The More Things Change?

Border's Books and Music is gone, and other national chains may be teetering as well. People buy fewer physical books in favor of using their preferred e-reader. So the bookstore is dead, right, to be followed after a short illness by the public library?

Well, maybe not. As this author notes, even though we're still limited by the widespread practice of publishing paper books, online book retail is a mess. A changeover to primarily e-books may only heighten the problem because of something as simple as not having any idea what's worth buying.

Many books available through online retailers may only have a publisher's blurb to let us know what the book is like -- and those are not necessarily objective. A move to self-published e-books, though, may snuff out even those dim lanterns and leave a book buyer with next to no way to know anything about a potential purchase. The reviews posted at the sites are rarely good guides and your faithful Friar can only evaluate so many lightweight airport novels, let alone try to offer insight into nonfiction works in all of the many fields that interest you. Should I ever have actual readers, I'm hosed.

The solution may be a figure from the past, from the days pre-BordersBarnesWaldenBooks-A-MillionAmazon: The bookseller. Not, as the story notes, the part-time clerk making money during school, but the bookseller who studies what's being sold, knows something about the different offerings on her shelves and can recommend what might match a customer's desires. A combination of GPS and e-reader devices would mean that the bookseller could even get credit for a sale made on an e-book, opening up the possibility of a new revenue stream, even if it's not all that much per book. Other than the part about revenue, the same setup can work with a knowledgeable librarian.

The key, according to the idea that's presented in the story, is that there will be a place for a certain kind of brick-and-mortar bookstore even for folks who aren't old-fashioned curmudgeons who think that there is value in preserving ideas in a format not at the mercy of battery life, screen quality or seller's whim. Not that I know anyone like that.