By the mid 1970s, the great downtown bookstores had begun to disappear as their customers migrated from city to suburb where population density was too thin to support major backlist retailers.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
When a town doesn't have a book store, it is like something is missing, and unfortunately, fewer and fewer have them.
We don't want bookstores to die. Authors need them, and so do neighborhoods.
Retailing has gone from an information-scarce to an information-rich environment.
As I watched bookstores close, I began to wonder how that felt for the owners. Owning a bookstore was their dream and now they're struggling and seeing those dreams fall apart.
Where I grew up, in Des Moines, Iowa, there is hardly any downtown economic activity now. Everybody shops in malls - you don't find a sense of community in malls.
In some markets, we don't have a lot of room to expand. We've done studies of store density and essentially found our more dense markets have more than one store per 15,000 people.
My books didn't fit a marketing niche.
Behind every small business, there's a story worth knowing. All the corner shops in our towns and cities, the restaurants, cleaners, gyms, hair salons, hardware stores - these didn't come out of nowhere.
Age about 30, I stopped looking up my books in bookstores. Paying attention to the marketplace isn't a healthy thing for me.
Bookstores will not disappear but will exploit digital technologies to increase their virtual and physical inventories, and perhaps become publishers themselves.