We're four months into a global pandemic. I could talk about Americans not taking adequate precautions. I could talk about how our general practioner's attitude has changed as more friends and acquaintances die around us. I live in a red state, and even our governor has taken this very seriously from the beginning.
Nope, I'm going to talk about brick and mortar (AKA b&m) bookstores. You know, those stand alone buildings that back in the day sold nothing but books?
They were already in trouble before big, bad Amazon came along. I know. I worked at a Waldenbooks (they were own by Borders Group, Inc.) for a couple of Christmases near the turn of the century. Our inventory and ordering computers were barely a step above the Apple IIE's I learned on in high school.
Amazon's Kindle came out in 2010. Borders collapsed in 2011. And it looked as if Barnes & Noble would follow suit after their attempts to promote a competing device, the Nook, failed abysmally.
Over the last few years, B&N juggled executives, thinking that would help. In the meantime, independent bookstores made a comeback as specialty shops. In both case, the b&m stores sold more than just books and most went online to sell around the world. Heck, I was excited to see my paperback sales take off!
Then the coronavirus exploded.
Pretty much everything that was non-essential shut down around the world for a time. Including bookstores. Even Amazon put a priority on health and safety goods and food deliveries over physical entertainment items and toys.
Indie publishing saw a drop in sales for a few weeks as college kids fled the universities, parents attempted to juggle their kids' education with working from home, and our elderly had to be treated like prisoners for their own protection.
Then e-book sales started up again because there's only so many times you can watch
Tiger King on Netflix.
I should say most genres saw the uptick. A large chunk of the post-apoc subgenre stayed in a slump because, well, we were fucking living it.
Even audio books saw an uptick. People listened to them as they planted gardens and worked on the house repairs they'd put off because now they had the time.
But paperbacks took a dive while the bookstores remained closed.
With reopening plans, bookstore owners struggled to figuring out the best practices to keep employees and shoppers safe. You can wash a tomato someone else may have sneezed on, but you can't wash a paperback.
Well, technically, you can, but it ruins the book.
And now that stores are reopened, most folks with any sense don't go out unless they absolutely have to. Especially, those of us in the high risk category, which ironically are the groups most likely to have the time and disposable income to buy and read paperbacks.
So what's going to happen to bookstores in the long run? No one knows, and anyone who says they do is lying their asses off.
We are still in the first wave of this blasted disease. Cases are spiking across the U.S. As of this writing, 137,000+ are dead, and that number will grow through the rest of July. Businesses are failing left and right. By the time it's over, we are going to have a very different world.
Books will be a part of the new world, but the method in which we purchase and consume them may be very, very different.
