Skip to content
ADVERTISEMENT
Sign In
  • Sections
    • News
    • Advice
    • The Review
  • Topics
    • Data
    • Diversity, Equity, & Inclusion
    • Finance & Operations
    • International
    • Leadership & Governance
    • Teaching & Learning
    • Scholarship & Research
    • Student Success
    • Technology
    • Transitions
    • The Workplace
  • Magazine
    • Current Issue
    • Special Issues
    • Podcast: College Matters from The Chronicle
  • Newsletters
  • Virtual Events
  • Ask Chron
  • Store
    • Featured Products
    • Reports
    • Data
    • Collections
    • Back Issues
  • Jobs
    • Find a Job
    • Post a Job
    • Professional Development
    • Career Resources
    • Virtual Career Fair
  • More
  • Sections
    • News
    • Advice
    • The Review
  • Topics
    • Data
    • Diversity, Equity, & Inclusion
    • Finance & Operations
    • International
    • Leadership & Governance
    • Teaching & Learning
    • Scholarship & Research
    • Student Success
    • Technology
    • Transitions
    • The Workplace
  • Magazine
    • Current Issue
    • Special Issues
    • Podcast: College Matters from The Chronicle
  • Newsletters
  • Virtual Events
  • Ask Chron
  • Store
    • Featured Products
    • Reports
    • Data
    • Collections
    • Back Issues
  • Jobs
    • Find a Job
    • Post a Job
    • Professional Development
    • Career Resources
    • Virtual Career Fair
    Upcoming Events:
    An AI-Driven Work Force
    AI and Microcredentials
Sign In
The Chronicle Review

Shelf Life

By Ian Desai January 14, 2013
Shelf Life 1
Tim Foley for The Chronicle Review
Shelf Life

Tim Foley for The Chronicle Review

As retailers around the country were hawking e-readers with escalating fervor leading up to Black Friday, Cyber Monday, and the holiday shopping season, many consumers found themselves lost in a sea of feature comparisons and indecision about the latest Kindles, Nooks, and iPads. Questions abound: How do the screens perform in sunlight? How often do the gadgets have to be charged? What happens when they are dropped on the ground? Can they annotate text? Are any of them really worth the money? How soon will they be outdated?

To continue reading for FREE, please sign in.

Sign In

Or subscribe now to read with unlimited access for as low as $10/month.

Don’t have an account? Sign up now.

A free account provides you access to a limited number of free articles each month, plus newsletters, job postings, salary data, and exclusive store discounts.

Sign Up

Shelf Life

Tim Foley for The Chronicle Review

As retailers around the country were hawking e-readers with escalating fervor leading up to Black Friday, Cyber Monday, and the holiday shopping season, many consumers found themselves lost in a sea of feature comparisons and indecision about the latest Kindles, Nooks, and iPads. Questions abound: How do the screens perform in sunlight? How often do the gadgets have to be charged? What happens when they are dropped on the ground? Can they annotate text? Are any of them really worth the money? How soon will they be outdated?

Meanwhile, as Americans continued to pick their way through the continuing chaos of the e-reader wars, books—the physical objects—have been showing signs of renewed life after several years of being pronounced dead or dying. In an October article in The Wall Street Journal, Joe Queenan defended books as a “perfect delivery system” for ideas and information. Book historians like Leah Price have pointed out that hype about the imminent death of the book has been around for centuries. The title of a new collection of interviews with Umberto Eco sums up the conclusions of a number of recent meditations on print culture today: “This Is Not the End of the Book.”

This renewed passion for print is not just talk.

This past summer saw successful community book sales around the United States. For example, at a mid-August roadside book sale sponsored by the Union Public Library in Tiverton, R.I., a lawn full of books was crowded with dozens of people browsing and buying, often by the bagful. In Connecticut, the town of Norfolk’s library held its annual sale at the end of August and sold 5,000 books in the course of a weekend. In Chicago, outdoor community book sales stretched into late October—cold weather be damned.

By far the biggest book sale of the year took place in Avery, Tex. In scorching heat, the author and bookseller Larry McMurtry unloaded approximately 300,000 books into the hands of eager buyers from around the country. The sale, playfully called “The Last Book Sale,” helped seed a phalanx of used-book stores in Arkansas, California, and Pennsylvania, among other places. And McMurtry still kept 150,000 books or so at his own store, in Avery.

If this is what death looks like for the world of books, we may be in heaven.

Of course, by definition secondhand books are those that people unload before other people come along and pick them up. The key part, though, is that buyers exist. People still want books, need books, love books, and will part with their hard-earned money to keep company with books. A strong secondhand market is not a sign of the death of books, any more than the vast used-car market is a sign that Americans have abandoned their automotive ways.

And unlike most used cars, secondhand books can forge bonds among owners, as readers meet and create a community of common interest. Secondhand books serve as living archives for communities of readers spanning generations. Marginalia, underlining, and other annotations provide a record of the unique social history of a particular copy of a book.

For scholars, mining such information—whether food stains or forgotten train tickets tucked between pages or dueling sets of marginalia—provides fascinating and vital information about how books have been “used” for varying, and sometimes revolutionary, purposes across years, decades, and centuries.

Yet the question remains: Is the only future for books a used one? Is summer the one season books can thrive, before we retreat inside to stare at screens all winter? Will retail bookstores go the way of record stores?

No, no, and no. Because of the way people and books mix—with passion, curiosity, frequency, longevity—books and bookstores are very much alive around the country.

One of the best retail bookstores in America is the Seminary Co-Op, in Chicago. Established in 1961 in the basement of the Chicago Theological Seminary, on the campus of the University of Chicago, the co-op is a labyrinthine bunker of books that has provided an education in itself for several generations of its patrons. In late November, the co-op closed temporarily in order to move into a new space, above ground, a block away.

ADVERTISEMENT

When I visited the basement premises on its penultimate day of operation, I was greeted by a store packed with customers who seemed to think of the bookstore the way I do—as a home away from home. I made new friends, caught up with old friends, even participated in an independent oral-history project about the co-op. (While I was there, a couple was being interviewed who had first met in the store. They brought their daughter along to show it to her.) The atmosphere almost felt like a party—not a going-away party, but a here-to-stay celebration.

Far from nearing its demise, the brick-and-mortar world of books in the United States, both new and secondhand, may be in the midst of a resurgence. Last year sales at independent bookstores increased more than 15 percent from the previous year during the week of Thanksgiving, according to the American Booksellers Association. The latest figures suggest a further double-digit increase in sales at independent bookstores this year.

Meanwhile, e-book sales have slowed, and e-reader sales are in an “alarmingly precipitous decline,” in the words of a recent industry report from IHS iSuppli, a market-research firm, having fallen 36 percent from their 2011 highs, with further projected declines on the horizon.

The novelist Ann Patchett, co-owner of Parnassus Books, in Nashville, reflected in The Atlantic about consumers’ turn away from online retailers and back toward brick-and-mortar shops: “Now that we could order any book at any hour without having to leave the screen in front of us, we realized what we had lost: the community center, the human interaction, the recommendation of a smart reader rather than a computer algorithm telling us what other shoppers had purchased.”

ADVERTISEMENT

Perhaps it is the purveyors of digital devices who should be insecure about the future. Despite their best efforts, their relatively flimsy and expensive products often fall short of the intuitive, durable, and simple interface provided by the ancient technology of ink on paper. Most notably, these electronic devices are failing the social test that has underscored the success of print culture. Not only have e-readers, tablets, and smartphones made it difficult for users to share content, but such devices are also cited as causal factors of stress and social isolation. When social media produce antisocial behavior, their fundamental value proposition collapses.

Fortunately, where these gadgets fail, physical books, bought and sold by physical people, are succeeding because they help create and sustain meaningful human relationships. Books, it turns out, are in the prime of their lives.

We welcome your thoughts and questions about this article. Please email the editors or submit a letter for publication.
Tags
Opinion
Share
  • Twitter
  • LinkedIn
  • Facebook
  • Email
ADVERTISEMENT
ADVERTISEMENT

More News

Photo illustration showing Santa Ono seated, places small in the corner of a dark space
'Unrelentingly Sad'
Santa Ono Wanted a Presidency. He Became a Pariah.
Illustration of a rushing crowd carrying HSI letters
Seeking precedent
Funding for Hispanic-Serving Institutions Is Discriminatory and Unconstitutional, Lawsuit Argues
Photo-based illustration of scissors cutting through paper that is a photo of an idyllic liberal arts college campus on one side and money on the other
Finance
Small Colleges Are Banding Together Against a Higher Endowment Tax. This Is Why.
Pano Kanelos, founding president of the U. of Austin.
Q&A
One Year In, What Has ‘the Anti-Harvard’ University Accomplished?

From The Review

Photo- and type-based illustration depicting the acronym AAUP with the second A as the arrow of a compass and facing not north but southeast.
The Review | Essay
The Unraveling of the AAUP
By Matthew W. Finkin
Photo-based illustration of the Capitol building dome propped on a stick attached to a string, like a trap.
The Review | Opinion
Colleges Can’t Trust the Federal Government. What Now?
By Brian Rosenberg
Illustration of an unequal sign in black on a white background
The Review | Essay
What Is Replacing DEI? Racism.
By Richard Amesbury

Upcoming Events

Plain_Acuity_DurableSkills_VF.png
Why Employers Value ‘Durable’ Skills
Warwick_Leadership_Javi.png
University Transformation: a Global Leadership Perspective
  • Explore Content
    • Latest News
    • Newsletters
    • Letters
    • Free Reports and Guides
    • Professional Development
    • Virtual Events
    • Chronicle Store
    • Chronicle Intelligence
    • Jobs in Higher Education
    • Post a Job
  • Know The Chronicle
    • About Us
    • Vision, Mission, Values
    • DEI at The Chronicle
    • Write for Us
    • Work at The Chronicle
    • Our Reporting Process
    • Advertise With Us
    • Brand Studio
    • Accessibility Statement
  • Account and Access
    • Manage Your Account
    • Manage Newsletters
    • Individual Subscriptions
    • Group and Institutional Access
    • Subscription & Account FAQ
  • Get Support
    • Contact Us
    • Reprints & Permissions
    • User Agreement
    • Terms and Conditions
    • Privacy Policy
    • California Privacy Policy
    • Do Not Sell My Personal Information
1255 23rd Street, N.W. Washington, D.C. 20037
© 2025 The Chronicle of Higher Education
The Chronicle of Higher Education is academe’s most trusted resource for independent journalism, career development, and forward-looking intelligence. Our readers lead, teach, learn, and innovate with insights from The Chronicle.
Follow Us
  • twitter
  • instagram
  • youtube
  • facebook
  • linkedin