SF Signal: Why Booksellers Are Going Belly Up

Why Booksellers Are Going Belly Up

AlterNet.org explains Why Booksellers Are Going Belly Up. One cited reason: The book is dying...

"Perhaps the hardest cut to endure is that books as we know them are fading, bit by bit, from ubiquity. We can no longer presume they'll always be here. Actual books, with covers and pages and bindings and type, are increasingly artifacts, relics -- old school, silverfish food, without hyperlinks. How long before that $24.95 best-seller, bought on Amazon yesterday, is displayed in a museum alongside rotary phones, cyclamates, and bustles? That's why the death of Cody's hurts: For all those who used to sneak-read as children under the covers with flashlights and books, it presages our own obsolescence."

[Link via A Progressive on the Prairie]

I look around my reading room and wonder how we can come to the conclusion that the book is going to be in a museum somewhere?

See my friend Pete Young's recent Live Journal entry:

http://flyingsauce.livejournal.com/218799.html

Looks like the books are dying!

Some bookstores are dying. Others are thriving. The business is shifting. The "big boxes" are coming, and smaller stores are dying or adapting. The ones that adapt are finding new niches. How many small booksellers are now on eBay? ABEBooks.com? Other internet niches?

Did Cody's die because books are dying or because San Francisco rents are hilarious and neighborhoods are changing, so what they carried may not have any longer reflected the taste of the inhabitants of the neighborhood?

Posted by Fred Kiesche on Friday August 25, 2006 at 6:31 AM