"I think that the megastore as we know it today will disappear from many towns and those that remain will be only in large urban centers," said Richard Day, publisher of Self-Councel press, which has published DIY legal books since 1971. "My expectation is that bookstores will revert to what they once were: smaller, neighborhood stores concentrating on selling print and digital to an audience with common genre interests. The stores may be book/coffee/tea shop hybrids, with a while-you-wait book printing facility, digital connections to facilitate e-book browsing and purchase, and staff who know and love the books they sell."
Stranger readers shouldn't find this to be a surprise: I said most of this over a year and a half ago.
Regarding while-you-wait book printing: last December, I wrote about the Espresso Book Machine at Third Place Books (a second has since opened up at University Book Store, which makes Seattle, I believe, the only metro area in the US with more than one EBM). EBM's COO gave an optimistic interview about the future of print-on-demand books to Book Business earlier this week. Here he is on why e-books don't hurt the EBM's business:
Perhaps counterintuitively, the growth of e-books is a net positive for us, as more digital content available to e-readers means more available to our EspressNet catalog of content. In addition, as publishers release books in both e-format and print-format, the overall impact of e-books (if it reduces print books) will be to drive more titles into POD or digital-print platforms, and by extension, our network, because run lengths will get shorter.According to a recent article in The Economist("Just Press Print," Feb. 25, 2010), which prominently featured our technology, 6 percent of books in the US are now printed on toner-based or inkjet machines (a rough proxy for print-on-demand) as opposed to on offset presses. Citing projections from [research and consultancy firm] InterQuest, The Economist article estimates that this ratio will increase to 15 percent over the next five years.
In other news, there is now a library in Amsterdam Airport. Apparently, this is the first library ever built in an airport. This is such a good idea; I'm shocked that the concept of airport libraries wasn't invented forty years ago.
