Where Book Selling is Headed
techcrunch.com
techcrunch.com
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).
It's hard to tell if it's because older people read more , or because they like ereaders.
But: " “Tablets and e-readers are relatively easy to use. Couple that with light weight and the ability to increase the text size (not to be underestimated with older owners), and you have a very appealing product for older demographics,” Kellogg said. "
And without physical books What left of the bookstore is(almost) the public library.
[1]http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2011/08/mobile-tech-demograph...
That's pretty much the main reason I go into record stores.
If I have something specific in mind I go to Amazon.
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.
This is all not to mention the fact that the era of buying music on physical media is pretty much over.
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...
Vinyl is certainly a much smaller market than CDs, but custom packaging still has its appeal.
And one of those things that will kill bookstores is apparently LOVE for paper books. Ok, sure.
>> easy for a professor to write his or her own book, made up of class notes
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.
(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.
And frankly, it's probably a good thing that a lot of records disappear. How many books about WW2 can you read? Is it remotely useful to keep all the accounting records of every company for future generations? There's a lot of angst about half of the silent movies having disappeared, but let's be honest - most of the silent movies were trash churned out for a quick buck.