If you want to read a book, unless you plan on reading it all in one sitting, impossible if you’ve picked a big old obsolete kicker, you’ll need a bookmark to avoid dogeared pages, and a place to store your book while you go about your other business: rucksack, briefcase, purse, table, shelf – an empty pocket, maybe. Books are not nomadic. Reading is a sedentary exercise. As for the argument for obsoleting print books in favor of ebooks, they require a hot reading device with batteries or electricity hookup nearby. A paper book might be simpler, and nothing worse than on the bus ride home and coming to the denouement of your thriller a pop-up appears telling you to plug in your device, you’ve only got 5% battery left, and your screen suddenly turns to an overcast sky, and you don’t know who done it.
Read enough books and you might even think about writing one yourself. But how do you turn that thought into a book? And what kind of book? In Louis Menand’s most recent piece for The New Yorker (August 26, 2024), he says, “Not only is there no settled definition of what counts as a bookstore; there is no settled definition of what counts as a book” (68). But that’s not to say books are not counted. They are, ad infinitum. Suffice to say, however you define or count it, your chances of your book selling off the shelves are worse than finding life on Mars. You’d have a better chance going viral with a reel of your recent garage sale. In any case, again no matter how you define and count them, you’ll always be confronted with the existential theorem that says the number of books sold will never be the same as the number of books read: it will always be more or less – most probably more sold than read. But if you persist in writing your book, try a romance. According to Menand, “The big winner in the pandemic was the romance novel. Eighteen million print copies were sold in 2020; in 2023, more than thirty-nine million copies were sold. Romance is among Amazon’s most popular genres” (72).
But Menand’s piece isn’t so much about books as about bookstores. A “Critic at Large” feature, it’s titled on-line at The New Yorker site, “Are Bookstores Just a Waste of Space? In the online era, brick-and-mortar book retailers have been forced to redefine themselves, but the print issue title is “Remainders: Why do bookstores still exist?” A remainder, in the book industry, is an unsold book, a writer’s doom word. Much to our disappointment, but not really diminishing his article, Menand doesn’t mention Penelope Fitzgerald’s “The Bookshop” (1978, movie version 2017). There you’ll find not the augmented hopes of the would be writer but the diminished hopes of the would be independent bookshop owner. We must read carefully for the antagonist though – there are several, for the odds of a bookstore succeeding may not be much better than the odds of a book being read.
Maybe bookstores still exist, and persist, like public libraries, because they appeal to the painting of a desired cultural landscape that includes a peaceful Main Street lined with shade trees and with ample sidewalk space for browsing the boutique window displays, though without much advertising fanfare but word of mouth. But an industrial setting also works as the cultural landscape: railroad tracks down a block of warehouses, light manufacturing shops of brick walls and metal roofs, building supply stores, a bakery, and a brewery, a National Guard armory – and a poetry reading tonight at the Vacant Lot Bookstore. The most successful bookstore, like the cafe or tavern, will likely be local and, to use Menand’s word, curated, by which he means specialized in a particular genre, the bookseller a trusted critic, the books on hand discussed neither as commodity nor snob fodder but cultural artifact of one’s own time and place.
At the same time, maybe books have nothing to do with bookstores, and the trends are simply part of the overall decrease in interest in offline retail shopping. Bookshops can be of course special places in that they merge the urge to purchase something, anything, with the cultural value, real or perceived, of reading. And many bookstores offer more than a retail outlet. They sponsor readings, art shows, writing classes, lectures, book launches and meet the author opportunities. Some have even added coffee and doughnuts. But as a place to simply go in and buy a book in the window, like going into a phone booth to make a call – well, first you have to find a phone booth. It’s possible that the current decline in retail interest reflects the general current decline in post World War II commercializations, commodifications, standardizations, much of which has moved virtually online, where it’s realized the physical necessity of the thing was never a reality. Why will a person buy something they don’t need?
The Coming of the Toads 