Sameer Rahim in The Telegraph:
This weekend, a sad scene is playing itself out on a busy west London high street. The Kilburn Bookshop, which has served readers for 30 years, is closing its doors for the last time. Many factors are involved – the recession and rent increases among them – but the bookshop’s manager, Simon-Peter Trimarco, believes there are deeper reasons for the closure. One problem is that browsers now rarely put their hand in their pocket. “Only one in 10 customers will end up buying a book.” They find what they want and then go to Tesco or Amazon where there are heavy discounts. (There is even an iPhone app that lets you scan a book’s bar code and find the cheapest price.) The Kilburn Bookshop is friendly and has something of a literary pedigree: “Zadie Smith came in as a little girl,” Trimarco says. If this shop can’t survive, then which can? Very few, it seems. Last year, one in 10 independent bookshops closed, at a rate of three a week. “I’m despairing,” Trimarco says.
The death of independent bookshops is just one symptom of a much wider crisis in publishing. Discounted books, online bookselling and the advent of ebooks are destroying old patterns of reading and book buying. We are living through a revolution as enormous as the one created by Gutenberg’s printing press – and authors and publishers are terrified they will become as outdated as the monks who copied out manuscripts. How this happened is down to ambitious editors, greedy agents, demanding writers and big businesses with an eye for easy profit. Combine that with devilishly fast technological innovation and you have a story as astonishing as the credit crunch – and potentially as destructive.
More here.
