazon almost as much as Borders did and Barnes & Noble still does.

Even though iPads are still selling well, people are mostly reading books on them with the Kindle app and no one is really buying or reading much of anything from/with iBooks (I assume that is the cutesy name they picked for this particular product; certainly, I am too lazy to look it up and be certain).

In classic Silicon Valley fashion, the folks over at Apple are considering solving this problem by buying a competitor to the Kindle, namely the Nook. And they will buy the Nook by… buying Barnes & Noble.

I wish I was obscenely wealthy and could solve my problems this way. Then I could solve the parking problem on my street by buying the street from the city.

Of course, in this scenario (which is still purely hypothesis and rumor), Apple isn’t really interested in managing bookstores. Maybe some stay open. Maybe none do. Certainly, the best locations get changed into glossy, cold Apple stores.

All bookstores are, in some fashion, repositories for some portion of our world’s knowledge and culture. That portion, as a percentage of the whole, is insignificant, but that portion is also hugely significant as a percentage of the means of dissemination. The same also applies, of course, to libraries.

To see such  a comforting and inviting repository disappear to be replaced with something of less cultural importance is sad.

To see hundreds of them replaced with stores that sell consumer techno porn is not just sad, but bordering on the immoral. It calls for priests, ministers, rabbis, monks, and lamas to thunder invective down from the pulpit.

God, I hope this isn’t true or doesn’t come to pass.