The Karoo's book culture will outlive the algorithm

The presence of books feels almost improbable in a place so empty. This semi-desert is better known for sheep. But scattered across its towns are second-hand bookshops, reading retreats, and Richmond - Africa’s only official Book Town.

At a time when generative AI can conjure entire libraries of text at the click of a button, it is here, in the slow spaces of the Karoo, that literature proves its stubborn worth.

Festivals as cultural counterweights

Richmond hosts the annual BookBedonnerd festival, a gathering that has become one of the most eccentric and memorable on South Africa’s literary calendar.

Writers and readers descend on a town with fewer than a thousand people, filling its streets with conversation. Nothing here is curated by an algorithm or packaged for clicks. Instead, it is unpredictable and alive.

In contrast to AI’s synthetic ability to simulate debate or fabricate entire panel discussions, BookBedonnerd reminds us that literature thrives in presence. It lives in the conviviality of small-town venues and the digressions of eccentric speakers.

Second-hand bookshops as archives

In Nieu-Bethesda, the bookshop Dustcovers feels like an attic of forgotten South African stories. Philippolis boasts Another Story, where volumes long out of print wait to be rediscovered. These shops serve as living archives of forgotten memoirs, obscure regional histories, and books too local or idiosyncratic to ever appear on a Kindle screen.

Generative AI thrives on data already digitised, but these shelves are indifferent to that sweep. They hold what has not been fed into the machine. In turn they have inadvertently become the custodians of the unsearchable.

Place as proof of value

Underlying it all is geography. The Karoo’s great distances enforce a slower pace: hours on the road between towns and the weight of stillness on a farm stoep. This slowness cultivates a different relationship to reading.

A book bought in Richmond or Nieu-Bethesda is carried home and mulled over. In a world where AI accelerates content production the Karoo demonstrates the opposite: value through delay.

Scarcity deepens meaning and reading deepens presence in place.

Why It endures

The Karoo is preserving an alternative to the digital-age consumption of content, almost by accident. Its festivals offer a counterweight to algorithmic chatter while its bookshops preserve memory outside the reach of datasets.

The Karoo's very geography enforces patience, reminding us that literature’s worth lies not in how it ranks, but in how we live inside it, and with it.

As AI floods the world with endless text, the Karoo suggests that the human encounter with books will not disappear. Rather, it will endure where it takes root.