I got a shipment from the Science Fiction Book Club on Friday. I read one of the books yesterday, and one of the books today (thus why the delay in posting, heh!). There’s nothing like holding a quality bound hardcover in your hand and cracking it open, and feeling the sleek feel of acid-free paper within, and the smell of ink. And no worries about whether you charged up the battery or such before you start reading, you just open it, and read.
When I was young, every mall even in podunk Southern cities had a B. Dalton or WaldenBooks bookstore. Now they’re all gone, either bankrupt (WaldenBooks went under with Borders) or shut down (Barnes & Noble shut down B. Dalton). When I was young, every major city had multiple independent bookstores. They’re all gone now too, killed either by Borders and Barnes & Noble, or killed by Amazon.
Then Borders died. Now Barnes & Noble is about to go under. They decided they were in the business of selling Nook tablets and Nook e-readers, not books. Thing is, you can’t make money selling consumer hardware. I know this for a sad fact, having been an employee at multiple consumer hardware companies that went under. So they lost a ton of money on their Nook hardware business. They would have been better off making a deal with someone like Kobo, whose eReader technology is technically compatible with B&N’s, instead they doubled down by discontinuing their PC and Mac apps so you had to read the eBooks on a Nook, and changing their encryption scheme so their eBooks are no longer compatible with Kobo readers and disabling download of their eBooks so you couldn’t put it onto a Kobo reader if you even wanted. Thing is, when you see a company doubling down on something that’s not their core business, furthermore, doubling down on something that’s lost them a ton of money, there’s no good end to that.
To compound all of this, the used bookstores are going under too. These were the last of the independents, the last place you could buy books other than Amazon.com now that the other bookstores are dead. But you can’t make a lot of money selling used books, and rents and taxes just keep going up and up. We have one used bookstore left in the city of San Jose, a city with a million people. One. And the way things are going, soon there will be none.
One thing I have to say good about Amazon: They’ve never forgotten that they’re in business to sell books. Sure, their eBooks are encrypted and tied to specific pieces of hardware, but they don’t care *what* that hardware is, as long as you’re buying the books. You can read your Amazon eBooks on your iPhone, on your iPad, on your Android phones and tablets, on your Kindle eReader or tablet, on your PC, or on your Mac. The only reason you can’t read them on a Nook or Kobo is because neither B&N or Kobo wants to install a Kindle app on their eReaders.
The problem is that pretty soon there will only be one place you can buy books, and that’s Amazon.com. Oh sure, Kobo and Apple have their niche markets, as do various specialty booksellers on the web, but for the vast majority of people the only place they’ll be able to go to get a book will be Amazon. And if you’re too poor to own a computer… too bad. Maybe I could save up my pennies and buy the occasional book at Waldenbooks or B. Dalton when I rode my bike to the mall, but kids of the future, well. Guess they won’t read books.
Which, perhaps, is the point, I guess. People who don’t read books are ignorant, and ignorant people are easy to fool and easy to lead into actions that benefit our oligarchs rather than themselves.
In the meantime, I just finished downloading and decrypting all my Nook books via methods I don’t intend to talk about, and will be putting them on a Kobo reader as soon as it arrives. It’s sad that it’s come down to this, that I can’t buy eBooks from B&N anymore because they want to be in the Nook business rather than in the Book business and thus won’t be around for much longer, but so it goes. I’ll support the last of the independents as long as they’re around (Kobo is owned by the Japanese equivalent of eBay so there’s money behind them, but books are a side venture for them so it’s not *unlimited* money), but keep my ePubs illegally decrypted whenever possible so that they can be converted into Kindle format when Kobo goes under. Because we all know how this ends. Amazon is the Borg. They will absorb all.
And then there will be one bookseller in America, Amazon. And not a single physical bookstore anywhere to be found.
I don’t know what kind of nation is going to result from that. But it won’t be a very good one, I don’t think.
– Badtux the Book-reading Penguin
I think you’re being a tad too pessimistic. Although the number of bookstores has diminished in quantity, the shrinkage in independent bookstores appears to have bottomed out. There are still independents out there that are doing reasonably well. There are also regional chains that are surviving, probably because they never had the delusions of grandeur Borders and Barnes and Noble nurtured with their humongous big box stores and they’ve also been smart enough to stay focused on selling actual books. Hastings has been opening new stores in states like Oklahoma and Texas, and Book World seems to be doing okay here in the upper Midwest.
I have noticed too that supermarkets still have book racks, which is a sign that physical books are not being eliminated by e-readers. If the books on those racks weren’t selling at a fairly steady pace, the racks would disappear. Granted, the selection on a supermarket book rack is going to run heavily towards romance and mystery, but at least people are still reading.
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The key part of your lament is the “guess they won’t read books” sentence. That’s where we continue to be headed to.
As long as I can remember, intellectuals have been decrying how “society doesn’t read books like it used to anymore!” (Which makes me wonder “When did it ever?” Immediately after Gutenberg?) Since television came along, that copped the blame. Now I reckon that because of smartphones, texting, FacebookFacebookFacebook etc. people spend more time than ever with their eyes focussed on the printed word. Only now it’s TINY, and often limited to 140 characters or less. Society is swimming in a welter of words that’s like a Texas river in flood — 10 miles wide and one inch deep.
I’ve always got my nose in two or three books scattered around the flat. Mostly non-fiction, because I constantly try to expand my knowledge of history, economics and culture. I talk to a lot of people at work and social occasions, and frequently cite books I’ve read to back up whatever point I’m making. Not to come across as some smarty-pants Poindexter, but so people will know what I’m saying is not just the solitary opinion of some Bukkwit. I don’t remember any time when someone else has said “I was reading this book and learned THIS…” And about half the people I talk to are university-level educated. Maybe it’s just because their conversational patterns don’t lean toward referencing source material. But I think it’s because so few people read, even the smart ones. They have no trouble mentioning the TV shows and movies that they’ve seen.
I spend a lot of time observing other people on mass transit, because I’m not ostriched into a smartphone. Maybe 1 to 2% of ’em on the trains will have a book. (Good place to analyse reading behaviour because the journeys people take are often half an hour or more, they’re seated, it’s a well-lit, physically stable environment and urban train travel is boring.) At least 50% are squinting at their tinyscreens. There’s your readers — in the Twitterverse.
At least Oz has bookstores still. That’s one of the many things about this place that reminds me of the U.S. in the 1970s. There are local chains, lots of independents (especially where I live in the downtown), specialty bookstores for science, arts, ethnic groups in their own languages, etc. One cool place in an inner northern suburb where I used to buy presents for my ex in the mid-2000s just sells cookbooks. It’s still open. Every mall still has a bookstore, and there are heaps of second-hand book sellers. Australia, being the butt end of the planet, has a higher concentration of used book, record, clothing, etc. stores than the U.S. It takes a lot of effort to get stuff here and people don’t jettison it as easily as they do in better-connected places.
Straya inevitably follows Merkin trends, though, just 20 years later. I reckon the bookish business will wither and die here too. Unless The Collapse happens first. At which time people will be GLAD to have printed books around. Because they can read them at night by the light of fires made from wood scavenged from gutted abandoned buildings…
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And then there is Powell’s. https://www.powells.com/
They even have two stores on the same block. Their downtown store, one square block, is the number one blind-date destination. They feature several book signings a week, which Amazon cannot match.
Of course, it IS Portlandia.
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Powell’s had the foresight early in Internet days to set up an Internet web site specializing in rare used books. This now accounts for a substantial part of their profits. The brick and mortar sites have been in decline for a while now, they closed part of their downtown store and have laid off almost 20% of their workforce over the past five years. I suspect Powell’s will someday shrink to an Internet site with no brick-and-mortar presence. That seems to be the way things are going today. Which, given that 50% of children are being raised in poverty and do not have easy Internet access, and public libraries are shuttering branches and drastically reducing hours and the number of books they buy per year, basically means they will also have no access to books.
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I think our parents and grandparents said the same thing, just change the name of the business. It is called progress. Businesses come and go as products and technology change.
Not many vinyl records or players around anymore. Use to be a record store on every corner. Now their on your phone. Who woulda guessed?
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Vinyl’s making a comeback. It’s a niche market but growing.
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Their = “they are”.
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The difference, Jerry, is that there is still a music business, and this music business has multiple outlets for its music. You have the indie outlets like Bandcamp, you have the e-music offerings via iTunes and Amazon, etc. People still listen to music as much as they ever did, just the physical device used to listen to the music has changed.
If the physical device used to read books changed but people were still reading as many books as they ever did, I wouldn’t be as worried. But it hasn’t.
Just out of curiousity, do you know how many copies a typical science fiction novel sells today? And how many copies a novel must sell in order to be certified as a “best seller” today? Just guess, without Googling. If you Google for the answers, you’ll be utterly depressed.
The situation with fiction magazines is even more dire. With the death of news stands, their circulation plummeted. I remember when Analog Science Fiction was the best selling science fiction magazine out there with a circulation of over 200,000 copies per month, and people started talking about the decline of science fiction magazines when its circulation dropped below 180,000 in 1984 or so. Its current circulation? Around 5,000. I remember when the Magazine of Science Fiction and Fantasy had a circulation of around 60,000. Its current monthly circulation? Around 1,900. It’s now put together on a guy’s kitchen table and based out of his home office. And it’s the 3rd-highest circulation of the science fiction magazines, behind Analog and Asimov’s…
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There certainly is less reading going on now. Perhaps my record analogy was not the best one, but there is still writing going on, a lot of it I think, but not nearly as many sales as before.
I think, and I haven’t check, that music sales are down too, or at least leveling off. More and more people are streaming music. They are buying a service that provides the product, rather than the product itself.
It is becoming more and more difficult to make a decent living with both writing and music.
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The average science fiction first novel actually sells better than the average book. The average science fiction first novel, according to an author whose wife is an editor at one of the Big Five publishers, sells around 675 copies.
675.
The average non-fiction book, on the other hand, sells less than 500 copies.
Selling 10,000 books in a month will get you into the best seller list.
Meanwhile, only thirty years ago, even short fiction magazines were selling more copies than that per month at the news stands. But the news stands are gone now, a victim of the resurgence of downtowns causing rents to rise and the rise of cable TV causing people to turn to CNN rather than print for news, and magazine sales plummeted with them. Book sales seem to be about to take the same dive as brick and mortar outlets die.
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Baen.com and a few other sites I visit to get my fix direct from the source. Yes, I’m not getting physical copies of the books, but they (generally) offer unencrypted epub, mobi, and sometimes pdf formats for their offerings. I have a used bookstore near my place, they sell used dvds/games/cds, and it is a postal station. I think the mix between the postal business and the bookstore is a good one, but for folks who what the latest physical books, they still have to order online from Amazon or go a few miles towards the mall for Barnes and Noble.
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Except there will no longer be Barnes and Noble shortly. They’re bleeding money because they decided to be a Nook seller rather than a book seller. The only company that has expressed interest in buying Barnes and Noble has been Amazon. It seems unlikely that such a merger will be allowed…
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I hear you Tux, I’m part of the reason the physical bookstore is declining – I only buy hardbound books of authors I *really* like, and only if I can’t wait to get the paperback. I’ve also made quite a few purchases of ebooks, since I can read them without glasses and backlist stuff can sometimes be found cheaper than paperbacks at the used book store. Heck, I’m even doing my part to kill off print magazines, since I have a subscription delivered weekly to my iPad. I’m not happy to see the physical bookstore go, but I can understand why, and wonder what will happen to public libraries as a result. Will more people go the the library or fewer?
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Libraries remain your best entertainment value. There are still a few independent bookstores in So. Cal., but local newsstands are indeed fading fast. (How ’bout the death of the dead-tree magazine? Missed even less than newspapers.) How much longer libraries & brick & mortar stores will be around is the question ‘though.
And I’m w/ Bukko on public transit. 99% are “ostriched in”, & a lot aren’t reading anything beyond texts.
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