

Where Book Selling is Headed - dylangs1030
http://techcrunch.com/2011/12/02/whats-so-funny-about-a-tablets-love-and-a-bookless-world/

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mechanical_fish
So, physical bookstores are going to completely disappear? Just as physical
computer stores completely disappeared?

Except, come to think of it, my last three computers were picked up at a
physical computer store.

It feels impossible for brick-and-mortar stores like B&N to survive on their
current scale (though never say never – it always seemed like a miracle that
those stores could have existed at such scale in the first place, fifteen
years and more after the invention of the web). But I suspect that _something_
made of bricks and mortar is going to take their place. It might look more
like a public library or a coffeeshop or a student union, because most of the
actual books will be sold electronically, but people are going to continue to
have a place to go which has the parts of bookstores that they like: The
browsing, the occasional chair, the librarian/bookseller/knowledgeable person,
the cafe, the company of other readers. And, yes, perhaps even displays of
books.

Because sitting alone in your apartment in front of a screen gets old. And
because a shelf full of physical books and magazines still makes an
impressive, and fairly inexpensive, _display ad_ for books and magazines.

Even the aforementioned Apple store, as well as the office-supply store down
the street, still has a few boxes of software sitting on a shelf – even though
software doesn't come in boxes anymore, to the extent that many of those
software boxes have _nothing inside them_ but a thin paper slip with a URL and
a code on it, and even though boxed software, unlike a physical book, is not
browseable, which destroys most of the value of having it on a shelf. Software
boxes are merely well-designed shiny props. And, yet, some of them are still
there. Props are useful things. Humans have more senses than one, and we like
to engage them all when we shop.

Of course, the structure of the bookselling business is going to change, and
some sections really will just disappear. For example, the softening of the
college textbook market seems like a harbinger: College textbooks are
incredibly expensive relative to other books, most buyers really only want to
rent them, they don't rely on bookstore displays to market them (because most
of them are sold to a captive audience), and the people who buy them already
have perfectly good places to hang out with other college-textbook readers (we
call them _colleges_ ).

~~~
ippisl
Why is the decline of the bookstore any different than the decline of record
stores?

~~~
tptacek
Record stores make poor promotional vehicles for records; people don't often
go into record stores hoping for serendipity. Partly because it's hard to
browse music, even when you can actually listen to it. Partly because people
tend to have something specific in mind when they go to a record store, at
least more often than when they go to book stores.

~~~
jamesbritt
_people don't often go into record stores hoping for serendipity._

That's pretty much the main reason I go into record stores.

If I have something specific in mind I go to Amazon.

~~~
tptacek
Yeah, because now there's Amazon. If you could own a record store before or
after Amazon...?

~~~
jamesbritt
I've little doubt record stores are now a poor investment, at least as
currently managed.

Like book stores, they need a way to exploit having physical items in
immediate proximity, and the prospect of there being other people around as
your browse or shop. Perhaps only carry items that have distinct packaging,
while providing high-end listening facilities for digital purchases.

~~~
tptacek
I knew when I wrote my first comment on this thread that someone was going to
tell me about how they love flipping through albums at record stores. I used
to, too! The issue is, _most people_ probably don't browse record stores that
much. You can take a bunch of books at B&N and sit down with them in the
coffee shop. You can't do that at a record store.

This is all not to mention the fact that the era of buying music on physical
media is pretty much over.

~~~
jamesbritt
_The issue is, most people probably don't browse record stores that much._

On what do you base this? I don't have anything other than my own anecdotal
data, so I offered up my own personal preference.

Thing is, as I recall, whenever I went into record stores there seemed to be a
fair number of people in there. Gut feeling tells me people were browsing in
the stores but buying online.

No, you can't take a stack of CDs to listen too, though some places will play
something for you if you ask (but that's hardly as frictionless as grabbing
books on your own). There still are some opportunities for listening previews,
though.

 _This is all not to mention the fact that the era of buying music on physical
media is pretty much over._

Define "pretty much over."

[http://blog.nielsen.com/nielsenwire/consumer/cue-the-
music-d...](http://blog.nielsen.com/nielsenwire/consumer/cue-the-music-driven-
by-digital-music-sales-up-in-2011/)

Vinyl is certainly a much _smaller_ market than CDs, but custom packaging
still has its appeal.

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aristus
From a person who loves to read, this article is barely coherent. It lists
three things that will "kill" bookstores then says Barnes is "only good at two
of them". Wha? Only good at two ways of killing yourself?

And one of those things that will kill bookstores is apparently LOVE for paper
books. Ok, sure.

------
blacksmythe

      >> easy for a professor to write his or her own book, made up of class notes
    

Writing a good textbook is quite a lot of work. This seems very unlikely.

What will happen is a few professors will write books, and self-publish or
distribute free electronic versions.

Perhaps crowd sourcing will become a popular way to write textbooks, based on
a wikipedia or github collaboration model.

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eljaco
As a parent, I can't imagine giving my 1 year-old a kindle to play with - I
think board books will be very hard to replace with digital alternatives,
unless it's something that looks and feels like a board book, but has several
different stories you can choose from.

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maccylo
And in the end, there won't be a trace of the next generation, since there
won't be any physical records left...

~~~
mechanical_fish
That's an important question, but a different one. Surely we could preserve
the collected works of Steig Larsson or J.K. Rowling without asking _every
reader on Earth_ to buy and retain a physical copy.

(If nothing else, if in three hundred years the works of Steig Larsson are
somehow lost, our descendents can just have the archaeologists dig down a few
feet, where they will discover a stratum consisting of nothing but remaindered
Steig Larsson paperbacks.)

More seriously: It's likely that books will continue to have print runs, but
the question is the size of those print runs. You can preserve a novel by
having twenty librarians in twenty countries run off twenty printed copies and
stash each of them in a storage vault. But that market won't support a
physical infrastructure of printed-book sellers.

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spwmoni
TechCrunch link, didn't read.

