Bookstores in Japan are closing at a high rate: about a third have gone in the last ten years. The Mainichi has a story, linked to by Nate Hoffelder.
Now this could be a peculiar manifestation of Japanese culture, or it might be an awful warning to us all. I’m not keeping score, but it does seem that the pandemic has been quite kind to the book trade and that a few more bookshops have opened than have closed over the past three years. Book sales are buoyant, and although Amazon’s grabbed a lot of that, local bookshops have played their part.
However, there is a logic trap here. Last century having access to a healthy retail environment (as well as more or less exclusive access to the printing press) meant that publishers were sitting pretty at the top of a supply chain pyramid. Of course publishers, by nature Quixotic, were well able to make losses even on such a tilted playing field, but bookstores were an essential part of their world. This is so much less true today: though all publishers do still behave as if they believed that bookstores are necessary to their survival — it’s expensive for example to run a team of sales representatives. The big problem is that you can discern a mode of survival now which simply doesn’t include a bricks-and-mortar retail component.
OK, people do like to look at a book before buying it. But if they can’t handle it, I don’t think that means that they’ll refuse to buy it. It means they’ll cross their fingers and hope for the best. Or more likely, they’ll look at it online, either at the publisher’s site or at an online retail site. Obviously this isn’t as good as holding the book in your hand, but it’s better than buying blind. And we’re all used to returning stuff now.
Sentiment is tough to slough off — but consider the fact that we give bookstores a sizable discount off the price of our books. Do I risk bringing about catastrophe by expressing the thought “why are we giving a forty-five percent discount to sell something we can perfectly well sell ourselves”? A book sold direct-to-customer requires no discounting, though publishers, who find it hard to imagine ever selling books at full price, do tend to offer customers a small discount anyway. Now of course online sellers also require discounts, usually, because of their buying power, even larger than a local bookshop, but because so large a percentage of book sales go through that channel, committing to D2C looks terrifying. Nobody wants to be a first mover, reviled for ever as the killer of the bookshop. Inertia’s not a great basis for business success.
I don’t see the ebook taking over from the print book though. This is not so much because of the virtues of the tried and true format of the codex, which we’ve all been brought up to revere — it’s because the ebook is such a lousy format. OK, OK, I read lots of ebooks myself, but maybe it just puts me in the old curmudgeon category that I don’t get as much out of them. You can blame publishers if you like, but we need to devise techniques for navigation around a digital text. Some books do a better job than others, but in none am I completely confident in referring to an endnote, looking at an illustration, reading detail in a table, without nervousness about ever getting back to where I started from. In most cases I just don’t refer to anything; I just read through the not-overwhelmingly-beautiful text turning neither to the left nor to the right. Now just because ebooks are less than perfect does not mean that someone won’t some day soon come up with something different that’ll knock our collective socks off. Indeed, I’d bet that that’s almost a certainty.
The one real certainty is that change is inevitable. If there’s any writing on the wall, however, it sure isn’t saying “invest in bookselling”.
See also Bookstore outlook — a glummer take, Bookstore outlook, and Bookstore futures.