http://www.nybooks.com/articles/19436

I think it is an excellent idea for an independent bookstore to buy a POD machine. Adam, are you on that? And why do we care what the Big Boys are thinking and doing anyway? Last time I checked, it didn’t matter. This is our revolution. This comes down to one thing: It’s that stories do matter and they always will. So figure it out. The comments above would be a good place to start. And, because I care enough to bother with this posting, let me know what I can do for you.

Sorry to harp on about this, but it’s a music analogy again: little record labels survive producing vinyl that the hardcore lovers like, while the big guys get busted by mp3s…

I also think it’s a genius idea for an independent bookshop to buy a POD machine. While it will require remortgaging the shop several times over now, it will become affordable, and who wouldn’t want shop-specific boutique editions? Furthermore, if there’s an out-of-copyright book you want to stock, why don’t you call Lightning Source now?

In our shop the market is for those people who love the physicality of the book and will buy 50+ books a year and cherish the way they sit on their shelves. There’s not many of these people around but just enough to keep our small enterprise afloat and no more.
Luckily there is enough small publishers out there who are still willing to scrape by in similar fashion to produce lovely things to populate our shop.

So, how do we survive? Buy a POD machine, make a beautiful environment for people to feel relaxed, create an informed and balanced selection for people to browse (I don’t think that will change. Customers love noodling in a bookshop) and make a space for people to share recommendations and passions. We won’t survive by attempting to turn into a 300 store nationwide chain filled with books that are sitting on shelves for no particular reason other than they are ‘D’ Core stock range.

Our service will become bespoke and I’m fine with that. But I don’t know what the big boys are going to do?

Accessibility problems will disappear with advances in the technology, and new benefits will emerge. Imagine a reference book with an inbuilt search function, or a self-contained dictionary instead of a glossary.

People will lose them, sure, but people lose mobile phones and ipods all the time, replacing them immediately because their benefits outweigh the cost. And you’ll have backed-up all your books anyway, right?

You’re correct that it’s difficult to make the cd/ipod analogy - that’s why I prefer the chamber music/gramophone one. Music has been through a number of format changes in the past few decades, which has made such changes increasingly comprehensible to the user. Literature has made one or perhaps two in several millenia, so it’s going to be a lot more difficult.

I like books too, and I love my vinyl records, and I expect to always be able to buy both from the kind of second-hand stores that I love. But expecting the book to be the dominant format for much longer is like expecting vinyl to make a serious comeback.

And that’s my point: I’m not really interested in having a will it/won’t it debate about the future digitisation of the book. It is going to happen: let’s start thinking about how.

Despite the often slapdash production quality of books, they’re still very handy. You can easily turn between pages, by keeping a thumb in between pages, you can pop back and forth between different parts of it; shuffling different windows around or even a relatively speedy ability to ‘flick’ between electronic pages would still not be as convenient.

If you lose a book while out, say drinking, something that happens frequently to me, it is annoying, sometimes intensely so, but rarely expensive.

Also I’m not sure the cd/ipod analogy works. Portable music has for some time been seperate from the medium it has been played on - the ipod and downloadable music is a natural progression. This is not the case with the book.

That said, I’m probably being foggy headed and unimaginative. Although there is one other reason why I hope the book stays around; I quite like them.

F Cyclonic