The Future of Print

Via the New Yorker, a thorough and detailed look at Kindle v. iPad, Amazon v. everybody, print v. digital, & etc. Worth reading.

On a related note, I just spent two and a half weeks on the road in the USA, where I noticed several things:

1. Almost a third of the bookstores that were open when PFB first opened in June 2000 have now closed. Of the used bookstores that remain, most are no longer buying books at all. Sales at those stores, based on my first-hand, limited, and admittedly anecdotal observation, are awful. The few stores that still regularly buy for cash are, like us, seeing more good books than they ever have before, and almost all of their owners told me that they expect 2010 to be their "best year ever."

2. Books @ PFB, new and used, are by and large cheaper than those at stores located in major US metropolitan markets (Seattle; Portland; San Francisco; Las Vegas).

3. Paperback exchanges that only carry mass market paperbacks -- a concept that's always struck me as an incredibly flaky business model -- are done, a victim of rising rents and their owners' reluctance/inability to buy for cash. The survivors' stock, which ranged from great to middling ten years ago, is now uniformly terrible.

4. Thrift stores in the States are now charging as much for recent books as we are. This doesn't make much difference to me, but it should to any bookstore owner whose business model is predicated on heading to the local thrift store first thing in the morning and loading up.

The Death of Print. The Death of Local.

Phone call from a local radio reporter who wanted to know how we were coping with Amazon, e-readers, Costco, the Olympics, "the death of print," skyrocketing retail rents & etc. "Just fine," I told her. "Sales at both stores are actually up over last year." Puzzled silence. There wasn't time to add much more, because the shop was busy and because actually helping customers and ringing up sales always beats yakking with the media. But if I'd had time I would have said that we plan to be here for the forseeable future, and that having a twenty, fifty, or hundred-year horizon for your business changes how you think about short-term problems. Eg., Should I order fifty copies of Greg Iles' latest thriller, the one that's heavily discounted at Costco and London Drugs and Wal-Mart, and which, six months from now, will be clogging up the sale table at Chapters, priced $4.99? Or should I order copies of The Invisible Committee's Coming Insurrection and all of Peavar and Volokhonsky's Russian translations, and everything in print by Italo Calvino? Viewed in this long-term light, bookselling looks less like a problem, and more like a set of ongoing opportunities.

Amazon to Kindle Users: Drop Dead

Weekend update:

Some starry-eyed Kindle owners finally wake up to the fact that they don't "own" their Kindle content; all they own is rented "access," which can be switched off pretty much whenever Amazon chooses. Best of the article's many insights: "A bookstore that locks you out because you treated it like a library doesn't take away the collection already sitting on your bookshelf."

JG Ballard, author of The Crystal World, The Drowned World, Vermilion Sands, Crash, The Atrocity Exhibition, and many other peerless works of experimental science fiction, dies, aged 78.

New used bookstore opens in Toronto. I don't know what this guy's stock is like, not yet having visited, but I totally covet his couch. Nb. banana box just above the couch, perfectly sized for transporting used mass-market paperbacks.

"Amazon's Gonna Put You Out of Business!"

...or not.

"[H]ow does the publishing industry fund the creation, editing, design, production, marketing, e-warehousing, and sales of ebooks, if the income isn’t there? How do ebooks cover the huge advances needed to buy books if we cannot generate the cash, especially at their extremely low, discounted prices, [to] cover the advances that an entire industry has come to require? The answer is that ebooks, alone, cannot."