re: #16 Honorary Yooper

I doubt it. The major shakeups in the book retailing world have already happened, and there are enough people like me who would rather hold a book than read it on a screen.

I own a small specialty bookstore that I built from scratch. It really hurts us small independents when one of our good customers either dies or buys an e-reader. Enough of them die or buy an e-reader, and I have to close my doors because I can no longer pay my rent or utility bills. Another small bookstore owner in my area finally gave up after his two best customers died and another one moved out of town. And at one time, this guy was the absolute tops in our area in his specialty field.

Unfortunately, the fallout from the emergence of the superstores such as Borders and Barnes & Noble included the failure of far too many independent bookstores. The studies I saw indicated that sales at any bookstore in about a five to ten mile radius of a newly opened superstore immediately fell by 35%, and that it took a good two years for sales to climb back to the previous pre-superstore level — assuming that another superstore doesn’t open in the meanwhile. In my specialty field, it seems like one or two more of us go under every year. Sometimes it’s because the owner(s) have just flat run out of money and can’t keep up the struggle any more as the cost of rent and utilities goes up as well as the cost of the books themselves. Another big reason for bookstore closures is that an owner has decided to retire and simply can’t find anyone dumb enough to buy the business.

And it isn’t just the superstores that are killing us small independents. WalMart, ShopKo, Target and all the other discount chains carry the bestsellers at a pricepoint that the small guys can’t afford to match. Heck, even Kroger’s will place bestsellers in their weekly food ads at 40% off. The sales rep from one of the major houses once asked me who was my closest competitor, and laughed when I said it was the drugstore just down the street from me. But again, the drugstore was selling the paperback bestsellers at a 10% discount, and people just don’t think anything at all about throwing the latest Stephan King, James Patterson or Danielle Steel into their cart as they go past the display.