The debate about e-books versus their deadwood variants will continue, but the fears about the era of print ending ebbed somewhat recently after e-books registered slower sales growth. There are many reasons why the possibility of the end of printed books keeps me up at nights, but the most important of them concerns retail. Securing the future of paper books is intimately tied to the viability of bookshops. Books are one of the few commodities for which the manner of retail has a direct impact on the kind of books that are ultimately published. Nothing can replicate the discovery of books that happens in an old-fashioned bookshop — left to only online bookstores, for all the convenience and chance to sample chapters that they offer, what is recommended to us would be just a function of what we previously bought or sampled or said we liked. It’s why we need to periodically spin through many, many bookshops to get a proper update of the world of fiction and ideas. Moreover, without the possibility of discovery in a bookshop, without the possibility of readers chancing upon new subjects and writers that are not immediately of interest to the media and review pages, many book proposals may not be viable for publishers to commission. That’s not all. The place of a bookshop in a society holds importance for freedom of expression. Through time, bookshops have offered the strongest resistance to the censor, with sellers quietly stocking books officially banned or targeted through customs curbs.
Some of my favourite books about bookshops:
The Yellow-Lighted Bookshop: A Memoir, a History by Lewis Buzbee — Buzbee, a former bookseller, paints a 360-degree profile of the special civilisational place of the bookshop, and makes a case for his claim that “a bookstore is the city where our fleshed-out inner selves reside”.
This is the Story of a Happy Marriage by Ann Patchett — This collection of essays by the bestselling author of Bel Canto and State of Wonder has a lovely description of her effort to prove wrong the prediction that “bookstores were dead” by starting one of her own.
The Most Dangerous Book: The Battle for James Joyce’s Ulysses by Kevin Birmingham — A biography of Joyce’s masterpiece, it integrates the role played by Sylvia Beach’s iconic Paris bookstore Shakespeare and Company.
