Used book stoes have been disappearing. I wrote a post about this three years ago this week, blaming the Internet for the decline. This, I think, is the better part of it. Another factor is that people just don't read like the used to. They read online. They passively receive information from the television gods. They listen to talk radio. But they don't read books.

This is bad news for an author. It's perhaps worse news for a used bookstore owner. Tom Wayne, the owner of Prospero's Books in Kansas City, has taken out his frustrations on the wrong target: books. On Sunday, he burned a pile of books to illustrate how bad it's gotten. Wayne says that he can't even give his books away. "There are segments of this city where you go to an estate sale and find five TVs and three books," Will Leathem, the co-owner of Prospero's Books, noted.

"This is the funeral pyre for thought in America today," Wayne said of his conflagration of books. He plans monthly book burnings until he gets rid of 20,000 books. I cringe at Wayne's form of protest. I've had my writings torched by political opponents, and have ugly visions of swastikas, or burning crosses, or Berkeley Mumia supporters whenever the subject of book burnings come up. But as a marketing gimmick, Wayne's stunt is genius. People who love books will spend money to save them. People who love cheap books know that they won't have to spend much for books that would, alternatively, end up in a bonfire.

That is truly cringe inducing. I've never written a book, nevermind have anything that I wrote burned, but the very idea of destroying books is unsettling to me. Guess I'm a nerd.