Ingenioustries.com

The supposed insight that, “I think ebook readers like the Kindle are neat, but I will always enjoy reading a real book,” is one of the most aggressively pretentious statements that the current generation insists on repeating.

Of course you like real books. Don’t we all? The segment of the population that prefers to read long-form prose on a computer screen or even the unfortunately named “e-ink” is vanishingly small. Your artful swoons about liking the feel and smell of paper books are shared and repeated by almost every single one of your peers.

But you are reading in a blockbuster economy. The industries surrounding and producing books, movies, videogames, and music all operate in the exact same way:

Everyone reads, watches, plays, and listens to the same content (or revenue, at least, is derived overwhelming from very few sources) but everyone still demands that they have choices and vast selections from which to make these same purchases.

What this creates are stores like Borders and Blockbuster that used to sell and rent many copies of the same thing, but were still forced by fickle and predictable customers to stock enormous numbers of untouched merchandise. “Sure, we’re all going to walk out of here with the same thing, but we’re going to spend an hour browsing before we select it.”

(How many of your friends are currently reading The Hunger Games? If you’re like me, almost all of them.)

If you’ve followed the music industry at all, you already know what this means: Increasing digitization and centralized order fulfillment. Kindles and Amazon, basically.

If you want to read something obscure, you simply can’t expect to find it in a small bookstore. Because if it’s truly obscure then a necessarily small number of people will want to buy it. Which means it will sit on a shelf for weeks or months costing that store real estate in which it could have stuck another copy of The Help.

We all want to read real books. But the only stores that can really accomodate this are ones like Amazon, which can centralize order fulfillment among a relatively small number of warehouses. Having a few copies of unread books doesn’t cost them as much as it does your local independent bookseller.

And ebook readers will allow you to read that book that you discovered before all your friends because your local bookstore didn’t have to find and stock it first.

You are reading in a blockbuster economy. If you truly want choice, you will have to stop expecting to shop at the Blockbuster version of a bookstore and move to another, more sustainable, source.

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