Future of Books and Bookstores Discussion

Recently, two terrific posts on the future of the book appeared in The Daily Beast.  Both find the foundation of literary future in downloadable content.  Another question was asked by Booksellers Blog, how are bookstores going to respond to the changing market.

Peter Osmos writes in “Who Says the Book Business is Dead?”that this round of digital readers are the beginning of a new way to receive and read  books.  He believes digital readers work for books (and will work better and cheaper with innovation), but they aren’t as effective for newspapers and magazines.  Moreover, audible reading is taking hold as people are listening to more written word content, “Earbuds are everywhere, and by no means are all of them blaring music.” 

In “An Autopsy of the Book Business” by Jason Epstein, he traces the decline of book publishing to the population shift from cities to the suburbs.  When people congregated in cities, there were independent bookstores with extensive backlists and publishers that printed those books.  When people moved to the suburbs, these stores didn’t have enough traffic to survive with huge backlists, nor were there enough customers in the suburbs to support this type of bookstore.  So, bookstores stopped ordering books from backlists and both publishers and bookstores began to rely on the blockbuster novel for sales and profits.  (Read the recent WSJ article on why publishers will continue to pay huge advances for “blockbuster’ books.  It uses the cat book Dewey as an example.)  He points out that it is exactly these “backlist books” that provide personal insight and wisdom,  ”Would the American economy have collapsed if the casually educated caretakers of our treasure and good name who wasted our wealth on the assumption that greed is self-regulating had read those great conservative skeptics of human nature, Gibbon, Hobbes, Smith, and Burke, or studied the wisdom of our country’s founders?”  One commenter also suggested reading the Bible for learning that nothing is new under the sun.

Mr. Epstein said that publishers started to strive for a level of profit that isn’t possible in this business.  He sees the future in digital readers and on-demand printers that cheaply print and bind books “wherever electricity and the Internet exist.”  What will be important with so much content easily accessible are people to filter and evaluate what is worth spending a few hours reading.

So how should booksellers respond?  A recent post on Booksellers Blog asked exactly that and the discussion it generated is interesting to follow.  Several variations on the theme of bookstores having some sort of download equipment that allowed e-readers to buy a book with a cut going to the bookstore.  Another suggestion is the on-demand printer that would allow a bookstore to order up a book and print it in the store.  All realized the value in shopping for a book in a bookstore, seeing books and having discussions with the staff about recommendations, the question is how to retain those benefits in a changing world. While I don’t know the answer, in fact, probably no one has foreseen how bookstores will change in response to the e-reader, I am more than heartened by an attitude of meeting the challenge rather than being defeated by it.