The traditional bookstore is doomed by e-readers and online sales of hard copy books. I use the word “doomed” in the same sense that online digital sales of movies and music have doomed movie rental stores, movie theatres, and stores that sell albums of music. Doomed does not mean that these stores will quickly, or ever fully, disappear, but that they have received deadly blows from Internet competition.
I agree but I must add a comment on college text books. These will keep the monopoly of the college book store going and it will continue to provide a heft income stream to those professors who produce the version after version of text books.
Let me look at a simple set of examples:
Calculus: You may just as easily get a 1930 copy of a calculus book off used book web site ABE since frankly not much has changed. In fact the book has fewer pictures if any and if often clear and to the point. Why spend $245 for a Calculus text, I picked the top one on Amazon. What in the good Lord's name is worth that much in a calculus book. In my opinion that is almost highway robbery if the price is truly what they say. Nothing has changed, it is all the same, and you would be better off with a half dozen used old books and comparing sections and methods of explanations, that is what real life is about.
French: Now I have a real issue here. This has not change much in a few hundred years. Same verbs, idioms, grammar, even the classic authors, and I read Le Monde each day on line! Why spend for beginning French $140 which is first on Amazon! There must be dozens of French books in every used books store and millions on ABE, actually 868,733, close.
Economics: Why not select witchcraft, but let's stay here. Not much has changed in fifty years with the intro course, same graphs, same arguments, and besides its usually knowing the political bent of the instructor rather than any facts in economics. Here on Amazon the top seller is $239. Now what do you get for that, I gather it is some later edition, and they just probably purged the stuff that was wrong last few times and included stuff that is most likely still speculative.
Now to engineering. Well, at the top schools you get handouts, and web based materials. The faculty I know are always at the edge and thus the students have no cost unless they decide to print it out. Now engineers become productive day one out of school, and the costs of books at the school bookstore can be de minimis. Does that say something.
Now back to Becker. The school bookstore does not seem to be going anywhere. It is a confiscatory monopoly for some. Remember that an author gets about 15% of the gross, so if your book is $250 then you get $32.50 each one sold. Sell 10,000 and you get $325,000 per year! That is another cost to the poor student and their family.
Perhaps the FTC may look at this some day, or Antitrust. But do not hold your breath. Becker may see the closing the Borders but the old college book store seems to be prospering beyond the wildest of dreams.
Yet as Posner just posted he states:
The question then becomes whether the loss of point-of-sale services that bookstores provide will hurt publishers (and therefore authors, whose prosperity is linked to that of publishers) more than it will help them by reducing their distribution costs. That too is doubtful. As technology continues its forward march, online booksellers will find it increasingly feasible to duplicate and indeed improve on the point-of-sale services that bookstores offer. Bookstores will decline, and perhaps vanish when the current older generation, consisting of people habituated to printed books (as to printed newspapers), dies off. Yet this may well represent genuine economic progress, just as department stores and supermarkets represent progress though they cause the demise of countless small retailers.
He reminds me of how thirty years ago when I tried to get Warner Cable into two way, we posed it as an electronic marketing and distribution channel. We saw two way interactive cable with our real time video on demand as a game changer. Yet we were too early. Yet we were right, it is a game changer, and it is a marketing and distribution channel change.
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