Can a cure appear before the bookstore vanishes?

Add a coffeeshop/internet-cafe/hangout aspect.

As a writer and an opinionated one my personal feelings on the matter are that if bookstores disappear soon it will be the fault of publishing companies and their failure to adapt to the times.

I am referring to paying 14.99 for a new ebook just so the hardback will sell, and other such practices. For me personally things like this annoy me enough to put me off buying books especially paperback ones altogether at times.

I acknowledge these are personal beliefs and most likely not common. @Zaku is on to something with the hang out option though, free wifi and good coffee would do a lot to keep customers, but I’m not sure even that will really be enough to keep bookstores around twenty years from now. I’m afraid you might need to get used to amazon ordering.

I used bookstores to browse books, and then I would go and buy them on Amazon. Some bookstores I went to sold books for higher prices than full retail. When Amazon exists as a cheaper alternative, it’s hard for me to want to buy them at a bookstore. And I’m not talking about ebooks either. I loathe those :)

I can read reviews and browse books on sites like Amazon and goodreads, but it’s the physical act of leafing through books that I miss bookstores for. But that’s not enough to keep them alive.

Old bookstores are still abundant in my little town.
My fav. ” The bookery” on our local Main street. Shelves and shelves of old books replete with a very fat orange tabby shop cat that lolls in the window and lures in passer by. lol

Univerities might still have used-books for sale on the corkboards.

Bookstores… how about libraries

@Zaku It didn’t work for Border or Barnes and Noble.
@bunnyslippers “It will be the fault of publishing companies”? Publishers have not been in the bookstore business, as far as I know. In fact, it’s Amazon that is replacing publishers with its own model, encouraging authors to self-publish. I already own a Kindle and like it actually.
@DominicX I like my Kindle, because I can carry a lot of books on it. I bought the cheapest model and have 151 books on it at present. I, too, miss the experience of leafing through pages of a new book at a store.
@Coloma We have 2 good used bookstores here. They are adequate.
@talljasperman You may be on to something.
@ARE_you_kidding_me I live in a rural area. We have a nice library, but it does not get new books regularly, unless they are fantastically popular like the Harry Potter series was.

In order to partially answer my question of how to find new writing, I’ve subscribed to a number of blogs that review books. I hope they will steer me to new, excellent books.

@Hawaii_Jake I got my point all mixed up and whatnot. Publishing companies may not be in the bookstore business but who do you think is the reason paperbacks are so expensive. My point on ebooks was separate from that and I admit sort of contradictory as charging as much for an ebook as a paperback or even hardback might be one solution to the problem but in my case it only angers me so that I buy neither. There is no conceivable way formatting for ebooks cost anywhere near what printing an actual tangible copy of a book does.

I don’t really want to argue my points etc. I just wanted to clarify that I’m not an idiot, I just have complex opinions.

@bunnyslippers You’ll get no argument on this thread from me. :-)

@Hawaii_Jake Glad that’s all cleared up then.

As much as I like books and bookstores, @Hawaii_Jake, they’re going away, and there’s almost nothing that can stop that from happening for bookstore survival “as just a bookstore”. I believe that there’s a business model (probably yet to be developed) that will enable some to survive in a marginal way just run by and for book lovers without hope of great financial return. But I don’t envision many people growing up with a dream to be a book seller or owner of a bookstore.

But just like clipper ships died out (to name an industry that I would have grieved as you do bookstores), and a lot of art, culture and history went with them, and whaling ships, too, there still are some square-rigged ships sailing all of the world’s oceans. But they’re not commercial ventures. And there is no more Flying Cloud.* They exist as training ships for merchant marines and navies around the world, extremely specialized research ships where the presence of metals and motors would degrade the research, historical curiosities and adventures for youth, etc.

Maybe “public libraries” should morph into “book rental” shops, for example. (The book lover and reader in me has always celebrated “free public libraries”, but the libertarian conservative contrarian knows that “there’s no such thing as ‘free’”, that libraries are mostly another government expenditure and bureaucracy that keeps a lot of technology stuck 100 years behind the times, and that “private enterprise could do it better – whatever it is – and it would probably be cheaper and more convenient, too”.)

In fact, I think that libraries, being perceived by users as “free”, have probably indirectly contributed to the demise of independent bookstores, or prevented even a notion of a market for “book rentals”, which could have flourished. (But would still be threatened in this digital age.)

I think no matter what happens with “publishing” in the next 50 years, “books printed on paper” will become more and more rare and exotic except to collectors and bibliophiles more interested in the art form than the content.

* However, there is a Maltese Falcon. A clipper ship of a sort does still exist. I can still dream.

A friend read me an article about six weeks ago that talked about how poorly Barnes & Noble is doing, and that they may end up closing within the year. Since then, I’ve seen nothing more about it, but I can’t imagine what it will be like (at least in my neck of the woods) to have nowhere to go to buy new books.

Loving gadgets as I do, I will no doubt eventually buy a Kindle, or some such toy…but nothing will replace the physical object that is a book for me. Oh, I suppose Amazon will offer “real” books for a good while yet, but for me part of the experience is also that of walking through a bookstore, taking sometimes an hour or more to discover all the new books available, or to come upon the “old friends”. Holding the book in your hand, choosing one edition over another, making sure you’re getting a “mint” copy…somehow placing an online order is not the same.

Sigh! No wonder I have so many books (eight heaping bookshelves and growing), and no wonder I am so reluctant to part with any of them. Perhaps one day I will have enough to open my own “gently-used” bookstore.

I too feel your dread, @Hawaii_Jake.

Books smell good too, and a used bookstore smells differently than a new books bookstore. Not important in the scheme of things but one reason I will miss bookstores if they do phase out is the smell. I did get used to not having a video rental place to rent from though so oh well…

edited comment for typo, probably missed a few though

@CWOTUS Believe it or not, public libraries are already lending electronic books in some places. All you have to do is register with their online site and begin downloading books to your device. If I understand the concept correctly, the book disappears from your device after a certain time.

There are literally millions of books in the public domain that are already available in the Kindle format. I have numerous ones. Project Gutenberg on the Internet offers all its books for Kindle, I think. I may be wrong.

We’ll save the public-libraries-aren’t-really-free debate for another day. ;-)

@yankeetooter I am sorry that B&N is struggling. I truly am. My daughter has a Nook, which is their electronic reader. She loves it. Who knows what will happen to it should the business fail.

@bunnyslippers I agree. Olfactory sensation is vastly underrated, and the tantalizing aroma of old paper and ink in leather is one of the best. I wonder if there’s a candle in that scent?

@Hawaii_Jake…apparently the lack of success of the Nook is part of what hurt B & N…they expected much more revenue from its sales.

Just so we’re clear, @Hawaii_Jake, I do love books and libraries. However, I do fear that the “free public library” (just like “free roads for all”) actually has stopped the development of what would have been / could have been a better model for getting more books into the hands of more people, and more cheaply. It’s difficult to impossible for me to get off the “free markets” soap box.

Generally the first argument against government divestiture of responsibility for “everything” is “What about the roads?”

Let’s imagine that “government roads” had never come into play, and that private toll roads were the norm, and let’s further suppose that the market / payment scheme was difficult, onerous, expensive, time-consuming (just like paying tolls on the Illinois Toll Road and some others is every day for millions of drivers, only compounded to every road in the country). I maintain that if that were the case… then we’d probably already have flying cars. Because someone would have come up with the better idea to get around a worse idea, which given our scenario would have been an inefficient and expensive mode of ground transport.

I think that without free public libraries (which spread out the costs to develop and maintain them among many others who do not use them) have hindered – made impossible! – the development of free markets to provide the goods and services more efficiently). We could have already had a thriving book-rental market around. (However, I think that that market would have already caused the shift to digital that is only now occurring… some 40 years after the widespread adoption of the personal digital computer. Forty years! Paper-printed books should have gone extinct a quarter-century ago.)

Maybe that’s not an argument that’s going to win you over to my side, though…

@CWOTUS Thank you. I’m glad to hear you love books and libraries. :) And you are absolutely correct on one point at least. That’s not an argument that’s going to win me over to your side. :)

It is a sad state of affairs. We are a college town but over the years we have seen several mom and pop bookstores close down. First it was when the big chains came in and now it is with the introduction of Ebooks. We are down to two, a Barnes and Noble and a Half Price Books.

What can we do? I do not know. I am buying all the books at half price books that I can without sending my wife into some sort of fit. I have a full library, two smaller bookcases full in the house, all the available shelves filled, several boxes of books in th garage that I cannot fit in the house, several more in my office and three well stocked shelves of books there as well.

Actually, my wife doesn’t mind me buying books, she just wants me to sell some of the ones I have.

But, I can’t. They are my drug of choice.

@rojo I lived in Dallas, Texas, for 4 years, and I loved Half Price Books. They gave me a lot of money for a ton of books when I moved back to Hawaii.

Here is a really scary thing to think about that someone suggested. You know how Amazon sells books really cheap and how the company keeps operating at a loss? What happens to the prices when they are the only game in town?

I get everything used, I’m a tightwad, so I have to admit it wouldn’t bother me too much.

Doesn’t everyone in small towns drink coffee, read the paper somewhere? Open your own shop, HJ!

That has occurred to me too, @LostInParadise.