Money’s Too Tight to Mention: Print’s not dead, it’s just broke
Sewell Chan, writing on the New York Times “City Room” blog yesterday, had a post entitled “High Rents Chase Another Bookstore, This One From a Chain.” The post is about how, while a large number of independent bookstores have recently gone out of business in New York City (i.e. The Gotham Book Mart, Coliseum Books), even the majors are now feeling the pinch. Specifically, the Astor Place Barnes & Noble will go out of business at the end of this year. As for the reason why its doors are closing, Chan quotes Mary Ellen Keating, a Barnes & Noble spokeswoman, as saying, “The sales simply didn’t justify the high rent. We’d love to stay, but unfortunately couldn’t work out the economics.”
The location opened in 1994, and I used to go there a lot when I first moved to the neighborhood in 1997. What’s sad is that there also used to be a Tower Books around the corner (it went out of business long before the Tower chain folded). Back then, the entire area felt a lot more bookish; it was before the era of the Internet and iPods. In fact, for lots of people these days a bookstore is Amazon. They don’t feel the need to go a big chain store when they can find everything they want (and more) at home, online. Meanwhile, there are still some good independents in the Astor Place area, including Shakespeare & Co and St. Mark’s Bookshop, which gives me hope that, in a “print is dead” world, when the majors realize that they can no longer operate on volume they’ll begin to go out of business and the independents will flourish once again.
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Also mentioned in the City Room post was McNally Robinson, another great independent bookstore in the area that focuses on quality and service rather than volume.
Yeah, good point. That shows how specialized stores will succeed where the big ones fail. The same thing is happening with journalism; the trick isn’t to try and beat the big boys at their game (no one’s going to out-Google Google), but rather to do the things that they can’t do. In terms of journalism, that means thinking local. For bookstores, I think it means specialization.
You seem to be lamenting the loss of bookstores when your argument is that printed books are dead. It’s almost as though you have some sentimental feeling for the loss of the bookstore, which must fold in a world without printed books. I find this post very curious and confusing.
Yes, you’re right. On the one hand I’m saying that the death of bookstores is inevitable in a “print is dead” world, because people will A. get their information elsewhere and B. get their books elsewhere. And yet, all of that being said, I’ll remember that neighborhood more fondly when it had all those bookstores. But that, in terms of my own feelings, has more to do with the overall gentrification on Manhattan. For instance, in 1997, Astor Place Hair (just down the block from the Barnes & Noble) used to be on two levels; it’s now regulated to the basement, while the upper floor is now a Cold Stone Creamery. There used to be a great wine shop on the corner, but it’s also gone. Across the street used to an old sheet music store, which has since been replaced by an ugly high-rise that houses a bank on its ground floor. So my feelings about the loss of bookstores is specific to that area. Believe me, like everyone else, as much as I profess to love bookstores, I buy nearly every book from Amazon.
As print on demand technology develops, a good model for a successful bookstore would likely be to have a p.o.d. machine (so that those who still prefer print can get just about anything available electronically fairly quickly in print as well), a selection of new print books (perhaps the book as artifact type stuff that’s starting to emerge as the standard book shifts to electronic format–see Lennon Legend by Jim Henke or an ornate artist’s book for a sense of what I mean here, but basically something that wouldn’t be the same electronically as it takes advantage of the physical nature of the print book), an eclectic but edited section of the huge mounds of past books that will end up on the marketplace as people get sick of dragging them around or previous bibliophiles die (and perhaps other not so vibrant anymore media such as cds, vinyl, and whatnot), and a coffeehouse/cafe section so that the store can get money from those who only read ebooks anymore but are attracted by the social nature of the place. VoxPop in Brooklyn comes to mind as the only place I’ve been to that has all these qualities but I’m sure there’s others. I think the bookstore will probably always exist, but I think Jeff’s right, there will be far fewer and the ones that survive are going to mutate quite a bit.
If advocates of screen reading want to spend their time death watching they should consider looking at non-book media as well. Analog magnetic media are gone and computer media are going. Screen reading is now more or less like television: network distributed. We all know what happen to television. (Television was once as popular as the internet!) The best search engine cannot revive television. One of the few promising formats from digital writing is digital print to paper. …er,books.
I love the independent bookstores because I can often find “gems” that I would never find at a large chain. Unfortunately, there aren’t many indies around where I live, so I’m forced to shop at the chain stores.
Even though the internet is eating up a lot of the brick and mortar chain store business (ie. Amazon), I would like to think that there will always be a place where books are sold, merely as a social gathering point - much like coffee shops.