Print is Dead: Books in Our Digital Age

Found a blog posting today through a publishing e-mail newsletter from last month by writer Matt Briggs, that had a couple of really interesting points to make about the decline in reading and the slowly creeping death of the independent bookstore (Briggs is an author who was spurred to write the post because he’d recently had a reading at a bookstore where no one showed up, and was wondering why). Putting this through the “Print is Dead” prism, it shows that reading is on the decline, and that books are moving away from the center of most people’s lives.

Here the last paragraph, which talks about the inevitable change to come:

“A bookstore as a physical repository of books is a place. A place, paradoxically, become a valuable commodity in a partially virtual world. Eventually virtual people and audiences want to converge and meet in the flesh. Books themselves I suspect will remain tactile objects, and just as the vinyl record has survived the Eight Track, Cassette Tape, and CD — the book will survive as a retail/fetish object despite or maybe because of digital media. Books have not been the central object of cultural production for some time, but I doubt they are going to disappear nor will the physical retail structure. Doubtlessly though it will change. I’m excited to see what it looks like.”

Death to the Bookstore, Long Live Books and Stores