Future tense for booksellers?
We’re a little late on this one, but last month on the Dooney’s Cafe site, Max Fawcett wrote about the plight of booksellers in the digital age. And the piece has quite the opener:
The other day while I was sitting at the only seat at Dooney’s Cafe’s newly renovated bar […] I happened to overhear a conversation that Franz [sic] Donker, the owner of Book City, was having with his business partner and the manager of his Annex location. One of the major publishers he deals with was releasing eBook copies of a major release, and Donker said that this marked the beginning of the end of his business. The internet and its related technologies would do what the Chapters/Indigo merger and subsequent market monopolization could not. It would put Book City, Canada’s most successful independent bookstore, out of business.
Of course, it’s probably also worth highlighting Fawcett’s caveats:
It is, of course, possible that Donker was joking, that he has a typically black sense of humour with which I’m not familiar. Eavesdropping, after all, isn’t the most reliable of journalistic techniques.
Still, bookseller anxiety over digital delivery is an undeniable phenomenon. Fawcett goes on to offer some advice as to how booksellers like Frans Donker can weather the coming paradigm shift.
Eavesdropping is certainly not the most reliable of journalistic techniques and the re-reporting of eavesdropping even less so. To say that Frans has a black sense of humour is like calling The Netherlands “not very mountainous”. In the past, I wouldn’t be surprised if he had linked the death of book selling to television, the trade paperback, dual pricing, the creation of ISBN, the popularity of the miniskirt, and the importation of tobacco by Sir Walter Raleigh. And yet he has managed to survive all of the above.