The death of the novel has been predicted regularly for as long as I can remember, but it seems to survive all attempts to talk it into oblivion.
Now I’m wondering if the same will happen to bookshops.
The concept of big chains certainly seems to be in a nosedive. The huge Borders organisation hived off its two main satellites in the UK and Australia some years ago. They both kept going independently for a while, but the UK version bit the dust about eighteen months ago, a casualty of the economic crisis that pretty well brought the whole world to its knees; and now both the Aussie version and what used to be the parent company in the USA are set fair to follow. A pity: here in the UK at least, Borders were the good guys among chain booksellers.
Waterstone’s is still afloat for the time being, thanks to monetary input from the Russians, who seem to be the only people with any cash to spare at the moment. But according to the handy little information sources that drop into my in box most mornings, the remaining American giant Barnes & Noble isn’t exactly in clover. Maybe that explains why I was stalked by an over-keen assistant in the Flagstaff branch last month: something that’s never happened before. Possibly he was just trying to be helpful, but I had a hard time persuading him that I wasn’t looking for any particular author’s work - I wanted to see what was on the shelves before I decided what to buy. (Not quite true, actually, but a bookshop is for browsing, not the hard sell.) I’d better hold on to the printed carrier bag they gave me; it could become a collector’s item.
There’s better news about independents, who, it’s devoutly to be hoped, are motivated by their customers’ tastes and requirements rather than by the blandishments and marketing fees of vast publishing conglomerates. Only this week I read of one which has doubled its floor area, and a couple of months ago I visited another which had just moved up the street into larger premises.
It’s not that people aren’t buying books. Amazon is thriving, and other online booksellers aren’t doing so badly. And of course sales of eBooks are growing exponentially. Which is probably the shops’ biggest problem.
I don’t have an eReader, and for the time being at least, I have no plans to buy one. Partly because I’m a quaint old-fashioned creature who actually loves the feel, smell and experience of paper leaves between cardboard covers.
No, not partly: mainly. But there’s also an element of waiting for the technology to settle down. When manufacturers of eReaders sort themselves out, decide on a single format and become interchangeable instead of pulling against each other and jumping up and down for attention like spoilt children, I may possibly succumb. We haven’t just run out of bookshelf space in our house; we’ve actually run out of walls to hang new bookshelves on. So there may come a time when necessity outweighs sentiment.
Then again, maybe not. Curling up in an armchair with a piece of plastic somehow isn’t the same.
So what’s to be done? Do we just sit back and let it all find its own level? Going back to my first observation, it could be deduced that the book trade seems quite good at looking after itself; the novel certainly hasn’t died yet, and given the stack I’m currently working my way through – mainly crime, but not all by any means – if I’m any kind of microcosm, it doesn’t even have a dose of summer ‘flu.
Maybe what’s happening to the chain bookshops is just an Awful Warning. Perhaps some booksellers have got it wrong, in which case we have to ask if they actually deserve to survive. I’m looking forward to seeing what happens to Waterstone’s now they’ve put a real bookseller in charge.
Or maybe it’s just the world turning and settling into a new shape. It does that now and again.
Any thoughts, Dead Guy followers?
