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they will cannibalize print sales as they were about e-books , and that ’ s been true ,” Milliot says . There ’ s another factor that continues to support the sale of physical books : the stubborn survival of booksellers , especially the independents that have endured a series of onslaughts . “ First there were the big-box sellers like Barnes & Noble and Borders ,” says Roxanne Coady , owner of R . J . Julia Booksellers in Madison , Conn ., for 30 years . “ Next came Amazon , and then the Kindle [ from Amazon ] and e-books .”
Borders filed for bankruptcy in 2011 and liquidated , and Barnes & Noble has been reducing its footprint . But independent bookstores are picking up the slack . As Harvard Business School professor Ryan Raffaelli wrote in the Harvard Business Review , the independent bookstore industry is experiencing
“ technological reemergence ,” as the number of independents in the U . S . rose 35 percent between 2009 and 2015 , from 1,651 to 2,227 . A similar dynamic has notably not played out among retailers of physical music and videos . Blockbuster is down to a single remaining store in Oregon . And music store chains such as HMV and Virgin Records are long gone .
R . J . Julia , like other indie stalwarts , has endured by expanding beyond print books to offer a range of high-end gift and stationery items , staging celebrity author signing events , and , as in Coady ’ s case , opening an in-store café . “ My worry now is that baby boomers are in the shedding mode , not the acquisitive mode ,” she laments . What ’ s more , although boomers ’ kids are reading a lot , they ’ re not just reading e-books and listening to audiobooks but also consuming newsletters and blogs .
“ If there were a finite amount of time given to culture , the portion of their time going to books would be different from baby boomers ,” she says . “ We ’ re trying to figure out what that looks like .”
It will certainly look different , says James DePonte . “ I suspect that , long term , the amount of reading will dissipate over time , if by smaller degrees than for other media ,” he says . Despite the disruptive elements , “ if you stack those all up , print books have done fine , but I don ’ t think that in 30 years we ’ re going to find them in the same light .”
Source : strategy + business On the base of PwC ’ s Global Entertainment & Media Outlook 2018 – 2022 : A comprehensive source of advertising and consumer spending data .
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