Rocket Bomber - article - retail - publishing - Amazonification

I could spend a lot of time doing research and providing links and spelling out for you just what Amazon is and what they do. Halfway through my research, though, I was scooped — thankfully, as the grinding process was killing me and stalling other writing. Please enjoy the following slideshow presentation made available by faberNovel under a Creative Commons license http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/

Stéphane Distinguin, Amazon.com: the Hidden Empire, faberNovel, May 2011.

also available from scribd

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Are you back? Great.

I could make all sorts of points about how Amazon.com has made fundamental changes to retail. I can’t say Amazon is bad; I use Amazon myself [mostly for computer stuff. I understandably prefer another source for books, and typically buy my anime DVDs from RightStuf, who rock]. I can’t say Amazon is wrong; obviously in a free market customers can choose whichever retailer or provider of goods & services they like — I might argue that Amazon shouldn’t have been given $3 Billion Dollars and a 7 year grace period without showing a profit, as that seems hardly fair, but in the world of corporate finance and stock market machinations there is no fair – and the ability to sell the concept to investors was at least as important as the ability to sell books through a website.

But Amazon didn’t really make any fundamental changes; it’s just an old business sped up by the internet.

1. The Catalogue

Some have said Amazon has revolutionized bookselling.

Sure. Whatevs. (But I’m a bookseller, you know I’m biased.) Let me cast it this way:

What Amazon did is revive and revolutionize selling books by catalogue, a practice that dates back to at least 1888 — and was lamented by booksellers even at that early date as a practice that was “taking advantage of the confusion between [the] two methods of selling books” and additionally of concern because: “the discount system developed until the nominal or advertised price of books did not correspond to the practical selling price. The result of this has been to decrease not only the number of bookstores in proportion to the community, but probably the actual number of book-stores throughout the country”

Publishers Weekly, January 7, 1888. Matter of public record & in the public domain, available on Google Books and also found [text only, with some typos due to scan interpretation] at Archive.org

Well worth a read, and a good think besides.

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Amazon is a giant book catalogue.

Actually, that’s kind of a great thing: every book ever, right! Neato!

Yeah, fine, but Amazon is not unique. Every bookstore—and several websites—have bought or built a book catalogue — and Amazon isn’t even unique in putting their catalogue online, as every sales site is basically an online catalogue — and for books, there is even an official arbiter & authority on the matter

In fact, Amazon wasn’t even founded to sell books. “Bezos perused roughly 20 different products, including magazines, CDs, and computer software, that he deemed appropriate for sale on the Internet. Eventually, Bezos decided to pursue books, believing that the electronic searching and organizing capabilities of an online site could help to organize the industry’s sizeable and varied offerings. At the same time, the small size of most books would simplify distribution efforts. Bezos also believed that customers would be more likely to make their first online purchase if the risk was minimal; an inexpensive object like a book might prove less intimidating than something more costly, like computer equipment.” [source]

When Bezos was casting about, looking for a business model, I’m sure he also noted that books each already came with a unique identifier — even going so far as to ID a paperback as different from the hardcover, or the US edition as distinct from the UK one, even for books with the same title, author, contents, and all that jazz: It’s called an ISBN, the international standard book number, and it’s an ISO standard, been around since the 60s, and was used by everyone for decades long before Bezos drove to Seattle to cash in on the Dot Com boom.

So even in building the massive book catalogue upon which the initial success of Amazon was based… well… turns out everyone has/had the same database. Pretty simple, in fact. Even with 6 or 8 or 12 million or so titles to worry about [opinions vary as to how many books are still in print] the basic database — Title, Author, Publisher, city and year of publication, and ISBN, will fit on a single disc. (Used to fit on a CD, Bowker sold one in 1986; I think you’d probably need a DVD-R at this point though of course the internet makes that redundant.)

“Ah yes,” I hear you [or at least, an Amazon fan] say, “but Amazon added pictures of the cover, and item descriptions, and user reviews, and the ‘customers who bought this also bought’ feature, and they’re cheaper” etc etc etc.

Amazon compiled all that, yes: but the cover images and item descriptions are provided by the publisher, who wants to sell books through Amazon — it’s not like some intern in the warehouse was scanning covers for 10 straight years (and even the publishers’ interns didn’t have to do it as most covers existed digitally already) (or maybe some poor schlub did have to do this, but it wasn’t on Amazon’s dime)

The “item description” is usually the same as the jacket copy: already written and also, likely already digital.

‘Customers who bought this also bought’ … man, I think even I might figure out how to code this.

And of course the customer reviews.

Written by customers.

Uncompensated customers. And asking for an opinion from the internet is like asking for nitrogen from the atmosphere: Free for whomever figures out how to fix it — even bacteria can do it.

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SO.

Amazon bought their initial database, plugged in some free publisher info, dressed it up with free content from their own customers [& actually, full props to Amazon for implementing social media years before anyone thought of Myspace or Friendster — let alone Facebook, or “social media” as a term] and ran it for years at a loss.

1995-2002. Seven years. Massive outside investment. No profits.

[…hand me a sweet deal like that and I could probably churn out a multi-billion dollar corporation, too.]

Amazon did have to spend money. Even with free databases and free descriptions and free reviews, someone still had to correlate and compile that mess [and write the software, databases, and user interfaces to make it automatic].

And of course, you can’t sell anything if you don’t buy inventory. Inventory means warehouses, warehouses means logistics, and shipping software, and inventory tracking software, and at least a few people to work in the warehouse, box the book, slap a label on it…

Ah, yes, but before I give Amazon too much credit:

Amazon had the advantage of selling a book before they bought the inventory. They had a massive catalogue, fancy user interface, all important credit-card processing, and a customer who wants to buy a book — This customer wants the book bad. Positively jonesing for it. Searched for it on the 1995-era-internet — maybe even willing to wait two weeks to get it, in fact.

Amazon doesn’t need to know which book this is. They just wait until one is ordered. They charge the guy’s card, tell him it’s on it’s way! — and then they order the book from the publisher. Or from Ingram, an established book distributor & one of the largest, whose Roseburg, OR facility is a short six-hour drive from Seattle, and Amazon. —This was a massive competitive advantage & significant cost savings in the early years.

The publishers — and book distributors like Ingram — were used to this. Small bookstores order just 1 copy of a book all the time. It’s all bookstores need. This system has been in place for decades, and Amazon shows up one afternoon in 1995 and so far as the system is concerned they’re just another bookseller.

No need for massive warehouses yet — the publishers do that already. No need to stock a store or guess at the bestsellers or pick worthy books or even read the damn things — just wait for the orders, and the computer heuristics figure out the rest.

A motivated customer, with money, who is willing to wait weeks for delivery, just bought a book. Get her that book, and order a spare [to speed up delivery to the next customer] and slowly build your own stock of warehoused books. Enough of these transactions, and you’ve built yourself quite the “bookstore”, even though it’s just a warehouse. Enough of these transactions, and you know your backlist: what sells and in how many numbers [nationally! annually!] and can order up to suit.

Build a history and you can guess how many books to order next year, how sales fall off after a book is a couple of years old, how the hardcover suffers once the paperback is out — which books are your perennials, your evergreens, your annuals. Build a history for seven years (without profits) and suddenly, OMG, you not only start to make money — it seems like you’re the only bookstore that knows and that you’ve been at this forever! How did we ever live without you, Amazon?

And if you guess wrong? Hell, that’s not a problem: just take advantage of the massive distribution systems already established to feed bookstores: it’s not like selling out of your stock of a book is a bad thing: you can order just one more copy of a book, if that’s all you need. And since you’re Amazon, and buy in bulk, you get the best discount available.

Sure Amazon has distribution centers coast-to-coast now and they’re building even more — but how many of you have been Amazon customers since the very beginning? It didn’t start out this way. The Massive Multi-Billion Dollar Edifice seems like it’s always been there — but Amazon didn’t post a quarterly profit until 2001, and needed the Q4 holiday shopping binge to finally go from red-to-black for that one quarter. It was another two years before they were able to claim annual profits.

An analyst at the time was quoted by CNN: “It’s high time they learned the ropes… It’s like you’re giving a student credit for not getting an F.”

like I said: allow me to build a business for 6-going-on-7-years with a seemingly unstoppable influx of capital and no expectations to make a return on investment and I could build a trillion-dollar-company too.

It’s not that I hate Amazon; I shop with Amazon too, on occasion. But as noted, I do hate cheaters and it seems like AMZN has gotten a free pass for far too long — can I mention the de-facto-gov’t-subsidy they get by dodging Sales Tax, too?

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Amazon is smart: they deal in information, and information is produced by every customer transaction. That’s why they send you the reminder email after you buy something, “Please review your recent purchase” — because your review is a block-o-text they can add to their item listing page (all the better for search engines) and your rating, 1 to 5 stars, is a data point they add to their crystal-ball-methods: “hey, a lot of people seem to really like this sparkly-teenage-vampire stuff, maybe we should keep an eye on it.”

But Amazon is not a book store.

Amazon doesn’t need to guess at worthy titles, and order 6 copies (each per store, times hundreds of stores) to stock tables — A table that can hold 50 books — one of a dozen or so tables in each store — and which changes out once a month.

Amazon can wait for customers to order from their catalogue, and then commit to a book.

[fine, for Amazon. Not so good for début authors]

Amazon doesn’t need to stock a hundred thousand titles, categorize, ship, receive, sort, and shelve them [by category] [thousands daily] because the computers do all that. Since there are no bookcases, only database entries, Amazon doesn’t have to do much of anything except accept your money and then figure out how to get the book. Of course, with all that data, they can write up a quick algorithm to guess at sales, order up [to say, 80% of expected sales – at least to start, for the first week] and now can have the books waiting in warehouses — $3 Billion in logistic infrastructure investments goes a long, long way, and it’s only gotten better in the 7 years since 2003.

2. The Next Bridge Too Far.

Amazon built a [*cough*] bookstore, but doesn’t have a monopoly yet. In fact, the actual bookstores seem to be running a successful “Pepsi vs Coke” campaign where number two is still a great place to be, has its own adherents and partisans, and will manage to be a thorn in Amazon’s side for decades yet.

— At least until all of us who were raised in libraries and spent our college years in bookstores are dead. *I* might not last more than 17 more years, given my lifestyle and massive beer consumption, but many members of my cohort will live on into their 60s (70s, 80s, 90s & beyond) and we’re preceded by curmudgeons of the first order, and a secondary wave of the Baby Boomer “me first” generation, who still must be appeased and catered to in ways Amazon has yet to realize.

[Please, Amazon, figure out how to take these needy bastards off my hands.]

Amazon [or Apple, or Google: pick your winner] could be the last sole provider of content that downloads direct to my nerve-stapled cortex — ‘content’ meaning professionally produced video & music & novels — but ‘content’ in this context is not the internet. Amazon is just one part of the internet, or perhaps I should say, Amazon conducts business using just one small chunk of internet. (Of course they hope to expand; everyone does)

— but you know, actually, this ‘print’ thing is available for direct ocular input and seems to do quite well for the transmission & propagation of information: almost singularly so. The paper page may die but ‘print’ lives on. The World Wide Web was “born” in 1993 and so for 18 years, we as a species have been converting everything we know into internet-capable resources, and in the end it is the web the succeeds books — not Amazon or Google. “Print” is dead; long live print — words are a wonderful thing, on screen or on paper — so long as we use words, letters, pinyin, kanji, abjad, and other black-on-white written systems, words will always be available on the net, and some will see value in hard-copy, dead tree editions, even if the primary copy is digital, even if books go digital-native.

And the Web is “free press” in a way ebooks never will be.

You’re still reading, chief — pixels or pages: we’re stuck with ‘print’.

What we are considering is delivery of print: Do you read the screen, or page, and on which device? [“device” can be considered synonymous with “format” now.]

I’ll give it 500 years. Gutenburg introduced mechanised (& eventually industrialised) print 500 years ago, and yet we still write things down, pen to paper — I doubt I’ll be here 500 years hence [would absolutely *love* to write *that* blog post] but honestly, we have to give digital at least a century to displace books.

[Music is different; unless you are a singer yourself, and sing daily, you can’t propagate copies of your music — but anyone with a stick of charcoal and a flat surface, or the modern equivalent—the graffiti spray can, can commit “print” as an act faster than authorities can clean it up or paint over it.]

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3. “I Need This Book”

Dateline, 30 years ago: 1981. Your ‘chain’ bookstore was a Waldenbooks or B. Dalton at the local mall, most folks found new books via a book-of-the-month club, rare indeed was the local independent bookseller outside of major metropolitan areas, and if you wanted to read the latest hardcover book, you put your name on a waiting list at the library.

Someone from New York or San Francisco is about to chime in, “That’s just wrong. There was a vibrant book scene in 1981…” and yes, and kindly STFU. Like many of my readers (at least, those alive at the time), I spent the 80s in a suburban hell with no local indy, no coffee shops, the nearest mall 20 miles away, a local library that squeezed into a small space next to city hall, and a bike. Give me a break, I was like, 12. I didn’t get a car until 1990.

I was not a ‘typical’ customer but neither was my personal experience unique. In junior high and well into high school, I would ride my bike the 6 miles to the local library, load up as many books as I could carry, and ride back — twice a week. Once a month or so the family made the trek out to the mall [it was the 80s, you likely did the same] and I’d hit the bookstore with relish, spending my allowance and all but begging my parents for another dollar or three to get just one more paperback.

I never went into the library or bookstore in need of ‘just this one book’ — I went in to browse and discover. I had no idea what was out there; I was a thirsty sponge willing to soak up it all, especially science fiction & fantasy.

Now, you might attribute that to my youth: in the 80s I was that special age, 7 to 17. What the hell did I know, what the hell would I be expected to know?

…well:

Oprah didn’t have a book club until 1996, the vaunted New York Times and their book reviews reached less than a million readers outside of New York even into the 90s [& today, though more used to read it online; no telling what their new web policy actually means; the print edition has been in decline for years] — in 1980, radio hosts and TV personalities didn’t push books like Oprah once did, or Glen Beck and Fox News currently does.

Also, there was no C-SPAN2’s BookTV [which only started in 1998 – and how many of you watch C-SPAN2?]

Granted, I was not an avid consumer of radio and TV in the 80s – but prior to 1996 folks did not come into a bookstore, walk immediately up to the information desk, and demand a book, by title, only this one title will do, what do you mean you don’t have it!?

The mall bookstore didn’t have an information desk. They had a short counter with a couple of bookmarks and a register. And a bored cashier [not a bookseller] who was making less than $5 an hour.

Obviously bookstores could order it for you; they order books all the time – but prior to computerized inventory systems it wasn’t something bookstores did every day – prior to the internet web sites, it wasn’t something customers even thought to ask. Indeed, prior to 1986, it was a big, fat catalogue known as “Books in Print” — and good luck! — and even after ’86 it’d be a few years yet before you’d find a bookseller with a computer and a copy of Books in Print on CD-Rom and the wherewithal and savvy to search it for you.

Only once (back in 1990) did I need a book — but only because it was assigned to me. It wasn’t out of print, it wasn’t from a small press; I was assigned Edmund Spenser’s Faerie Queene for high school AP English. There was a Penguin Classics edition, in paperback — but no one had it. Neither the high school library nor the local municipal library had a copy, but that didn’t phase my English teacher, who was a royal bastard with a PhD [in education, not English, btw] and who did not care. I couldn’t even get an extension on my due date. Mom & Dad had to drive me into Atlanta to Oxford Books, the only place we could find in the phone book that had a copy.

I’d like to point out that Spenser is available for free from Project Gutenberg and as a Penguin Classic, the physical book [isbn 9780140422078] is available just about everywhere these days; the bookstore I currently work in stocks a copy [with another half-dozen copies available through our other outlets around town – not every store, only about half] though to my knowledge we’ve never actually sold one – but that just demonstrates how far even brick-and-mortar book retail has advanced in the last 20 years. As much as some hate the Big Box, it still means more books available to more folks in more places — if you can drive to the cineplex, you can drive to a bookstore, which is something we couldn’t say in 1985, or even 1992.

Parallel to the development of Big Box Books, is the explosion of the internet. And in the last 15 years, a sea change in the way book lovers shop for books.

As a young man, I was practically starving for books; I would prowl shelves at the library or bookstore and pounce on new and likely-looking titles. I shopped the bookstore, the whole bookstore — I bought books, but it wasn’t like I was shopping for a particular book. Not that just any book would do, but to an extent, yes, any book would do. [I still shop this way; though of course my current preferred method these days is to work the back room & receive books as they come in and shop right out of the box, before customers even see them — highly recommended if you can manage it] As a lover of books and avid reader of books, this whole business of “I just saw this book on TV: Gimme.” is not only annoying, but counter-productive: an author can be on TV before his book even gets back from the printer, let alone is in warehouses, or available in stores, or is available to order, from us or Amazon.

Buzz about a title is one thing, but this game is stupid, and reinforces negative public perceptions about the bookstore; I get blamed for not having books that do not physically exist yet while also bearing the full burden of stocking “all books” — a claim even Amazon can’t make — and the TV celebs and networks don’t get blamed even if the customer [when they eventually get a copy] doesn’t like the books they plug [assuming they even read it].

No. Really. Folks are buying Atlas Shrugged like the books are shipped with $50 bills inside, or maybe next week’s lottery numbers, and despite fervent protestations that Of Course they’ve read it: I very sincerely doubt folks who are hard pressed to read even one book a year are all reading *1088 pages* about trains and steel production.

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The bookstore is set up to sell books – like a butcher sells meat, or a grocer sells vegetables, or the internet sells porn: sure, we try to have your favourite, but since we can’t sell everything we don’t try – please look at what we do have.

You can have it now, you can have it cheap, or you can have exactly what you want: but at most you get to choose two. And even if I don’t have organic free-range ostrich — fresh fillets, not pre-packaged ground meat — well, I might still have something you’d enjoy for dinner.

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4. Amazonification

I could make all sorts of points about how Amazon.com has made fundamental changes to retail [and likely will, in some later post] but at a store-front, physical bookstore level what is more annoying is the changes Amazon has affected upon my customers. The customer base is not what it once was.

Primarily,

“Oh, you don’t have it? I’ll just order from Amazon.”

Yes. [*gritted teeth*] Thank You So Much, since I was able to find that for you after 35 solid minutes on the internet when you walked in not only with incomplete information but incorrect information, and we pulled in 3 other booksellers, and eventually found for you exactly what you wanted, something that is also available from my warehouse.

I’m [*gritted teeth and a barely constrained snarl*] so… Glad… we were able to help. Thank You for not paying my rent or payroll today.

So that’s one case. Fairly rare, if I had to admit it. Much more common are the folks who call on the telephone.

“Yeah, I’m looking at this online and wondered if you had it available for pickup today”

The short answer is no. The long answer is yes, maybe we have it, but I can’t match the online price — among other things, I have to pay rent, and pay for stock on shelves (for you to pick up today), and pay someone to answer the phone (which you just called) to answer your question. Additionally, I’m not going to have 20 copies no matter how badly you need them later today (indeed, 20 copies may not physically exist in any distribution chain anywhere) and a lack of planning on your part does not constitute an emergency on my part.

Just sayin’. And if you’re looking at it online, just order the damn thing online. No need to waste my booksellers’ time for your copy of A Gentleman’s Guide to Organic Ostrich Farming.

The web provides instant gratification: Oooh, I read a review, then follow the link, then click-click-click-BOUGHT. Go me!

And if it takes 3 days from click-click-click until you actually see your book, well, at that point you’re mad at UPS or FedEx or DHL or the old standby, the US Postal Service — but not Amazon. Amazon [or whichever web site] sold you the book, it can’t be their fault.

Unless of course you ordered the exact same book using very similar systems at a bookstore. (I can tell you, it’s the exact same system as our website if you do it from my bookstore.) If you provide us with an email address [a requirement, not an option, at Amazon] you’ll get the same updates: we’ll email you the tracking number, we’ll let you know exactly when it ships. Via EMAIL. But about twice a week I get a call at the bookstore, “But I ordered it two days ago, why isn’t it here yet?”

[*sigh*] …and there goes more of my limited payroll.

Yes, I complain. Yes, these are the interactions that stick in my memory, as they’ve taken up too much of my time. We are also able to order common books, and even a few uncommon ones, and have them delivered without problems — several hundred every week. Happy customers, happy booksellers, profits to both my corporate overlords and my store front.

& We’re all happy! Yay! Books! — but on top of that I get these really awful-book-sales experiences that amazon doesn’t, because they don’t have to (and choose not to) support every customer.

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Folks come up to the desk multiple times every day [multiple times an hour even] [or call on the phone, an option Amazon doesn’t offer] and aver/demand, “I’m looking for a book…”

They are not asking. It’s sort-of phrased like a question, “I’m looking for book or magazine or whatever on…” but in fact it’s a demand, “I’m looking for this and you will help me, no matter how stupid or unreasonable I am, because you work here and have no choice but to capitulate, you poor bastard.” — not that they even put that much thought into it — It’s a matter of them being a ‘customer’ [sic] [note: real customers spend money] and us being retail wage slaves.

I didn’t pull this out of thin air, I’m not making it up. I can quote comments made to this very blog

“I never go to bookstores or hardly any retail stores any more. Salespeople with a superior or condescending attitude are the worst. It’s totally inappropriate given their place in the food chain.”

[that’s a really fun thread, btw, for both pro & con bookseller views.]

Even if “customers” don’t think of it that way, they’re asking for a lot: they’re asking me or my booksellers for expert help, often help in shaping the search, or help in clarifying partial and misremembered details, or help identifying an author, or basic things like which subject, which topics, which keywords, and for the really tough ones: how to spell Latin, Greek, French, Russian, Italian, or Spanish keywords and author names. Help they don’t get from Amazon, by the way. Just sayin’.

… or the type of help not even trained psychiatric professionals would be able to provide

…but this is my ‘customer base’. Love you guys.

Note: Not the tech-savvy computer people. They can use Google, they can figure out what they want – many if not all of them then order online.

Not the the smart people: these folks know what they want, too, and can remember the two pertinent data points (title, author) even if it took an hour to drive into the store, or five whole minutes to walk from the car to our info desk.

No, I get everyone else

what’s the title? “I don’t know”
or the author? “I don’t remember”
ah. Is it fiction or non-fiction? “Definitely fiction. It’s a true story.”
Ah. …so it’s a biography? “No, not a biography, I said it was a true story. It’s a memoir.”
Ah. …so a new memoir about…? “I don’t remember. But it was just on Oprah, or 20/20. Or 60 minutes. Or maybe CNN or Fox — you know, on TV. Can’t you find it from that? I just told you it’s a new fiction memoir that was on TV or maybe the radio sometime in the past month and while I can’t remember the author or title I’m sure you’ve heard of it.”

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Some days — I’ll be honest with you — some days I *can't wait* to go out of business if that is to be my eventual fate, if only to see the look on the face of this particular type of customer.

Amazon does not play 20 questions. There is no app for this. Amazon can’t deal with incorrect and conflicting input, as Amazon is a computer. Amazon has no idea what it’s like to have a demanding customer come in and treat you like a personal shopper [please note, personal shoppers get paid much more per hour than retail clerks] only to have said customer return it all in two days because a ‘better’ gift idea occurred to them.

Web sites like Amazon took the easy customers from me; the ones who could help themselves, the ones who bought the most books, the ones who love books and recommend them to friends (some still do so in person, but many more just email the link).

I have many reasons to hate Amazon, not least of which is they just might manage to put me out of a job. But primarily I hate them because they’ve squeezed a lot of the profits and fun out of my job, and I’m left doing the drudge work — often doing their drudge work because I’ll still spend a half hour with a customer who then says, “Oh? You don’t have it in stock, today, and at a discount? I’ll just buy it from Amazon”

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I don’t even have time in this essay to complain about the college students who call every semester looking for text books. [OK, I’ll make a little time:] If only we as a society could, I don’t know, maybe open up a set of specialist ‘college’ bookstores on or near campus to help these customers. These ‘college’ bookstores could even get syllabi from the instructors so they’d have the books in stock before classes start, so students wouldn’t have to call all the local general bookstores looking for $200 texts the day after.

But of course I’m just speaking out my ass: there’s no way anyone or any campus would open such a bookstore — obviously no one has based on the number of calls I have to take almost every week – speaking of which, I thought classes were taught on a regular schedule? either you kids are waiting way past the last minute or you’re just messing with me.

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Final point: see also “The Future of Reading”, Newsweek, 17 November 2007.
http://www.newsweek.com/2007/11/17/the-future-of-reading.html

“Books are the last bastion of analog,” [Bezos] says, in a conference room overlooking the Seattle skyline. We’re in the former VA hospital that is the physical headquarters for the world’s largest virtual store. “Music and video have been digital for a long time, and short-form reading has been digitized, beginning with the early Web. But long-form reading really hasn’t.” Yet. This week Bezos is releasing the Amazon Kindle, an electronic device that he hopes will leapfrog over previous attempts at e-readers and become the turning point in a transformation toward Book 2.0. That’s shorthand for a revolution (already in progress) that will change the way readers read, writers write and publishers publish. The Kindle represents a milestone in a time of transition, when a challenged publishing industry is competing with television, Guitar Hero and time burned on the BlackBerry; literary critics are bemoaning a possible demise of print culture, and Norman Mailer’s recent death underlined the dearth of novelists who cast giant shadows. On the other hand, there are vibrant pockets of book lovers on the Internet who are waiting for a chance to refurbish the dusty halls of literacy.

The fight isn’t for publishers or mass-market acceptance, or readers per se. The fight is for “vibrant pockets of book lovers” and we’re already on the net. [I say “we”, I’m one of them.] Some partisans fight for libraries, some for bookstores, some for genres, some for capital-L-Literature and some just to be read themselves. Indeed, some readers on the internet will argue until they’re blue in the face that ebooks are better and I’m an anachronism, fighting for carriages and steeplechase in an age of jet travel and fibre-optic cable.

This is not a war between Amazon & Bookstores — it’s not a war at all — it is a much larger conversation about books, and how books are packaged and propagated, & to a lesser extent on how books are bought & sold. Before we decide on a single answer and close off other paths, we need years yet [decades, if we can manage] to figure out just what books are — surprisingly, we haven’t even answered that question yet, even after centuries

I will hang on for as long as I can, the noble opposition fighting the good fight, even if I know or might guess I’m on the losing side.

Books have value. Libraries have a value that goes beyond books, if only we can convince governments of that. [we might need a 21st century Carnegie, a billionaire who loves books and loves to give away money to support them]

and Bookstores also have value; I have made this a basis of my own personal career.

and Bookselling has value that goes beyond, and will survive bookstores.