Richard Adams in The Guardian has a great piece on a counter-intuitive result of the Internet on a venerable old retail model, actually helping it rather than killing it. Says Adams:
It wasn’t meant to be like this. The internet was supposed to bid farewell to the need for buying books in shops. When the dotcom bubble was at its peak, web gurus claimed sites such as Amazon would undercut and undermine traditional bookstores, and that ebooks would eventually do away with “dead tree” media altogether.But what no one saw coming was that the internet would, in fact, provide a lifeline for possibly the least fashionable and most technologically backward part of the marketplace: old books.
The growth of an international distribution model for old books (through stand-alone web sites or more importantly affiliate-based sites like Amazon’s used book section or Abebooks) has liberated old books from their usual local reach, and into a new realm of book enthusiasts.
Adams again:
They might not be ditching the traditional shop, but the suggestion that booksellers would crumble under the challenge of the internet has been utterly refuted.Instead of becoming a footnote in bookselling history, the industry has used the web to secure its future. And the resulting competition between the main players means that, right now at least, the second-hand book field really is a buyer’s market.
There’s plenty of bad news for more traditional new book retailers, of course. But it’s nice to see a large group of culture enthusiasts and cultural merchants finding a new way to connect, rather than screaming at the tide of change.
