by AStonesThrow | 2025-04-10 05:00:39+00:00
Okay, well, the article in the OP describes a situation in Great Britain, and I'm unsure how accurately it describes the bookshop industry in the United States.

Here's what I've seen: Amazon.com came online as a bookseller, chiefly, and began to eat the lunch of every brick-and-mortar. Then in turn, independent sellers began shopping in those stores in order to snap up inventory and sell it in their cottage-industry online shops. My cousin noted, back around 2010, that many antique, thrifts, and secondhand stores were clogged not with consumers, but shoppers and arbitrators and pickers, just scavenging for anything they could sell.

Between 2016-2019 I was in ministry with a small "lending library" at church. We had two bookshelves full of books that parishioners might enjoy reading. We had just lost our entire inventory when I started, and so it was up to me to sift through donations, especially estates of the deceased, to build up the collection again. I destroyed a lot of bad titles in those days. I noticed that there wasn't a lot of demand to borrow, nor theft, except for the non-book media such as DVDs. There was someone interested in messing up all my organizational work, though. I began to realize there was no good way to recycle or donate the unwanted titles, and eventually I was sort of forced out when a deluge of Spanish-language books came in, and I couldn't keep up with the evaluations and the shelves were full anyway.

I've also hung out in libraries for a long time. Now if you have visited libraries over the last 5 decades, you've noticed dwindling shelf-space for physical books, as computer labs and other tech takes over. It's plain to see in action: nobody really wants to check out books on such a scale as in the 1980s. eBooks are hot properties, along with CDs, DVDs and video games, oh man the shelf space given over to electronic media now! Ask any librarian and they will tell you about the proportionate need for space in this regard.

Furthermore, there's this quiet revolution in "libraries" known as "Little Free Library". My municipality and many others sponsor and encourage them. They're essentially little residential kiosks where any passerby can take a book or leave a book. Essentially many become dumping grounds for unwanted titles and real junk, I suppose, but perhaps have some utility for bookworm types who stroll through neighborhoods, walking dogs, jogging, and hob-nobbing with suburban neighbors. Many cafés also have such library shelves for customer sharing. Books are often useful for very small children to have and pass down.

Going to college in 2017-2023, I noticed a lot of classes where students carried no books, no notebook, and not even a backpack! They'd bring in their phone to class! The eBook could easily be accessed online from an app, so why carry those hella-heavy books around? Many students in I.T., coding, and other tech subjects would have negative use for dead-trees and we regarded them as pure anathema, because it was all about the online access to edu materials. Books and the bookstore did exist, and there were mandatory titles in many disciplines, but always had eBook counterparts. (And yes, I saw The Half-Blood Prince and I understand the value of a well-loved secondhand text!)

Lastly I managed to divest my home of every single book I own, save for a few personal titles and a Bible or two. I found that I never sit down and read a book except in power-outages or trying to drift-off to sleep. Books are too heavy to carry on the bus, and impractical to store on a shelf when I'm not home. Every resource is vastly more useful when loaded into cloud storage for me. I've been unsuccessful in eliminating paper, and I still use a printer, and I still receive paper email in the USPS, but as for books, they're history.

So all this above stuff makes me shake my head at this OP. When I hung out in the libraries I read some classic fiction and got some good learning, but the library situation itself is pointing to a book-free future IMHO. I've known some great bookshops in my day, and cats to go with them, and they were anchors in the community for people to just chill and sit around, but I still regard them as Apatosaurs in this digital age.