Text Mafia

We live in a text mafia, for lack of a better word.

When I asked for a book the other day, I had a conversation or better yet, heard the clerk have the following conversation (he was on the phone, asking someone on the other side of the line for a book I needed) and I can only guess the answers; the rest is up to your imagination:
- Hey...Le plaisir du texte...Bárthes...
Costs XXX (facing me).
I'll take it. That's my answer.
See you kid... (hangs up).

I decided to take the book and come back for it next day. But I was shcoked with what I had just heard at the library.

What had we turned books into? How much had we degraded it?
I felt we had reached the point of speaking about a book as if it were something unnameable, sordid.
"How much you want for it?" "How many do you want?" "I can get it for you tomorrow at 10 am". Books have become a drug for some, to which you can gain access to after a quick deal with a supplier- more than libraries, what we have now are culture retails. We deliver according to consumer tastes, new dosages are given, and evry new drug will be newer, more seductive. Old drugs won't be useful anymore. We want more shine, better effects.
The book that I needed and that will come in early Friday morning will be useful to me until I can pin down what is the next dose I ask for at the retail.
Books are drugs. And what I would like the most is that this dosage wasn't punishable.
We have to return to the bookstore, so I can keep being treated like I'm hooked on something.