a thoughtful web.
Good ideas and conversation. No ads, no tracking.   Login or Take a Tour!
comment
kleinbl00  ·  4332 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: The wrong goodbye of Barnes and Noble

If your local bookstore is awesome, keep giving them money. Buy used books; I'll bet they make double the money on used books that they do on new (you could always ask them). I worked at a book store for four years in high school, spending 4pm to close four nights a week and all day sunday surrounded by books. That store just closed four months ago, having been open for 25 years; the guys I worked for had the sense to sell out in 2005 when they saw the writing on the wall, though. They'd already switched over from "bookstore" to "gift shop" and although they loved books, trinkets made more money.

If I haven't made it clear, I very much value "books as objects." I think there remains a hell of a future for them. For my part I'd love to see "book binding" becoming a thing again - since we're print-on-demand, why not have your work leather-bound on 25lb vellum for an extra $50? But at the same time, I stopped seeing paper-and-glue as the best medium for the transmission of knowledge. There is, has been and shall always be a very visceral difference between flipping pages and staring at a screen. Yet I'll bet if you could have asked the pulp publishers of the '20s and '30s if they'd prefer a paper or Kindle ecosystem, they would have gone Kindle all the way.