Re-Kindling a love of the book: Wells

There's growing evidence of a return to the printed word.

Amazon opens physical bookstore
Amazon Books, the e-commerce giant's new physical bookstore, opens in Seattle. Fred Katayama reports.(Powered by NewsLook)

Skeptics will view the decision taken by Amazon to open its first-ever bricks-and-mortar bookstore as nothing more than a means to sell more Kindles and more Kindle Fires.

And will point out that curating 6,000 titles, positioned face forward on book shelves at the Seattle store, would seem to be at odds with the digital giant’s plans for drone delivery. (Prime Air, once launched, promises to get packages into customers’ hands in 30 minutes or less, so great ready for hover-and-drop manoeuvres in your neighbourhood.)

Yet there’s continuing evidence, some of it surprising, that not only can the business case still be made for books in printed form, but they’ve emerged as an outlier in the digital world.

Just last week, the Pew Research Centre released its latest data on digital device ownership. A standout stat from that report was e-reader ownership. Just 19 per cent of adults surveyed in the spring of this year reported owning an e-reader. That’s a thumping drop from the 32 per cent of adults who reported owning Kindles and Nooks etc. the year prior.

Interestingly, the age breakdown of those owners was flat across all age groups: the percentage of e-readers owned by millenials is the same as for baby boomers.

Article Continued Below

A report from Publishing Technology in March found that millenials were almost twice as likely to read a print book as an e-book.

 Most popular books on display at Amazon Books, the company's first brick-and-mortar store, in Seattle's University District. The store opened this week.
Most popular books on display at Amazon Books, the company's first brick-and-mortar store, in Seattle's University District. The store opened this week.  (Erika Schultz / AP)  

Deloitte, drawing data from both Pew and Publishing Technology, concluded that the “aversion of millenials to physical CDs, DVDs, print newspapers or magazines does not extend to print books.”

And the forecast for digital sales does not look any brighter: “Print is likely to generate the majority of books sales for the foreseeable future,” Deloitte concluded. “eBook sales volumes have hit a plateau, or seen decelerating growth, in major markets including the US, UK and Canada.”

James Daunt, managing director of the Waterstones book chain in the U.K., said in an interview with the Guardian last month that he had removed Kindles from most of the 280 stores in the chain. “Sales of Kindles continue to be pitiful so we are taking the display space back in more and more shops,” he said. An analyst with an independent U.K. research firm said the removal of the Kindles was hardly a surprise, given that the e-reader “may turn out to be one of the shortest-lived consumer technology categories.”

Digital conversion to tablets and phablets, or even smart phones, might be an obvious migration path for e-book readers. But that ignores the most important stat of all: In 2013, print sales comprised 80 per cent of total U.S. book sales of $14.6 billion.

This must be confounding for Amazon founder Jeff Bezos. In The Everything Store, Brad Stone’s inside look at Amazon and its culture, Bezos marched into the office of digital executive Steve Kessel in 2004 and issued this order: "I want you to proceed as if your goal is to put everyone selling physical books out of a job.”

The Kindle was unveiled three years later.

Why the preference for an actual book over a piece of hard plastic? One U.K. study found that 62 per cent of 16 to 24-year-olds “like the smell” and the look of books sitting on shelves, perhaps as cultural and intellectual signifiers.

All of this in no way suggests that book retailing is due for a significant rebound.

The physical book store still struggles — consider the ongoing reshaping of the Indigo Books and Music chain, and the paucity of independents. Which is why Amazon may never extend its terra firma footprint beyond a single outlet.

But even one store reinforces this message: the physical book so derided by Bezos is not dead. Long live the book.
https://www.thestar.com/business/2015/11/03/re-kindling-a-love-of-the-book-wells.html
www.thestar.com
crawl=CC-MAIN-2016-44
92575
application/http; msgtype=response
sha1:2M2RAG4FQARUJHQOL6XXLZC55UJKV6G3
<urn:uuid:0f0e4502-fced-4935-9cca-aeb28b1bb9d1>
2016-10-28T02:40:53Z
54.192.17.55
sha1:FUPV7QC3YIMEPYFTMDK6XPQU5N7ZLUTO
<urn:uuid:d70291d2-623b-40e9-a6c9-3012cbebd813>
https://www.thestar.com/business/2015/11/03/re-kindling-a-love-of-the-book-wells.html
response
<urn:uuid:4dfcfe45-a1ea-44a1-be2b-12564b2ea6c3>
robots: classic
hostname: ip-10-171-6-4.ec2.internal
software: Nutch 1.6 (CC)/CC WarcExport 1.0
isPartOf: CC-MAIN-2016-44
operator: CommonCrawl Admin
description: Wide crawl of the web for October 2016
publisher: CommonCrawl
format: WARC File Format 1.0
conformsTo: http://bibnum.bnf.fr/WARC/WARC_ISO_28500_version1_latestdraft.pdf