I'm a big fan of Seth Godin, and most of the time I think he is at least interesting, and more than often, right. But his recent post misses the point.
Amazon and the Kindle have killed the bookstore. Why? Because people who buy 100 or 300 books a year are gone forever. The typical American buys just one book a year for pleasure. Those people are meaningless to a bookstore. It's the heavy users that matter, and now officially, as 2009 ends, they have abandoned the bookstore. It's over.
Sorry, Seth. But I think your analogy is mistaken. The shift that you are predicting was predicted by people who said that movies would replace theatre, television would replace movies, and that the internet would replace television. Well, the relative popularity and usage models have certainly changed. And yes, I would expect new usage models to emerge.
Just don't tell me that the heavy users of the Kindle are going to give up consumption of any other forms of reading. Its just not true. Now physical books might become a niche business in a while. It may be true that more books are consumed online. But I bet that some books will still continue to be delivered as physical artifacts through retail channels. Art books for example. Or personalised books. I'm a www.blurb.com fan where I can deliver a high enough quality book, one at a time. Great for gifts, great to remember events, great to deliver a tangible momento.
Actually, Kindle users aren't yet typical book readers. There are a bunch of barriers still. I don't like the fact that Amazon can change content on me after I have bought a book. I don't like their pricing policy relative to real books. Kindle readers are atypical in lots of ways, and I don't think we have got anywhere close to crossing the chasm on electronic books. So are Kindles the next big thing, or just another electric carving knife, bought and abandoned to the back of the drawer?
Seth, you are just a little too advanced in your prophecy this time. Now some bookstores are going to die, just as some retailers are going to die with the advent of internet retailing. The ones that survive will adapt to the customers that still value them, just as theatres the world over survive, despite all the alternatives for consumption of theatrical content, many of them superior in production values and value for money. The magic of theatre is equivalent to the magic of a book. Their value won't change for me, even if I do spend most of my time in front of an electronic screen rather than in front of a book.
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