Books

If you are at all a book person and you read the news, lately things have been a bit depressing.  I began thinking about this from an odd angle tonight as Adam and I sat down and watched a cooking documentary featuring some of the world's top chefs and I recalled the first time I had something one would consider fancy fare.  

I was in my late twenties and finally the manager of a bookstore (I am going to refrain from using names, but most who read my blog know where I've worked so filling in the spaces will not be too difficult).  I adored my job, I really did... no matter how stressful or how unrealistic a forty hour work week was, I loved where I worked, my employees, my little store, and my company.  While I worked for a lesser successful portion of the company, I still managed during a pretty successful period on books...Twilight, Harry Potter, big series really boosted sales and more people were reading... OHHH the early 2000s, how the book industry loved you.

Managers were lucky enough to go to a yearly conference where we of course learned ways to better manage our stores, learned about our product, and learned how to really help customers... but we also met famous authors, stayed in lavish hotels like the Dolphin in Disney World, and ate this amazing food prepared by chefs and had fancy little dessert mousse shaped like books with ingredients I'd never tried (I blame this for my love of food now).  Anyone who worked during this time knew that things were going well and even when my small store closed (many people were getting away from small stores as the concept of mega stores caught on), I still believed I worked for this really prosperous company...

Ebooks are a tricky and dangerous mistress.
They are alluring with their ease and storing capacity.  I will not deny that I use them, I do... a lot and perhaps my own usage has contributed to the demise of these big book companies, but I don't think its that simple.

It is easy to say the ebook has destroyed print, but it hasn't... it may force publishers and book dealers to change the way they operate, but everyone has to change with the times to some extent... that does not mean though that every book store should get into the hardware business because THAT is not profitable, especially when company ownership shifts, goals shifts, priorities shift, and employees are no longer important to maintaining success.  When you cut hours, cut benefits, and try to find the cheapest labor while pushing a device instead of the actual item in your title BOOKSTORE, you lose important parts of your business and while I do not think that alone has harmed book dealers in the last ten years, I do not believe it has helped one single iota.  

For those of us who still adore books, who find them vital to cultural survival and believe that a space for those books is necessary... we want to see things go backwards for once.  No, I do not mean embrace some archaic 19th century notion of the bookshop... modern bookstores do a few things really right (no matter how much a lingering hours long customer can grate on the nerves)... cafes, cozy spaces, internet access, and BOOKS (at an affordable price...this is where the publishers who are truly murdering the business come in), all need to converge in an area staffed by competent, willing, and friendly people...like it was say... five years ago.... Yes ebooks are a component of the business now that should not be avoided... BUT
I do not believe it is a good idea to push the idea of an electronic book over your ACTUAL PHYSICAL PRODUCT at all and doing that may turn a profit tomorrow, but it will shut you down in two weeks.  

I'm kind of out of the book business, moving on to an also dying profession, academics... but it does not mean that I don't worry.  I worry a lot because I think that if we let this part of our psyche die (even if its just in the US...the bookshops I visited in the UK seemed pretty busy and not focused at all on the digital format), it will be a terrible loss that we as a society will lament and I don't just say that because I am a book nerd, I say that because I think reading, the act of looking at a book, looking at the words on the back, choosing carefully which book you will take home... these are important things.