Book ‘Em
The other day I was at lunch with a friend in the kind of restaurant that passes for fashionable here in Prague. Among the many stylish attractions was a large flat panel TV conveniently placed to ensure that we couldn’t help seeing it no matter how little interest we had in what was playing. In this case, what was on was an MTV wannabe (I didn’t note the name) playing an endless stream of puerile music videos. We couldn’t hear the sound, but we did notice that every single video, without exception, featured a horde of scantily-clan young ladies flaunting an impressively implausible array of athletic dance moves. It would have been almost titillating if we hadn’t been so incensed by the blatant objectification of women.
This led to the inevitable discussion of the music industry’s woes, and in particular their penchant for blaming digitization for poor sales rather than accepting that no one over 17 wants to buy the crap they’ve been foisting on the listening public for the past ten years. My friend asked me if I thought that bricks-and-morter music stores would eventually disappear altogether. I pointed out that the same doomsday predications had been targeted at the book business after Amazon hit the scene, but turned out to be off the mark. As it turns out, people like to skim through books before buying them. Moreover, the bigbox variety of bookseller (Borders, Barnes&Nobles and so on) has done a pretty good job of countering the digital threat by making their locations fun to hang out in and overpay for coffee and pastries.
But then we hit on a factor I haven’t seen mentioned before: consumption of digital music is a lot more convenient that consumption of digital print. Everything about your iPod and its thousands of virtual albums is better than the old analog experience of slapping a vinyl disk onto a turntable, hopelessly tethered to your living room wall. On the other hand, I know I’m not the only one who absolutely hates reading any text longer than a couple of pages on a computer monitor. I want to be able to read while lying on the couch, sitting in the dentist’s office, riding the bus or… well, you get the picture. There is already a variety of technical solutions for this, but as yet none can rival the portability, simplicity, robustness and reliability of good old pulped trees.
The inevitable conclusion is that book industry, and booksellers in particular, are heading for trouble. It’s a technical certainty that someone will eventually invent a lightweight, flexible e-tome that will let you carry around a veritable library wherever you wander and read any of thousands of selections with the same convenience as a regular book. In my opinion, this is going to happen sooner rather than later; certainly within the next five years. Amazon and company will be well-placed to take advantage of this trend (I dare say they’d be rather pleased to reduce their reliance on physical inventory), but the bricks-and-mortar guys may find themselves struggling to justify their existence.
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