Is closing a bookshop akin to knocking down a unicorn?

PRESENT TENSE

PRESENT TENSE

THIS WILL BE a column about book shops, but let’s start in a record store.

With a few minutes to kill recently, I wandered into Tower Records, hovered inside the door for a moment and gazed blankly at the chart albums while my brain tried to figure out just why I was there. The only reason I could come up with was that I was acting out a memory of how I used to kill time. It’s been at least three years since I last bought a CD. I download all my music now – through PC or phone. There was a time when I would look at a stack of CDs and calculate how many of them I could afford to leave with. Now, it is a reminder that I need to clean out the attic. So, I turned and left.

Bookshops, on the other hand, remain a treat. They are never about killing time, but savouring it. And yet . . . I have begun reading books on iPhone’s Kindle app. On many levels, this should be a daft concept. The screen is so small that only three or four paragraphs fit on each “page”. Tactility comes through the swipe of a grubby finger across the screen. And an iPhone “book” smells not of fresh paper but of my jacket pocket. Book sales would have collapsed years ago if all books smelled like my jacket pocket.

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But here’s the surprise: it’s great. The text is crisp against the bright white background. Swiping is no less an inconvenience than turning a page. The app automatically remembers where you last read. It is attached to a bookshop that will not only send you books quickly but will let you read free samples. When you have read a book, it doesn’t need shelf space and gathers no dust. Forget, for a moment, the obsession with owning a physical copy of a book and think only of the words. On this criterion – whether on its own device or on a phone – the Kindle works.

Hughes and Hughes went into receivership a week ago, and many people reacted to it as if someone had knocked down a unicorn. To many people it just seemed wrong that a book chain could be crippled. As if it should be a protected species in the retail jungle. I liked Hughes and Hughes too – my local branch had great staff and a children’s section that allowed kids to grab and sit and read. Yet, a bookshop is no more worthy of survival than a clothes shop or a café or a furniture warehouse.

The market doesn’t care that the shelves were heavy with works that were imbued with authors’ lives and souls. It doesn’t care that they were also filled with bad books, lazy books, shameful books and a Sharon Osbourne novel. It doesn’t care for the public’s romantic notions. Sentiment does not keep any business open.

It’s still uncertain what proportion of Hughes and Hughes’s problems were unique to the company, caused by moving into the wrong places at the wrong time, or how much they are symptomatic of deeper problems that will drag others down too. Whatever the truth, the past year has been chastening for the trade. In 2009, the market’s value shrank by over 5 per cent. There have already been job losses and reduced profits. The traditional Christmas rush started very late last year and the success of recession-themed books masked declining sales elsewhere.

Still, prior to the Hughes and Hughes news, the recession had yet to fully impact in the way that it has in the UK, where the story is resembling something from the worst misery lit. When Borders collapsed in the UK, it left Waterstone’s as the only national chain and even that has suffered losses strong enough for it to sack its chief and reshape its business model. Several independent bookshops are closing every month. The days of big author advances are threatened. Publishers’ reliance on celebrity memoirs outlasted the public’s appetite for them. Supermarkets and the internet have become major threats. And no-one seems to know what will happen next.

Why should Ireland be so special that it can afford several book chains when the UK now has only one? Is it enough that we still buy a lot of books (15 million last year) and that we consider ourselves to be pretty decent at writing them too? Whatever the causes of Hughes and Hughes’s decline, it at least proves that the unthinkable can happen in a trade that had long been considered as recession-proof.

But the unthinkable is already happening – in how books are bought, published and read. Ten years ago, few would have guessed how much music would soon be bought without there being a physical purchase involved. But people still love music. Ten years from now, the books trade will have changed, perhaps as radically. But it will not be the end of reading. That is the only truly unimaginable thing.

shegarty@irishtimes.com

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