Are Shmee-Books the New Hotness?
Two bookish bits of news graced the pages of the New York Times last week, and I want to share a few thoughts about them both. As this first one, “E-Books, Shmee-Books: Readers Return to the Stores” shows, I think we’re seeing the evolution of a meme. It’s no longer big stores vs small stores, or even Amazon vs brick-and-mortar. It’s the ebook vs printed book fight.
Now I don’t mean to say that no one has written about this before. Obviously, lots of people in the publishing and writing world (who are all smarter and more immersed in the industry than I) have been discussing it. But this holiday shopping season is the first time that many mainstream media outlets are talking about ebooks and print books in a context other than publishing and marketing. This article is the one of the first I’ve seen to talk about print-over-digital sales from a general consumerist/shopping perspective.
So what is the precise meme? It’s the crystallizing of the “sales supremacy of analog vs digital” storyline. Prepare for a glut of articles trumpeting the decline and/or return of the print book, as based on whichever statistic pops up that week. For example, this article crows “E-Books, Shmee-Books: Readers Return to the Stores”! Well, dang. Shoppers shop in stores at Christmas? Now that’s news!
To be clear, I’m delighted that (some) bookstores are reporting great numbers for this season. As a reader, I wholeheartedly endorse the gift of books—they are as awesome as whole worlds, and easier to wrap. As a writer, I’m encouraged by people’s continuing love of books. That news is both welcome and wonderful.
But...the sales figures for Nov/Dec 2011 do not offer much to prognosticators of future holiday shopping trends. As noted in the article, Borders closed earlier this year, throwing a huge wrench in year-on-year statistical trends for print sales. As Lanora Hurley of Next Chapter says, the closure of a nearby Borders probably drove more traffic to her indie bookshop this season. But will the traffic shift be permanent? No one can say, but that’s the one thing everyone desperately wants to know.
And the in-your-face headline that trounces e-books as shmee-books is equally misleading. Who is surprised by the fact that people like giving physical, wrappable objects as presents? The act of wrapping a gift is as much a Christmas tradition as caroling and vowing not to eat a metric ton of cookies.
If I were to write a breathless piece on how egg nog is totally on a comeback tear over milk, based on December sales reports, the results would be just as useless for long-term planning. The better measure of the pbook/ebook controversy will be found in sales figures for the other eleven months of the year, when most books are purchased not as gifts, but as plain ol’ products to be consumed. And again, only after this holiday season, in which ereaders like Kindles and Nooks1 will be among those wrapped presents under the tree, will we really get a better picture of how ebooks sell in comparison to pbooks.
In related news, another NYT article appeared: Richard Russo’s reasoned and thoughtful reaction to Amazon’s price-check stunt. Russo says:
As I see it, the problem with Amazon stems from the fact that though it started out as a bookseller, it isn’t anymore, not really. It sells everything now, and it sells it all aggressively. Maybe Amazon doesn’t care about the larger bookselling universe because it’s simply too big to care. In a way it’s become, like the John Candy character (minus the eager, slobbering benevolence) in Mel Brooks’s movie “Spaceballs” — half man, half dog and thus its own best friend.
I think he’s nailed it, and you should check out the whole thing.