January 30, 2010 at 9:46 pm (Amazon, Bizarro, Furries, How To Eat Fried Furries, Jeff Strand, Monty Python, Nicole Cushing, Reviews, Uncategorized)
Jeff Strand, Author of BENJAMIN'S PARASITE & PRESSURE
It’s still a few months before the launch of my first book, How To Eat Fried Furries, on Amazon.com. But it’s never too early to hear good news. Jeff Strand has posted a positive review up on his blog (“Personally, I enjoyed every f***ed up page,” the Benjamin’s Parasite and Pressure author says).
Check it out the entire review at: http://jeffstrand.wordpress.com/2010/01/30/how-to-eat-fried-furries/
January 30, 2010 at 4:55 am (Amazon, Bookselling, Borders, Writing)
I feel a little like an archaeologist on the History channel, pointing to some chunk of limestone where the strata of the geological record is revealed, and lecturing about how this is the point where everything began to change.
Publishers Weekly posted two headlines on their website today that summed up the situation in bookselling with a sort of quirky pithiness.
Headline #1: “Amazon Has Blockbuster Year”
Headline #2: “Borders Eliminates 164 Positions”
Well, that pretty much says it all, doesn’t it?
Don’t get me wrong. I love the whole idea — and reality — of a brick-and-mortar bookstore. A trip to the bookstore was always a treat when I was growing up. When I was just a small child, our family would go out every Friday night and drive off to the next-town-over to enjoy all the delights our tiny town couldn’t offer. Dinner at McDonald’s was one of those elusive treats (my hometown didn’t have one until I was a teenager). The other was a visit to the little Mom-and-Pop bookstore that fueled my childhood love of reading. Much later in life, it would be a visit to a local IndieBound store that led me to the book that would open my heart to reading (and ultimately, writing) again after too-long hiatuses from both.
So, I find it hard not to feel a sentimental fondness toward bookstores.
But at the same time, I just don’t see many bookstores rolling up their sleeves and developing business models to stay competitive. Like “the record store” and “the video store” before them, “the book store” is finding itself squeezed not only by online competition like Amazon but also by “one-stop” mega-stores like WalMart, Target, Meijer, etc. Thus, these days, you can buy your copy of Twilight and grab produce that matches the cover art — all in one place. Just don’t ask the stock boy cleaning up aisle two where you can find The Haunted Vagina (play the tape all the way through in your head — absolutely nothing good could come from that conversation).
But I digress. My question to you, dear readers is this: can (or even should) the brick-and-mortar bookstore survive? Do you think there’s just a lot of nostalgia/sentimental love of the bookstore that’s making people freak out about the possibility of us losing them? In the end, does it matter? Do you think that all of this is all just a process of evolution toward greater and greater convenience (like how decades ago, people got all their milk from home delivery, and now pick it up at …um…Wal Mart).
OR…
Will we all be losing something very dear to us if (when?) the brick-and-mortar store goes the way of the Dodo? Will there be something lost which neither the Amazons nor the WalMarts can replace?
Any and all opinions welcome, so long as they are respectfully expressed (according to my subjective standards). The idea of this post is to yield more light than heat. Feel free to even disagree with the premise of my question. Let’s have a lively debate!
