A gift certificate led to an interesting trip to the local Barnes & Noble today. I hadn’t been there in a while and was surprised to find very few books when I walked in the door. Half the front of the store was a display for their ebook reader and the other half seemed to be games, toys, and random stuff. For a minute I wondered if they even had books anymore. It turns out they do, but almost all the paper books were in the back of the store and there did seem to be fewer of them. A quick check on the internet when I got home revealed that Amazon has been selling more ebooks than hardcovers for a while now.
Is the paper book in its death thoes? I’m not sure that’s true, but something is definitely happening. It seems to me there will always be a place for paper books, however diminished, but there’s little doubt that the system for publishing, marketing and distributing books is in a state of dramatic transformation. Where all the pieces are going to land is the subject for a lot of speculation in the news, but I feel like I just read the writing on the wall.
Also, I’ve thought about getting a Kindle.
matthewlowes.com 