X-Bookstore: The Next Retailer

(Special to Publishing Industry News.) Copyright @ 2011 by John T. Cullen. All Rights Reserved.

Call it the X-Bookstore, because nobody knows what it will be. One thing we can be sure of: bookstores are not going away. That's right, you heard it from me, one of the original firebrands preaching that the print industry is not only doomed, but should be doomed. There is a vast difference between having a print book versus having a retail experience.

The bottom line is that all of us, including me, love the retail experience. We get out of the house, or take a break from work, and go to the mall. Those of us who love books inevitably wander into bookstores. I realized years ago that going into a bookstore lowers my blood pressure dramatically within ten minutes. So there's one of the reasons we are all standing on our heads these days: nobody really has a complete handle on where the reading industry is going, but I cannot think of anyone who won't miss the bookstore experience.

The Next Big Thing is going to be—listen up, Next Entrepreneur—a retail space that brings us the best of the people, the lighting, the coffee, the music—even the smell of that dead tree binding glue marinated in perfume to kill the dead horse stench (I'm not kidding; try going within a mile of a gelatin rendering plant, where giant ladles slowly stir a whirling vortex of carcasses in putrescine and cadaverine syrup). Right now it looks like the lights are going out across the U.S.A. But have no fear. One day soon, as nervy entrepreneurs begin to smell the money, someone will come along with the X-Bookstore. What will it look like?

The X-Bookstore will predictably be a comfortable, efficient retail space. It will be friendly, inviting, well-lighted but cozy, conducive to thinking and reading and being at peace. Text is the music of the mind. Reading is the concerto of thought. The human brain, all 3 pounds of cheesy gray 'it,' is the most complex entity in the known cosmos, all 13 billion or however many light years the universe may be from ear to ear. That's what is at stake.

The X-Bookstore might just feature the best of your cyber-café with new ways to browse, read, write, study, even talk (or chat online). My main beef with displays so far is that they have tended to be like keyholes, whereas in the physical book world (forget for a moment how horrendously expensive) books can be as large as you wish, and it's more like looking through a three-bay picture window. But have no fear. You see them on news programs, and on the latest police procedurals—courtesy e-ink and other technologies, a wall or a table surface can become a complete viewing space as wide and tall as you wish. (I described this in a 1999ish editorial in Deep Outside SFFH, so I've had plenty of mulling time.) Maybe even 3-di holographic down the road. As I describe these visions, I almost think of myself as an 1860s person, in the age of Jules Verne (1828-1905), trying to imagine the theater experience of the mid-20th Century (i.e., radio, movies, television, all unknown in 1860 or 1880).

Deliverance, or Delivery. The X-Bookstore will deliver new wonders in ways that the frustrated, angry, fearful mensch of today cannot imagine. People today are caught up in one vast uncivil discussion populated by Garfield Cats and other monstrous, absurd pundits of polarity. The punditocracy who dominate the media make a lot of money from stirring up fear and loathing. It works, because I believe governments all around the country will soon be installing barf bag dispensers at every street corner. As we learn to control our media—and thus our governments by voting intelligently rather than as hysterical and underinformed minions of whoever wants to push our buttons—we will also regain a sense of the sanity and philosophy we fear losing as the venerable print book returns to its primeval forest, dons its Robin Hood green, and fades from memory.

Picture This: You enter the bookstore, which is quiet, pleasant, and well-lighted. Your social contact is at the coffee bar, which is more brightly lighted, and you mingle with pleasant barristas, and customers sipping drinks. Other sections of the store space are segregated by function.

You wander into the triflingly less bright, cozy book area and walk among rack displays. You hold your hand-held PEA (Personal Electronic Assistant). This could be anything from your e-wallet to your wrist watch—in other words, a Swiss Army Knife of digital functionality so you don't need to carry and memorize sixteen different devices with a million buttons and keystroke combinations (designed by mercilessly anergonomic ADD programmers hyped up on candy bars and cola drinks).

You browse the illumined little rectangles that emulate face-out book covers of not-so-long-ago. If you see something that interests you, you hold up your PEA and the display Wifis the book data to you: let's say, Richard Henry Dana Jr.'s 1840 Two Years Before The Mast, or an 1849 volume of Edgar Allan Poe's 1846 The Cask of Amontillado ("For the love of God, Montresor—Yes, for the love of God!"). Old meets new. Nothing is lost. The music is pleasant, the background chatter is social and reassuring, the coffee smells fresh (it's not virtually brewed), and the cash register never stops saying "Thank You" in a Droidish little voice.

You will enjoy a far richer experience in the X-Bookstore of the near future than anyone can imagine right now, as the old print industry with its fossilized practices turns to dust. So, do lament the passing of Borders and other dead tree outlets (grief is a process we must grind through), but eagerly anticipate far smarter and better things to come. Unless this happens to be the end of the world (not a print book's chance in the rain), the future can only get better as we adapt.