The Future of Bookstores
A very snarky lede paragraph but an otherwise interesting commentary on the state of popular book publication these days and its future.
This is from the
UK Guardian and was written by author
John Sutherland
bq.
No more bookshop idyll
There was a sad news item last week about 130,00 penguins doomed to die because of the havoc wrought on their environment by climate-warming. Damn George Bush and his SUVs.
'Scuse me -- as if. We are currently going through a 400-year cycle of warming and cooling and are entering a warming period. SUVs may go against your nuanced sensibilities but they are not the cause, they are a minor contributor but not the cause.
Harrumph... Back to our regularly scheduled pogrom:
bq. It's been a disastrous year for the other Penguin as well. Last spring the imprint's super-agglomerated parent group, Pearson, brought on-stream its new, airport-sized warehouse at Rugby. The computer operating system, predictably, crashed. They always do. From April to June the system stayed obstinately down. Penguin books were scarcer than Penguin's teeth. Delivery, almost a year later, is still constipated and hiccupy.
Ouch! Wonder who did the development on that one.
Anyway, John goes on to decry the passing of the small independent bookstore:
bq. The book trade tends to enjoy long, stable periods of operation punctuated by seismic upheaval. The next big upheaval is imminent. Go into any high-street bookshop today and you are confronted with a dizzying profusion of wares. There are more books on display than any normal person could read in a lifetime. Where to start?
bq. It used to be that patrons (never "customers") went into a bookshop, browsed for hours on end and bought one book or perhaps no book at all. Now booksellers want you to "load your cart" with three for two, or an armful of "50% off" items. It's the
Tescoisation of the British book business. Nowadays you would no more think of going into a bookstore and old-fashionedly browsing than taking a tin-opener into the local supermarket and sampling the baked beans.
(Tesco is a large grocery chain in Europe.)
More product being sold is a bad thing? I thought that authors only got paid when their books sold. The idea that someone would walk into a book store, spend several hours and walk out empty handed is not my idea of good marketing... I do feel bad for the small bookstores that were running a marginal revenue stream who were pushed out of the marketplace when a chain store moved in, it would be nice if there was a way to ease that transition but that is business raw in tooth and nail.
He also talks about
Amazon:
bq. Despite the healthy Christmas sales, the walk-in, walk-round bookstore is doomed. "Cyberglobalism" is about to happen. International copyright is already a dead letter. You want the book everyone is reading in the US? It won't be published in the UK for months, but Amazon.com will send it to you, copyright restriction be damned.
bq. After the cyberglobal dust settles it won't be Amazon or any other of the webstores which comes out on top. Despite its web address, Jeff Bezos's outfit functions as an old-fashioned middleman. They add a surcharge of up to 40% for "handling" the product. Web-based publishers can do that themselves, direct-delivering from their warehouse. Two things are necessary: getting their act together and a state-of-the-art mega-sized warehousing system.
There is some other fascinating stuff regarding the early history of Penguin Publishing, how they started and what their corporate philosophy was (Jeff Bezos would have approved).
Posted by DaveH at January 23, 2005 9:12 PM