Ultimately, who will be the winner? The brick and mortar book stores or e-book publishers? Will more people use the library or purchase their books?In the past two weeks, two stories in the news have caught my attention. The first had to do with the opening of some Amazon brick-and-mortar bookstores? Really, the king of online shopping is going to have bookstores that people can actually walk into? Interesting. Who would have ever thought? I probably should research this further to get the corporate thinking behind this. If I do, I will update you here.
I can't remember the specifics of the second news story about last year's e-book sales growth versus brick-and-mortar bookstore sales. I've tried to locate the exact growth statistics to share those here, but I can't find the story anywhere online and I can't recall where I heard it. In a nutshell, though, brick-and-mortar bookstore sales have grown over the previous year. I can't remember if e-book sales increased or stayed the same. The point of the study is that traditional bookstores are still alive and kicking. Hearing this study, my heart was warmed.
Until I started to feel guilty. Why guilty? Because I hardly ever buy books. In my young adulthood, I would pour over the New York Times Book Review, starting on Sunday and savoring it throughout the week. I wanted to buy every book that I wanted to read. If I wanted a book, I went out and bought it. Immediately. I was an impatient reader. Hardcover or trade paperback, it didn't matter. (I tended to shy away from mass market books if I could.) I accumulated shelves and shelves of books. As I got a little older, I started passing along the books that I didn't feel the need to keep so that more readers benefited from my book buying than just myself.
Prices of books kept rising and one day I realized that with the speed I was pouring through my books, I was spending way too many dollars per minute of reading! Plus I was running out of shelf space in my house. And I had a lot of shelves in my house! It was time to get back to the library. Do library books count towards a book getting on the bestsellers list?
Growing up in Brooklyn, the Midwood branch of the Brooklyn Public Library was one of my favorite places to be. I remember the excitement of getting my first library card. I remember the horror of dropping a library copy of The Bobbsey Twins into the bathtub as I was reading while I bathed! I remember hours and hours of browsing the shelves, first in the children's library and then in the main fiction section.
Now it was time to get to know the public library in my town in New Jersey. Not only did I have access to my small town library, I also had access to a consortium that included most of the libraries in my county as well as some of the libraries outside the county. I quickly learned which towns' libraries had the most recently published books. I was still an impatient reader, but I learned how to manage.
When we were looking for neighborhoods in Florida, I had a list of requirements. One item on the list was a good public library system. I think I have a pretty decent one.
Before I moved, I lived alone with my children. It wasn't a problem if I had the light on all night to read. Now that I'm remarried (to a non-reader - gasp!), keeping the light on all night is no longer an option. E-books are harder to come buy (when you're borrowing them from the library). I still wonder what the impact of me mostly reading e-books from the library has on the bestsellers lists.
I still love to browse in book stores. Large chain book stores as well as small independent book stores. Even though I request most of my e-books through the Overdrive app, I enjoy browsing in libraries. Heck, anywhere there are books, I'm happy to browse!
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| A new used book store near my home The Next Chapter, Inverness, Florida |
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