Quote:
Originally Posted by iterati
That applies to bookshops. If some large ones go out of business then other ones, smaller but more flexible and agile will appear.
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Smaller is never "more flexible" in a bookshop--smaller means less space, less activity, less range of selection. Several small bookshops in Berkeley--a college town--within blocks of the university have shut down in the last few years.
They can't compete with Amazon.
There are people who loved them, who tried to shop more, but that doesn't overcome the problem that casual shoppers are now browsing online as much or more as they do in person... and if the one book they want isn't available in a store, they're likely to go home & order it. (Some stores do manage to get customers to order books from them. But the customers who come to the desk and ask, "do you have this?" are a smaller number than those who browse the shelves and never tell anyone what they were hoping to find.)
Publishers are trying to kill the midlist; they want Stephen King and the next JK Rowling, and they're willing to drop a hundred Jacqueline Lichtenbergs or SP Somtows to get them. The publishing industry is competing with the web for people's reading time, and it's panicking. It's trying to cut costs & increase profits without thinking too much about what's actually changed in people's lives in the last decade.
While I believe that pbooks are NOT becoming obsolete (I can count on one hand the number of people I know who use ebook readers, and I live in a high-tech city and work in a high-tech office), I do think the publishing industry will go through some drastic changes over the next decade.