WP Covers my book club!

Michael Rosenwald's article on the troubles of book superstores in the face of Amazon's challenge and ebooks is featured on the first page of today's Washington Post. The article begins with a few paragraphs on last week's meeting of our history book club at the local Borders book store, a meeting which Mr. Rosenwald observed. As readers of this blog may know, I have been a member of the club for something like five or six years.

Let me begin by carping on a comment made "above the fold" of the WP:

"This group is challenged by e-mail," said Christian Minor, a physicist and longtime member.

I am a long time member of the group, and I do not feel challenged by e-mail, except that I receive too much of it. I may be an old guy, but my blogs have had something like a million page views; I have something like 4,500 followers on Twitter, and I am heavily connected on social networking sites, especially Linked In.

I have put away my Kindle and I buy books from Borders face-to-face with the staff. I do so because I value the advice and assistance of the staff. I don't know about the executives who run the Borders chain, but I find the people who are actually in the stores to be friendly and to know a lot about books. I realize that unless I buy books on paper from my local Borders book store, I won't have the chance to do so in the future and that would be a shame.

Source

While the graph above suggests that Borders has lost market share, especially to Amazon.com, eight percent of the U.S. book market is nothing to sneeze at and can serve as a good base for restoration of the competitiveness of the chain. Part of the problem of the Borders superstores is that they lost a lot of business as CDs have been replaced by other forms of music, since Borders used to do a lot of music business. I see that the stores are now diversifying to do more sales of DVDs and book related accessories, as well as even some toys. Borders offers a variety of e-book readers in its stores, and does compete for online book sales.

Obviously the digital revolution is changing the market for lots of products, including books and book stores as well as the WP itself. It may be that book stores will suffer the fate of the merchants who once sold buggys (to be pulled by horses), with many going out of business and some becoming successful in auto sales. Even as fast food restaurants have become ubiquitous supermarkets have become bigger and able to offer a larger variety of consumer goods; perhaps Borders will make a similar adjustment to that of the successful food store chains. I hope so.

In my last posting, based on a book I bought at Borders and expect to discuss at the next meeting of the history book club, I considered the impact of the Information Revolution on libraries. Clearly they too are adjusting to new conditions but I find it hard to believe that our society would be so foolish as to dispense with organized repositories for books and the service of professional librarians. I hope we will continue to enjoy both libraries and book stores, and benefit from the people who serve in them. I encourage you to patronize both your local Borders and your local library!