The thing about Borders is that they put almost every independent bookstore I ever loved out of business. Now it's gone. Giants always fall, and they fall big, and they fall hard, and eventually another will take its place, but now I think we will see more small book stores coming back.
Bookstores with personality, where the person who does the stock orders also reads, and the choice of stock has a flavour.
Bookstores where you can go in and buy a book by an author you've never heard of, because someone working at the shop can make a favourable comparison to an author you love.
Bookstores where you can browse and sit and make friends with a book before you buy it.
Bookstores where the staff don't need a computer to navigate the shelves with--WITH, not FOR, nor AT--you.
The fate of the book as a physical object is, like all species, evolution and ultimate extinction. But I don't see the heat-death of the universe anywhere nearby, and books still demand shops.
I don't care how sophisticated it gets, online bookselling will never let you handle the book, flick through it at your own pace, and get to know it before you buy it. People need that. Books need that.
It's not just nostalgic, kindle-despising, anti-e-reader booklovers who need it. It's not just people with a slight fetish for the glue or whatever.
If e-readers replace books completely, or even nearly completely, I shall stand dejectedly corrected on that front, but now, right now, that hasn't happened.
The only reason this seems so catastrophic, I think, is because it's so public. In combination with connectivity, high-speed communication, and the relative scarcity of discretion and critical thought, chicken-little has gone all candyman.
People who know nothing about the publishing industry, nothing about bookselling, nothing about business, nothing about economics, and fuck all of anything about anything relevant, can make a witless analysis and convince an unprecedented number of other people that the sky is, in fact, not only falling, but it is doing so with the intent to rape you to death with exploding knives that shoot flaming bees.
That, to me, seems the greatest danger to the whole book thing. If people are too afraid to open small bookshops because Borders died and every wanker with an internet connection and an opinion is foretelling the doom of the written word, then the whole industry could indeed shit the bed.
But. It seems the less likely outcome. For the short term, we will look upon a wasteland, but over the next five years or so I do predict that books still want stores, and we shall have our bookshops back. For a while.
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2011-09-13 10:30 am (UTC)The thing about Borders is that they put almost every independent bookstore I ever loved out of business. Now it's gone. Giants always fall, and they fall big, and they fall hard, and eventually another will take its place, but now I think we will see more small book stores coming back.
Bookstores with personality, where the person who does the stock orders also reads, and the choice of stock has a flavour.
Bookstores where you can go in and buy a book by an author you've never heard of, because someone working at the shop can make a favourable comparison to an author you love.
Bookstores where you can browse and sit and make friends with a book before you buy it.
Bookstores where the staff don't need a computer to navigate the shelves with--WITH, not FOR, nor AT--you.
The fate of the book as a physical object is, like all species, evolution and ultimate extinction. But I don't see the heat-death of the universe anywhere nearby, and books still demand shops.
I don't care how sophisticated it gets, online bookselling will never let you handle the book, flick through it at your own pace, and get to know it before you buy it. People need that. Books need that.
It's not just nostalgic, kindle-despising, anti-e-reader booklovers who need it. It's not just people with a slight fetish for the glue or whatever.
If e-readers replace books completely, or even nearly completely, I shall stand dejectedly corrected on that front, but now, right now, that hasn't happened.
The only reason this seems so catastrophic, I think, is because it's so public. In combination with connectivity, high-speed communication, and the relative scarcity of discretion and critical thought, chicken-little has gone all candyman.
People who know nothing about the publishing industry, nothing about bookselling, nothing about business, nothing about economics, and fuck all of anything about anything relevant, can make a witless analysis and convince an unprecedented number of other people that the sky is, in fact, not only falling, but it is doing so with the intent to rape you to death with exploding knives that shoot flaming bees.
That, to me, seems the greatest danger to the whole book thing. If people are too afraid to open small bookshops because Borders died and every wanker with an internet connection and an opinion is foretelling the doom of the written word, then the whole industry could indeed shit the bed.
But. It seems the less likely outcome. For the short term, we will look upon a wasteland, but over the next five years or so I do predict that books still want stores, and we shall have our bookshops back. For a while.