Another Footnote

I'm throwing another old column up here to give context to a follow up that I will post later in August...

Where are the Jet Packs and the Moving Sidewalks???

Well, the PNBA newsletter has gone digital. Welcome to the new millennium… really, welcome to 2000! It’s a crazy world out there, and I have to ask – What took so long? Why are we, as a profession, so far behind the times and so reluctant to change, that we are JUST NOW starting to get newsletters from publishers and other groups? The obvious answer is that we make a living selling that which many consider to be the precursor to the computer and all things digital. Or do we?

When we recommend a book, we don’t talk about the process that took natural fibers, soaked them in water, and then pressed them flat to produce paper. We don’t talk about the cover designer (except, perhaps, to praise or vilify the result), and we don’t impress upon our customer the importance of Library of Congress Cataloging-In-Place Data. We tell them about the story, about the creative thoughts or facts that spellbind us, horrify us, or make us laugh. What we are selling is an expression of a work created by an author.

What booksellers have been slow to embrace is that we need to let go of our reliance on one particular medium. In our defense, we work closely with the publishers who are fighting tooth and nail to keep the book around. We can’t help it, we love books, and we’re enabled by an industry that gives them to us. But think about the companies that have embraced digitization, and then think about the success of these companies. Google.com springs to mind, as does Audible.com and Netflix. Even librarians, our kith and kin, have been quick to bring in more audio books and other media, because they pay attention to their circulation reports, and they see what their customers require.

Now, don’t get me wrong, I don’t believe in the death of the book. I also don’t believe that the bound book will be a curio, a sideline in the ‘thought emporium’ of the future. If you want reassurance about the future of the book, read the wonderful work of David Levy in Scrolling Forward: Making Sense of Documents in the Digital Age. But I do know that we need to rethink the business that we are in, and the business we may be in 5 or 10 years down the line. We need to be ready for the changes that come, to be proactive rather than reactive. The first step in this preparation is utilizing all the 1’s and 0’s in cyberspace to our maximum advantage. This means digital newsletters. This means blogs. This means publisher catalogs online that are tailored to the small store in Montana or Alaska or even central Oregon that is too far away for the bean counters in New York to allow reps to travel to.

Some of you might not know that I started buying and managing for bookstores in the early 90’s. Then I took almost five years off to work in the for-profit education field (go ahead, ask me anything about the GRE…) I waited patiently for a chance at another bookstore, and was shocked to find that when I did return in 2003, things hadn’t changed at all. Sure, there weren’t as many house reps and the ABA was now called BookExpo, but the function of buying books was almost untouched by the world of the internet.

If we wait for the publishers to help us embrace technology, we’re dead in the water. Instead, we need to step to the front and show them just what we can do, to prove our relevance, to make them more responsive to us. I’ve been in enough educational marketing sessions at book shows to know that the ideas are out there. I don’t have all the answers, but together, those of you reading this inaugural PNBA newsletter have an awful lot of them. The tools are there, it’s high time we pick them up.

So kudos to the folks over there in the PNBA basement offices for a first step. Like most milestones in life, there is good and there is bad. Good for the trees, pulped and pressed in order to hold ink; bad for John E. Potter, the current Postmaster General.

What are we few, we happy few booksellers to make of this small shift from print publication to electronic publication? Only time will tell, and our success hinges on just how long we allow that time to be. After all, you’d be lying through your teeth if you haven’t wondered publicly or privately about the death of the book. I know I have…