Print is Dead: Books in Our Digital Age

There’s a story in the LA Times about the sad plight of California independent bookstores; most of them are going out of business in the face in increasing competition from web-based retailers (namely: Amazon) and general decreasing interest in terms of consumers (namely: kids). This resonates in terms of the “print is dead” debate, which is one wherein print’s most vocal adherents rhapsodize about the beauty of books themselves and yet never talk much about actually reading; their notion is almost always romantic, never practical. Chris Anderson, author of The Long Tail, has a great quote in the LA Times article which reflects this: “A lot of our affection for bookstores is based on a romanticized notion. The fact that we’re not patronizing them speaks more loudly than our words.” I think that’s a great point; everybody loves the idea of bookstores, but fewer and fewer people actually spend their money in them.

From the story: “Technology changes behavior, which reshapes the physical landscape. The era of repertory movie houses playing ‘Casablanca’ and ‘High Noon’ ended with the VCR. The telephone booth was replaced by the beeper, which was made obsolete by the cellphone. And the newspaper is under siege by the Internet’s ability to recombine and distribute news without leaving ink on your hands. ‘The bookstore as we know it is in dire straits,’ said Lewis Buzbee, a novelist who spent many years working in the local shops.”

LA Time: Bookshops’ latest sad plot twist

Article in the New York Sun from Monday about how, despite the dominance of the big chain bookstores in New York, and the fact that other venerable indie stores (such as Coliseum books) have recently gone out of business, five new bookstores have opened recently in Manhattan. What I find interesting about these new stores, however, is that they’re either niche bookstores (the Taschen store), or else they’re trying to be much more than just a bookstore, acting more as a book “lounge.” Reminds me of the New Yorker cartoon from years ago of a man in a bookstore asking an employee, “What do you mean you don’t have coffee, you’re a bookstore!” So even though these are not your standard bookstores, I think this is a great development, and actually points toward the bookstore of the future, which will resemble more of a local gift shop than the book superstores of today (Borders, I’m talking to you). In fact, the key to saving the bookstore, especially in an era of rising digital delivery and consumption, is the same thing that’s starting to save journalism: think local. Don’t try to compete with Amazon or Barnes & Noble (not to mention blogs and Myspace); instead, try to do what they can’t do.

From the article: “Yet while [bookstore] closings get attention, bookstores are opening, too. In the last several months, owners have cut ribbons on five new independent bookstores across the city.”
NY Sun: Booksellers Fight Back As 5 New Stores Open

A bookstore named Booksplus has taken out some ads showing a book giving a computer error message, along with the tagline “Books never let you down.” The point of course is that digital books have all kinds of potential technological pitfalls that good ‘ol printed books don’t have. Booksplus of course has a point, but their viewpoint is also a bit defensive and completely small-minded. Like, with that kind of mentality we’d all still be living in caves. It’s like saying, “Horses don’t break down by the side of the road, so let’s not invent cars.” And of course, what’s really interesting about these ads in the “print is dead” debate, is that it shows that the book industry is finally realizing that electronic reading is here and is a serious threat to the long-held status quo. When they start telling how good you have it right now, they know you’re looking over your shoulder at what’s coming next.

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