Borders UK

Too bad about Borders.

It’s probably my fault. Amazon and Alibris get all my business these days.

I guess it is a case of reaping what you sow, but still it’s a sad day when any bookshop closes. While I’ve only ever bought one book in Borders in my life (mainly due to ever living near a Borders once in my life) it was indeed an excellent one and one that I’d have only found by looking at their recommended reading section. Indeed I always found it a better browse than Waterstones, although some Waterstones are better than others. I think the one high street winner (in the UK) in recent years has been the charity shops (which unlike the chain stores still throw up the occasional pleasant surprise when Zen browsing), although the knock on effect of them has been to put pressure on the real second hand bookshops… shit, bookshop survival is more brutal than the theory of evolution!

I sincerely hope something really cool fills the void.

To be honest I doubt anything cool will take it’s place. Beyond endless clothes and fashion shops (mainly for the ladies) the British high street is pretty much dead these days (at least it is for me). I can’t see another book chain store arriving on the scene any time soon as I doubt if that business model is really viable any more today.

Gonzalo said:
On the whole “what will happen to booksellers” argument, Cory Doctorow has an interesting article up on boingboing. If I follow it correctly, the largest slice of the market, currently fulfilled by mass-market paperbacks, will continue to migrate onto online retailers and supermarkets. I would add that if e-book readers ever reach the kind of usability and convenience required to satisfy readers wish to consume content (irrespective of the medium it comes in), then a large proportion of these mass-market books will actually be consumed digitally.

The rest of the market, Cory argues, will be catered for by the likes of the Espresso book printer for custom-made and public domain titles.

Of course, there will always be room for the book as a beautiful physical object, but this is likely to move to the top end of the market, with finely bound editions, conllectors’ editions, signed editions, and the like.

You’ve just perfectly described my idea of hell. So the only hardcopy books available in Cory’s utopia will be £50 special editions than no one will read because they’ll be too scared to ruin them? A post-literate world for collectors not readers! Gaaahhh! Let’s hope Cory’s wrong, I say. Anyway, I’m not really convinced on what especially qualifies him as a publishing soothsayer… He might individually have done okay out of digital formats, but I’m yet to see any evidence that enovels have been beneficial to many other authors or publishing in general. Anyway, Ursula K Le Guin could take him in a fair fight any day of the week!

I for one am not celebrating the death of the paperback and I never cease to be amazed at the blind enthusiasm of other readers (who presumably love books as much as I do) in their rush to embrace everything that is new with no apparent concern of what they might be loosing… If the ye oldie system of bookshops, publishers and hardcopy books was soooo bad then why did it produce all those great books that have literally changed my life for the better (and presumably everyone else who loves books too). Let’s not dance a jig because it’s dying.

I’ve said it before, but I’ll say it again: Has the death of LPs and CDs actually lead to better music today? I’d argue that music today is worse than ever, I’d argue that is because it has been devalued by the digital format. Christ, as a teenager I used to take an hour train journey every few weeks and blow all my money on a handful of 7″ and 12″ singles. Of course looking back, I bought a lot of crap, but, believe me, I’d cherish every one of them at the time and I love the old me (and the people like me) who were obsessed by music like I was. I just don’t see that love of music today in the ‘kids.’. Who could give a shit about an mp3 (bought or illegal). Who remembers their first download? I don’t. If my harddrive died today, the last thing I’d care about is the music on there (I’d just download it again). But, let’s say, if my LP/CD collection got robbed 10-15 years ago, I’d have been spitting blood for months. At one stage I’d have literally preferred to loose a limb than my records! Music has become as disposable as used condoms and bubble-gum (don’t get them confused). Sure, this is partly due to the lack of risk-taking labels (same can be said for publishers), but I really believe that the digital format has had a reductive influence on the quality (if not the quantity) of popular music.

Forgive my sense of melodrama, but I think I will simply give up reading rather than read pdf-novels on some crappy plastic ereader that I won’t be able to read if the sun’s too bright or the batteries run out or if that bottle of mineral water that I threw in my backpack springs a leak all over it or if I drop it… Saying that, most of the books I buy are oldies anyway, so I’ll probably be relatively unaffected if the book trade flies off up it’s own digital backside and some pdf hell is vomited out the other end – but still, I like the idea that maybe there just might be a book published sometime in the future that I might just want to buy… if only in theory! But I suppose there’s enough old books to keep me happy for a few lifetimes yet…

*INSANE RANT OVER*

I’m pretty sure digital will kill the book business the same way it killed the music business.

But not for me. I find myself buying two books instead of one. I am reading Jack London’s The Iron Heel on the Kindle. Political science fiction and a good read. And I just ordered the print version so I’d have a back up.

What I am most troubled by is how easy it will be to kill digital books that governments find subversive. Not that they didn’t do the same thing with print books. I don’t think truly leftist books have been published in the US since before the Russian Revolution.

Gonzalo said:

And yet, doesn’t the fact that more books will be available in digital form mean that they will be harder to suppress?

I hope you’re right but every place I turn I see articles about new movements to censor the internet. Even copyright, which developed as a way to reward authors, has evolved into one of the strongest justifications for censorship.

UK ISP’s are censoring Wikipedia

95% of UK ISP’s implementing censorship machinery

A recent research project found that even John Stuart Mill’s libertarian classic wasn’t safe from private internet censors.

UK’s Terrifying Anti-Piracy Plans Leak

Gonzalo said:
TEA, first off just let me say that I don’t necessarily agree with all of Cory’s article, although I do think he has made some interesting points in his (self-confessed half-formed) argument.

I totally agree it is an interesting piece and one that I think will prove fairly accurate. I wouldn’t want to appear totally hostile to it. I like the sound of the Espresso machine, which has been knocking about as a concept for a few years now and is one that I hope will, at least, compete with the pure electronic forms, which obviously I really don’t like. The fact remains though that print-on-demand technology can’t financially compete with the mass-produced paperback, simply due to the reduced production costs of mass manufacturing compared to printing a one off, which will in turn push up book prices. People today already complain about the price of books (a fact that amazes me as book prices in the UK have remained fairly static over the last 10+ years, both in real terms and in absolute terms). It certainly would be cool to pop into a Espresso bookshop in a lunch break and get a copy of some previously out of print SF cult classic printed off 10 mins later, but I still believe that the loss of the ability to browse will ultimately be corrosive to the book trade, although, to counter that, i think it will allow a lot of niche and previously unavailable books be read, which could possible lead to a rise in the small press.

As for the censorship problem… well some governments will try it but so far digital media has been almost impossible to police, so I think in today’s political climate it is probably something of a non-issue, although something to be aware of nonetheless for sure. In fairness I think the bigger problem will be the loss of control that authors/publishers will have of their intellectual property. And of course the problem of data rot. Drop your removable hard drive: loose everything. Server crash or hackers on your online back-up account (or they go bust because it’s impossible to make money online): loose everything. It all seems very fragile to me.

I think it’ll certainly be interesting times for books, but, call me a doom-sayer, I think ultimately the book trade will have very big problem coping with all this and it’ll be the reading public who will loose out, again.