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 How soon will they be outdated?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.
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.”
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.
