The disappearing bookstore.

[no_hypocrisy]

I don't troll malls anymore. Too old, too poor, and I reached my consumer saturation point a while back.

However, yesterday I was forced to explore all four corners of a large mall in Freehold, NJ while waiting for my client to have an evaluation by a therapist in the Food Court. (Yes, I'm serious . . . . )

Anyway, I walked and windowshopped. And not one single bookstore. Waldens, gone. Borders, gone. Doubleday, gone. Not one book in a large commercial enterprise.

I can't tell you how depressing this is and the absence is a foreboding of the future. No books.

[bigwillq]

1. Very sad.

Same thing with video stores.

I still enjoy going to a bookstore, browsing, then buying a book and going home to read it.
I don't like reading a book on an electronic device. I tried it on my iPhone and just don't like it.

[GeorgeGist]

6. Novels on matchbooks ...

never made it either.

[nuxvomica]

2. We lost our two local bookstores in the past year

"Red Fox Books" closed back in September and a children's bookstore that had been around for a while -- "The Dog Ate My Homework" -- closed earlier this year. I think that the commercial credit crunch may have been the last nail for the former. Both bookstores were very active in their marketing and competitive in their pricing. It's not like they didn't give it a good try.
I loved going into Red Fox and finding so many books that I bought on impulse because the owners were so savvy about packing the small space with genuinely interesting books. It's not the same when I go into Barnes and Noble and have to search past all the fluff.

[canoeist52]

3. The only hope I see is in the public Libraries.

Their popularity is at an all-time high in my area - which tells me it the economy causing this, not lack of interest in books.

[Chan790]

4. Oddly, they seem to be thriving in DC.

I've also noticed a dramatically-low uptake/saturation for e-book-readers here. I guess living in a city where electronic security and surveillance are a part of everyday life and everybody has a government Blackberry, people just don't want or trust another electronic gadget. Combine that with an exceptionally-literate well-educated population and you've got the fertile ground for book-trade.

[greendog]

5. If I want to visit a bookstore I'm looking at a 120 mile drive.

Our little independent bookstore closed down in 2009 when the owner retired. Then Borders went bankrupt.

[tabbycat31]

7. There is a Barnes and Noble across the street from the Freehold Mall

That mall used to have a Borders in it until the chain went under.

[lunatica]

8. It won't be long before physical classroom textbooks aren't needed too

And in one sense that's a good idea. Working in UC Berkeley I see students loaded down with so many heavy books in their backpacks that I know they're hurting themselves physically in the long run. Their backpacks are so crammed with textbooks that I'm sure they weigh at least as much as the students carrying them do. You can tell they're heavy because when they swing the packs off so they can sit down you can see their arm muscles bulging from hefting the weight.

If they could have all those textbooks on their ipads with the ability to make notes and also take class notes they would only have to carry their ipads.

And as nice as books are they do require paper which means cutting down trees will diminish considerably. Having a few million more trees on the planet would certainly help cool it. There's a definite up side to the loss of books, as long as there is no loss in literature and reading material.

And I imagine that when people take the long colonizing trips to Mars they can take their entire culture and literature with them, all in gadgets like ipads without adding any weight to the payload. They could take all the movies ever made too. Boredom would be one less consideration for long trips.

[quakerboy]

11. I think thats good

At least with a novel, its written once and done. Its the same words, sentences, paragraphs, in the same order if you read it today or in 10 years, or 50.

Textbooks are more technical, and they like to constantly change them. With an e-form, you don't have to waste new paper every year. You could even update a text mid year in the more dynamic fields, much more easily.

[marzipanni]

12. My son is a high school junior

Fortunately his school provides a home copy and a classroom copy of four of his textbooks. His AP biology book, the heaviest, weighs over 5 lbs. and is 1,231 pages w/o the appendices, index, etc. in the back.
I appreciate Jansport, and any other backpack company that manufactures backpacks with straps, stitching, and zippers than can stand up to the weight many students are expected to carry. I 'm not so sure human spinal discs are strong enough.

[Brigid]

9. I don't want an e-reader.

Not until they're made here instead of China or wherever. In the meantime, I'll avoid getting one for as long as I can get away with it.

[kentauros]

10. I don't have a single problem with them going away.

I love my Kindle. And I really wish I could convert all of my books (cookbooks especially) to electronic form. Most books are still not available in an ebook format.

And until ebook readers get to be at least the size of a standard A4 (letter) sheet of paper, you'll still have all those massive coffee table books being printed, too.

[Meiko]

13. Many of the bookstores have moved online

If you are willing to search you can find just about anything. It is no substitute for browsing a bookstore but the material is still out there.