The world is changing and we must change with it, innovate, and rush on to the next frontier and then the next one after that – forever in a rapid, dizzying traipse into the very near future. No time to stop.
And sure, it’s inevitable. That’s true. But we should be cognizant of what is lost, which old things are traded in for the new and shiny.
Amazon and the Starbucks Effect
by Erik Kain
http://www.forbes.com/sites/erikkain/2011/12/17/amazon-and-the-starbucks-effect/
Earlier this week I wrote about Amazon’s Price Check app which allows customers to scan barcodes of any item sold at Amazon and get an instant price comparison at any store. This allows customers to get on-the-go price comparisons and helps Amazon get pricing data from competitors all across the country.
Much of the bad press this app is getting is in response to what it might do to local bookstores.
But Amazon is hardly just a bookseller anymore, and while many people might hesitate at undermining their favorite local bookstore by window-shopping there and then buying at Amazon, far fewer people would think twice to price check at major retailers like Walmart.
Tim Carmody argues that the way much of the media has framed this issue is simply wrongheaded. Rather than some death-match between Amazon and indie bookstores, Amazon is actually targeting much bigger fish. After all, books aren’t even included in Amazon’s $5 Price Check promotion.
Technofuturists vs. the Bookservatives
The debate in the media, Tim argues, is largely framed by two predictably opposing sides: On the one hand you have the technofuturists, “characterized by an embrace of new technologies and delivery methods, irreverence toward traditional vehicles of culture, and an embrace of a spiritual Darwinism that says that institutions that can’t adapt to the future should die and make room for the new. Only an extinction event can kill off the dinosaurs and allow the mammals of the future to thrive.”
On the other there are the bookservatives, who “identify the essence of literary culture with a specific (and largely contingent) technological and social arrangement governing the production, distribution and consumption of literary material.”
I’ve encountered both types in my wanderings. The Techonomy conference I attended last month was really a creature of techno-futurism. The optimism over social media and the transformation of the economy vis-a-vis hacker culture was downright Utopian (and I admit, somewhat intoxicating.)
Meanwhile, many of my old college professors and fellow lit students were bookservatives. Both have a valid point about the direction of technology and the arts, I think, but often are too optimistic or too cynical by half.
Interestingly, the dividing line on many important issues such as the anti-piracy bill, SOPA, hinge on these very different worldviews and the special interests they represent.
As a writer in new media who has largely come into a career thanks to technology and the openness of the internet, I probably lean a little closer to the technofuturist side of the aisle – as does Tim – but I remain cautiously optimistic at best.
Tim argues that neither side really gets the argument right because neither side is having the correct argument. Rather, they’re both feeding off of one another in a discussion that is largely irrelevant.
“To try to understand the transformation of the global publishing and retail market; to cope with the fact that our digital tools and the emerging culture associated with them don’t just transform local commerce, but the very idea of a local community itself, to see the accelerating demise of the local bookshop as an institution as something that has happened not over five or 10 but 50 to a hundred years,” Tim writes. “all that requires calculus, and all we have is arithmetic.”
This is similar to what I’ve argued about Price Check and about other industries, including the music industry. Local businesses, and bookstores, will have to become more than just bookstores – much as Amazon has become more than a bookseller itself.
Local bookstores will have to become experiences as well, whether that means selling coffee or work-sharing spaces or transforming into book cooperatives owned and operated by patrons.
A Time for Every Purpose Under the Sun
This really is a time for experimentation, as Tim argues, but we should also be aware that with experimentation comes the loss of things many people once loved. Tim thinks that the technofuturist argument is misguided, but these graphs read very much like a paean to technofuturism.
The world is changing and we must change with it, innovate, and rush on to the next frontier and then the next one after that – forever in a rapid, dizzying traipse into the very near future. No time to stop.
And sure, it’s inevitable. That’s true. But we should be cognizant of what is lost, which old things are traded in for the new and shiny. Maybe that’s just my inner-Burkean coming out, but I think it’s important.
I temper my enthusiasm because I am invariably full of doubt. Don’t get me wrong – I’d rather have a bookclub online than in person. I’d rather get my book recommendations from friends on the internet than a local bookstore employee. I prefer the availability of niches and communities I can find in the haunts and dives of the digital world to those I can find in person. I like being able to customize my experience.
But other things are irreplaceable. While I may love Alyssa Rosenberg’s bookclubs, I can’t sit down at Alyssa Rosenberg’s coffee shop. There is a place for the old and the new in cozy juxtaposition.
The Starbucks Effect
To don, once again, the futurist hat for a moment I think it’s important to think about how the internet has helped make reading more widespread. Far from destroying the traditional paper book, ebooks have led to increased sales of books across the board. And many local booksellers are flourishing as they adapt to a new marketplace.
Let’s call this the Starbucks effect. As the coffee giant spread across the country, many worried that its arrival in their town would lead to the death of local coffee houses. Nothing could have been further from the truth. The popularity of Starbucks had a trickle-over effect, creating a market for coffee where none existed before.
Time and again, when Starbucks came to town other local digs would flourish themselves.
Amazon may not have had the exact same effect on local booksellers as Starbucks on local coffee shops, but it certainly has opened many new avenues for readers, publishers, and writers all of which lead to a broader book culture that local sellers can capitalize on.
So should we be enthusiastic or pessimistic about the state of affairs of books in this country? Should we embrace apps like Price Check or dismiss them as unethical attempts to dominate the market?
It’s impossible to predict the future, but I’m hewing to the cautiously optimistic line of thinking. Part of this is simply reading the writing on the wall: the world is changing and the future will happen with or without us, for good or ill. But part of this is genuine enthusiasm, too.
As Tim so eloquently puts it, “Remember, it may be true that mammals, not dinosaurs, came to dominate Earth’s land masses, at least for this tiny sliver of our planet’s history. But even now, dinosaurs didn’t vanish from the earth; they’re still here. We call them birds.”
And the meek shall inherit the earth.