Bookstores Now, More than Ever
February 9th, 2011 · 18 Comments
by Kassia Krozser
The loss of booksellers — traditional and innovative — is a huge blow to book discovery.
Predictions about the future are difficult, mostly because it hasn’t happened yet. Darn future! There is no doubt that the bookselling landscape will change. Some, most notably Mike Shatzkin, are wondering what the physical bookselling landscape will look like in five years. I agree with Mike that it will be vastly different. But do I think (physical) bookstores will go the way of dinosaurs? Absolutely not. We are human. We are social animals. We need someone to wait patiently while we painstakingly describe the book we want, finding it for us despite the fact we a) got the author wrong, b) described the cover art wrong, and c) described the entire plot wrong. We want someone to talk to us about books and guide us.
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