Online Media Cultist

In a piece entitled “Bookstores Begin Slow Descent Into Obsolescence,” Scott Karp eloquently describes the growing sense I’ve also felt over the past few years while browsing record and book stores.

It strikes me – at first with amusement but increasingly with a sense of frustration – each time I’m in a particular kind of store (book store, music store, video store) looking for a particular item. I have money in my pocket, ready to purchase an item and therefore help the parent company’s bottom line. If the corporate gods could look down upon me a la Clash of the Titans, they would be rooting me on saying, Come on Eric, lay down that green on the register, more money for us to help build a Starbucks outside of the Olympic Palace!

But very often, the store doesn’t have the item that I want. For example, I was at my local Borders the other day when it struck me that there are a bunch of bands that I would love to add to my collection, Citizen Fish and Frank Black and Brother Ali among them. Now, granted, Borders music sections don’t have the world’s largest selection, but I figured I might catch a sampling of these eclectic but fairly well known acts. But alas, it was not to be, zilch across all fronts. Sure, Borders would have been more than happy to try to dig this stuff up for me and order it (at hefty shopping mall retail rates) but the bottom line was that I had to leave the store with money still in my pocket. No Starbucks for Mt. Olympus.

There’s some level of human service and social interaction that brick-and-mortar stores will always provide, which is partly why I think adding coffee shops to bookstores has proven so popular. But the Internet is just too efficient, too scalable, too useful, and too relevant to allow bookstores and music stores to have any hope of competing on an even footing.

Corporate chains like Borders and Virgin may have wiped out a bunch of mom-and-pop shops, but Amazon and iTunes will wipe out the corporate chains.

Scott Karp also does a great job in looking at the eventual demise of many kinds of print books, particularly non-fiction and business books. I love this line:

Instead of writing this blog over the past year, I could have written a business book — but how much less interesting that would have been.

Absolutely right. I love Scott’s Publishing 2.0; it’s like a college course in online publishing and advertising that rolls out in digestible snippets each day. If he did write the business book instead, it’s very unlikely that I would ever stumble across it, and more than likely it would be far less relevant as it would have had to get filtered and delayed through a lengthy editing and print publishing and print media distribution process.

Scott says that he’s done with bookstores, particularly because he’s not that into fiction. I do still enjoy browsing the fiction stacks every now and again, and in fact just picked up a large and old John Le Carre tome (The Honourable Schoolboy, I think it’s called) along with a newer literary thriller that looked interesting just yesterday.

But more often than not I use Amazon to buy books.