Few people have not noticed the diminishing number of bookstores. We’ve had several in Tamsui close in the past two years, and many others have much ‘slimmer’ collections of books… it seems that bookstores as we grew up with them are about to go the way of the dinosaurs, CD stores, and other esoteric products.
Most of this is due to products like the iPad
, the Amazon Kindle, the Nook
, and the Kobo ereader. All of these products are combining to create the end of the mass market for books, just as technology is making it all but impossible for the book to go out of print. It’s hard to see what the results will be, but I like to have both real books, ebooks, and home made books.
You can carry hundreds of books in your bag, but you can’t smell an ebook; you can buy a book from an eseller and get it immediately, but you can’t touch the pages or feel the surface; you can read an ebook quickly, but you can’t ponder on the binding, the fingerprints inside, or the annotations of a 2nd hand book.
Someone, somewhere will always want a REAL book, let’s make sure that books stay on paper, too!