Borders Books plans to close stores on Cobb Parkway and Barrett Parkway as part of its restructuring. Bibliophiles are depressed, but 21st-century realities are unavoidable.
Who needs real bookstores when you can shop online, buy a cheaper version, and have the product delivered straight to your mailbox — or better, to the screen in your backpack? Maybe so, but that doesn’t mean that something important isn’t threatened.
Consider this: When market research firm Codex Group asked 7,500 book buyers how they discovered the last book they bought, 23 percent of iPad owners said they came across their last title by browsing in bookstores, and that method was the most popular one. The rate for eBookstore browsing was only 11 percent.
People without iPads widened that gap, with 31 percent discovering their last book by bookstore browsing, and only 6 percent by eBookstore browsing. Those same folks reported finding books through YouTube and related video sites a mere 0.1 percent of the time.
In other words, the bookstore remains the single most important means for readers of all kinds to find new books.
The reason isn’t hard to figure out. Contrary to everything we assume about the Digital Age, searching book lists online is less efficient than a visit to Borders or another bookstore.
The head of Codex Group, Peter Hildick-Smith, terms it the difference between “lateral” and “linear” searching. Through the laptop, you click page by page sequentially, pulling up one book at a time and receiving a low-resolution, two-dimensional profile for the effort. In the physical bookstore, scanning and assessing hundreds of titles is fast and easy, sliding sideways and back and forth, glancing across the tables and running through titles on the shelves, flipping through chapters and indexes with zero download time.
You absorb book information so much faster there that it has a measurable effect on buyer behavior. In a bookstore, you can pore over more volumes in an hour and take in more of the qualities of each one.
Book buyers in a store survey a wider range of titles and, most importantly, buy a wider range of titles. This kind of browsing is crucial to the survival of out-of-the-mainstream titles. The loss of the bookstore, in other words, threatens that diversity of new book and new author discovery.
Another finding from Codex indicates the process is already happening. It showed that Kindle owners purchase a narrower listing of books in digital format, preferring best-sellers such as James Patterson and Lee Child, even though Kindle owners give higher ratings to more sophisticated offerings by Kingsley Amis and E.O. Wilson. Apparently, these devices restrict their dispositions.
So, when Borders announces its closings, authors and readers should indeed worry. The more real bookstores shut down, the more the publishing world loses volumes outside the mass market listings, and that makes for an impoverished culture.
Mark Bauerlein is professor of English at Emory University. Rick Badie resumes next week.
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