Since the advent of the Internet (more specifically, the advent of graphical browsers that made it easy for the average Joe and Jane to actually use the Internet), copious quantities of ink (traditional and electronic) have been spilt over the impending death of the book--which, of course, also has implied the death of libraries, bookstores and book collectors.
As the existence of this blog should make clear, we take all of this hand-wringing to be somewhat overwrought. Certainly book publishing has undergone enormous changes over the past fifteen years, and certainly book publishing is likely to undergo further--probably wrenching-- changes in the years ahead. There may be fewer books printed, more books may be printed on demand, vooks may take the place of books in certain areas, Google may well digitize millions of older books, Kindles and their ilk may attract more readers who like to curl up with a good computer. But all of this will no more kill the book than movies killed the book, than radio killed the book, than television killed the book, than home video killed the book:
The problems that book publishers are having, and I mean here the half-dozen or so mega media corporations that dominate the industry, are--to a considerable extent--due to their own poor choice of a business model. While fewer books may be published for markets like the USA (down 6% by volume in 2008) and the UK (volume down 4% in the same period), emerging markets with a healthier appetite for books (such as India and China) will likely take up much of the slack. (India, already the world's third largest market for English-language books, is seeing market growth in excess of 10% per annum.)
Once one turns away from the mega media, one finds that all is not doom and gloom. The Independent Alliance (an organization of ten small publishers) saw its sales volume grow 66% during the first 16 weeks of this year.
But it is not book publishing per se that we are concerned with in today's post. Rather, it is book collecting that we wish to focus upon. And the problems in publishing are but one of several trends impacting book collecting.
The worldwide economic recession probably is the dominant factor impacting all kinds of collecting right now. Most folks have less money than they had at this time last year, and they likely are more careful about how they spend it. A recent conference at the Grolier Club, Books in Hard Times (nicely summarized by Jeremy Dibbel on his blog Philobiblos), produced comments like the following from well-known book collector Mark Samuels Lasner: I have half the money, books cost twice as much, and there are four times as many of them on the market.
But this particular problem (which, like the depressed housing market, actually is a golden opportunity if you have the funds to take advantage of it), is less worrisome than another trend in book collecting: the "graying" of book collectors themselves. In a recent essay, which should be read aloud to every organization of book collectors on the planet (many of which you will find links for in the left-hand column of this blog under Bookish Organizations), the founder of Americana Exchange, Bruce McKinney, tackles the vexsome issue of how book collecting is to survive if there is no one to mentor younger generations which rarely spend much time with printed books.
Book collectors clubs, which have served this purpose for at least two centuries, have seen their membership numbers plummet in recent decades. McKinney surveys this challenge in some detail, then offers a solution that we find both reasonable and worthwhile, especially for clubs that do not have a solution of their own already in place. If you are an officer for such an organization, or know someone who is, pass along this link....
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