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.
{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }
Having worked in a bookstore for a few years this is very true. Book stores are incredibly inefficient. Most people bought magazines, the top 10 NYT paperbacks, bargain books, and romances, or what Oprah told them to. I can safely say I was the largest purchaser of novels of any customer the entire time I worked there. Although popular and successful,authors like Chuck Phaliniuk and Yann Martel rarely have their books sold. I never understood why but the central warehouse would recall inventory weekly. About 200 books a week, mostly novels, would get sent back. I can’t imagine the costs to send books to Ontario and sit in a warehouse. Sometimes we’d send a bunch of copies of a book back only to have other copies of the same book arrive to put back on the shelves again the same day. A huge waste of money. I’m not exactly sure why small format Chapter’s stores like Coles exist when they are no profitable or barely scrape by. Their sales are mainly cheap paperbacks and other filler products. Romances are so cheap we never sent them back to the warehouse, we just ripped them up and recycled them.
I’ve always appreciated those small magazine book shops in airports, they do it so right. Very limited stock, but quality stock.
The beginning of this century was mass production, now we’ve moved into mass customization. People can their products to be special and different. Cars, Nikes you can pick out on a website, etc. Who knows how that will turn out. It probably means to cut costs companies will have to work in developing countries with prison like factories.
I always said I’ll like paper books better but after reading ebooks since I got my ipad I’ve changed my mind. I have over 500 novels which were expensive, heavy, collect dust, and steal a room away from the house. On the iPad I have over 1000 novels, most of which were free. I used to drag 5 to 6 books with my whenever I went on vacation (and end up buying a few more while I was away). I would have to say that ebooks are better for authors. Anyone can self-publish and get their work out there. They also have the option to offer books for free where it would never fly in paper, a great perk for first time writers. Hopefully ebook pricing will come down to match that fact that it’s so much cheaper than paper.
Thanks for the comment!
Your point about what bookstores send back is just wild. I didn’t know it was that significant.
It’s a shame that all this will continue to lead to the death of the local bookseller, but unfortunately customer sympathy and nostalgia doesn’t make for a very good business model.
I’m not sure the rise in the ability to customize everything will lead to everyone actually customizing everything they buy. Instead, like unlimited selection, people will want the ability to do it, but won’t actually take part. They’ll still buy the same things their friends are buying.
Which, as you say, will just make things more difficult for companies and will lead to even greater costs and even less return.