When travelling I judge the health of a community by the privately owned bookstores especially in the heart of downtown. For many this may be only a subliminal indicator but it is a factor that a Chamber of Commerce should consider.

Michael, I’d be interested to hear more about your Tolkien titles. My college senior thesis for my Honors in English was on Tolkien. My mom once told me that if I’d spent half the time learning “real” history as I spent on Middle Earth, I’d be more successful. Not sure what I would have been more successful at, but at the time, I didn’t care. Elves and hobbits were way more interesting than the American Revolution.

I suspect in a couple of years I’ll be doing a a paperback version of many titles more for legitimacy than income. There are a lot of trashy ebooks out there. The discipline of creating an attractive print version with a great cover and the money/time investment required is a good way to signal to readers that a book is well-done.

We need to be practical too. There’s simply no way that a brick-and-mortar bookstore can market ebooks. It’s too easy to get them directly from your home or the coffee shop on the corner. But something like a bookstore can remain alive if they emulate two success stories, Starbucks and Apple stores, and create a total environment that’s worth visiting for other reasons.

One final note. I’ve been told by people who know that bookstores were actually rare in the U.S. before the 1960s outside large cities. Most people read books they got through belonging to book clubs. If we’re interested in preserving reading and a world where authors don’t live in dumpsters, something similar might make more sense but with ebooks.

For instance, there’d be ebook clubs for various sorts of books: mysteries, thrillers, romance, fantasy, and the like. There’d be different levels, depending on how much reading you liked to do. You could even store up titles for summer vacation. New authors would get to promote their titles as outside-the-limit downloads. Subscribers could even try a title for a day and return it at no penalty. They might also be able to pick an occasional title outside their genre. Authors would be paid based on downloads.

So how did a (mostly) full price store put the discount store out of business? Borders was the better bookstore despite higher prices. A modern bookstore must be able to offer something more than Amazon — and doesn’t have to be price. Or have times so changed that price really is the main thing.