Storming the Amazon Castle.

Today I’m featuring a guest post by a young man who has worked in both mom and pop bookstores and Big Box Bookstores. He’s also a book appraiser. For those of you who want to hear more, Dan can be found over at The Reign in Maine.

Welcome to my world, Dan.

Is Amazon killing bookstores? It’s a question on many minds after an Amazon offer this last weekend awarding people who scanned books at their local bookstores, comparing the prices there to Amazon’s, with a 5% credit towards a purchase, while at the same time reminding them that they could order the book far cheaper online.

The answer is yes.

Before you go storming the Amazon castle with pitchforks and torches, know this; Amazon isn’t doing it alone, and it’s not Amazon’s fault.

Also know that it’s not necessarily a bad thing.

Books, and writing, are very much like living organisms. They have evolved from wedges on clay to images on papyrus, from characters to alphabets, from hand-copied manuscripts to printed and bound books. At each stage the printed word never died, never went away, never ceased to be relevant. The ebook is next in the evolutionary stage of writing, and like each previous stage, it will change the way we approach books.

People love bookstores, me more than most, but brick and mortar bookstores have been disappearing from under our noses for years now. Box stores have taken from us the mom and pop bookstores as readily as they have neighborhood groceries, tailors, novelty shops, and the like. We haven’t cared because, frankly, shopping at a big box bookstore is so very much more rewarding. The stock is far better, prices cheaper, and the big box bookstores often staff the same snobbish, elitist, book nerdy folks who would have been working in the dusty overstuffed independent store, had it still existed, so your desire to have your reading list mocked was also fulfilled.

But now, suddenly, we worry. Ebooks are poised to kill off local bookstores entirely in a quick, and bloody coup. Ebooks and ebook readers have created the biggest revolution in reading since Gutenberg, and just as moveable type sent scribes into a panic, operators and customer of independent bookstores fear for their lives.

Sorry guys, the war is over, you never had a chance.

But what does all this mean to us book readers? I’ll tell you what it means. It means that millions more books are available to us now; and the prices range from very affordable to very free. It means that thousands of classics, books in the public domain, money that until recently went directly to the publisher, are now a click away at no cost at all. And the best part is; we never even have to read them. They can sit on whatever device we use, along with hundreds of others, just waiting to be opened. If we don’t open them, instead of wasting shelf space, the books exist in an electric ether, neither here nor there, out of sight and out of mind until we’re ready to read them. It’s a very natural progression, from the writer’s brain to the computer’s brain with no messy paper and ink in between.

It also means that every author, all those tireless typists who can’t get agents or publishers to even take their opus out of the envelope, can now share their work with the world and let the public decide what can and can’t make money. It means instead of spending your savings at Kinko’s and hoping that your local bookstore will take a work on consignment, you can now simply upload your book to any ebookstore you’d like and just sit back and wait for the royalties to roll in.

You see, unlike music and movie producers who are more than happy to pass whatever shit crosses their desk onto the consumer (Battleship the movie anyone?) and then complain that they aren’t making money because of piracy, publishers have grown increasingly narrow when deciding what gets published. These days, unless your book is full of vampires, or in the case of romance, barrel-chested time-travelling Scottish vampire ghosts, getting your book published is more difficult then dividing up the Holy Land. Stores like Amazon have changed the way books get from the author to the consumer, forcing publishers to change as well, benefiting both ends of the production line.

So yes, stores such as Amazon, like a logging company in a spotted owl habitat, are turning bookstores into an endangered species. Your local bookstore is being crushed under the eglacier of the ebook ice age. But before you put on your black veil and mourn the end of bookstores (while secretly hoping for a quick funeral service so you can get back to the new riveting book you downloaded on your Kindle of course) you should also know that brick and mortar bookstores will never truly be dead.

Books, physical books, are too much a part of our psyches to completely disappear. New bookstores, even entities like Barnes and Noble, won’t be with us much longer, but used bookstores will continue a furtive existence in the dark, musty corners of big cities and small towns all over the world. There will always be just enough people who desire the mildewed smell of yellowed paper, the brittle texture of an aged page, and the unmistakable feeling of warmth that holding a book in your hands brings. No one wants to pay ten bucks to experience that with the new Dan Brown when they can download it for seven (still too much if you ask me), but people will always treasure that old Kurt Vonnegut, or Tolkien, Joseph Heller, J.D. Salinger. These books, and books like them, will never translate into e-form, not entirely, and there will always be a need for bookstores to cater to the people who desire the complete book experience.

So yes, you will see bookstores close their doors, but there will always be one, somewhere, if you look hard enough. And in the meantime, appreciate what businesses like Amazon have done for books. We have more access to more literature than at any other point in history and it’s not thanks to local, independent booksellers, but innovators like Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and other cutting edge stores that have permanently changed the way we read.

Thanks, Dan.

***A little bit of my own business. Yes, this is the spot for the Stuff Your Stockings blog hop. Leave me a comment to enter for a copy of my SFR, Captured. Here’s the link for major swag: http://thebloghopspot.com/event-page/

Related posts:

1. David Farland has a very interesting perspective. I’m so glad I signed up for these newsletters. Here...

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.