City Safari: Have Bookstores Become Caffeinated Hangouts For Cyber Zombies?
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Wed, Nov 20, 2019
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It’s over. It’s done. The city bookstore is dead and maybe even the suburban bookstore is dead as well. Something awful has happened, but what?
I think I know the answer to the question.
A quick summing up: Bookstores have become café stronghold hangouts for students with laptops who loathe working in the privacy of their own room or apartment but who opt for public space theaters where they can sit for hours in W-Fi bliss.
Walk into any bookstore now where there is a public seating area, such as a café, and you will see multiple rows of students arranged like penguins along a beach front. The students sit frozen in a transcendental state, massaging hand held devices, clicking or swiping ad infinitum as the aroma of coffee pervades what has become a ‘dormitory away from school.’
What are the ramifications of this?
For an author scheduled to do a reading or a book signing in one of these cyber station universes, the experience can be challenging. The cyber zombies, you see, view the bookstore as primarily a bricks and mortar physical space where they can catch up online, snapchat or cavort with friends. The zombies divorce themselves existentially from the soul of the bookstore and in the end the bookstore might just as well be a hardware store with a large café, a church basement or a gift and novelty shop that’s gotten into the muffin and coffee trade.
Some naïve ‘futures experts’ have perceived the rush of students into bookstore cafes as a good sign. They see it as increasing book sales but that simply isn’t true. In a café setting books are taken off the shelves to accompany the coffee drinker to the table but more often than not end up back on the shelves with coffee stains on the corners of the pages. Classic book lovers tend to wander the shelves and might occasionally sit in the café but certainly the tendency with them would not be to linger all day unless they happen to be homeless novelists or get off by posing as wannabe Sartre’s or Beauvoir’s trying to write in an imaginary French café.
The majority of bookstore café lingerers are students doing homework or cyber stuff that has little to do with books. Many are there because they fear the solitude of their rooms.
The current reconfiguration of bookstores into full service cafes or restaurants has contributed to this craze. The idea of a bookstore has been demoted and denuded so much that The New York Times reported that Barnes and Noble has taken the word ‘bookstore’ off the labeling of their college stores. That is significant because even B&N realizes that college bookstores are not real bookstores but student homework hangouts and mini-department stores.
Philadelphia’s UPenn Barnes and Noble is a perfect example of this. Nearly half of the UPenn B&N is devoted to school apparel. There are racks of university-branded polos, windbreakers, backpacks, pompom hats, scarves (stripped, of course), baseball caps, coffee mugs and assorted knickknacks. The books are still there, of course, but they appear weirdly sidelined almost as an 11th hour afterthought. God help the unsuspecting author who has agreed to do a book signing or talk in one of these university department stores because the laptop students won’t budge from their mass hypnosis. Susan Sontag, revisiting from the land of the dead, could appear and begin to speak but these students wouldn’t even raise their heads to see what was happening.
Dead to books, alive to digital--that’s the truth of this new age.
Matthew Norman, a first-time novelist, wrote an article entitled, “On the embarrassment of confronting an empty space,” in Literary Hub.
Norman’s relates what happened to him during his author’s talk in a downtown Baltimore bookstore:
“[The events manager] looked over at the café and nodded. “There are a few people there,” he said.
Technically, he was right. There were some people—students, it seemed—sporadically hunched over laptops drinking coffee at some tables. “I don’t think they’re here to see me,” I said.
He sighed. In retrospect, I suspect this is a conversation he’d had before with writers like me who’d found themselves suddenly thrust into literary obscurity. “Well, there’s really no way to know,” he said. “Maybe give it a few minutes. Wait and see. Maybe some more folks will roll in.”
But nobody rolled in, as it turned out, because the students just weren’t interested. And Norman was their age, a millennial twenty-something.
Shakespeare and Company on Walnut Street opened with a great deal of fanfare and promise. I attended the opening press event and was very impressed with the beautiful store and the friendly staff. The store’s potential at that time seemed limitless…until, of course, the invasion of student cyber homework zombies. Student cyber homework zombies live in small frame fishbowls and rarely have any intellectual curiosity beyond the confines of their world. To some degree, this is a perfectly natural attitude when you are twenty-something. At that age, we think we know everything. It’s a time when harsh criticism and (sneering) cynicism sometimes comes as naturally as breathing.
It’s the mass indifference enhanced by the new digital world that I don’t like.
Shakespeare & Co.’s CEO Dane Neller was quoted as saying that “Each new bookstore should be rooted in the local community and offer a cultural sanctuary where customers can escape from their daily routines, turn off their smart phones, relax, unwind and indulge in the luxury or reading.”
Obviously, it doesn’t seem that anything digital has been turned off.
The fact is, real bookstores are disappearing. Earlier this year, The Guardian published a piece about the disappearing bookstores in New York City. The blame for this is attributed to several different sources: competition from Amazon, Kindle, Tablets and Smartphones. One must also add the fact that bookstore have had to become café/restaurants in order to survive.
The Guardian also noted that reading has become a specialized, elite activity, seeming to contradict what Forbes magazine reported in an article entitled, Millennials: A Generation of Page Turners, that praised millennials as “reading more than their elders.” (Of course, what they’re mainly reading is suspense novels and Harry Potter).
Way back as 2011, Authority Publishing published an article entitled, Why Book Signing Events are a Waste of Time for Authors.” The author, a former bookseller, wrote:
Back when I owned a bookstore, we held author events every weekend. The vast majority of authors sold eight books or less. I remember one author who didn’t sell a single book and many who sold less than five. Ouch.
The authors who sold more than eight books typically invited in their following. They had mailing lists, alumni groups, coworkers, and other networks that showed up to give support. Once in awhile, coverage in the local paper or news would stir up some shoppers, but even those mentions fell flat more often than not.
I think I know the answer to the question.
A quick summing up: Bookstores have become café stronghold hangouts for students with laptops who loathe working in the privacy of their own room or apartment but who opt for public space theaters where they can sit for hours in W-Fi bliss.
Walk into any bookstore now where there is a public seating area, such as a café, and you will see multiple rows of students arranged like penguins along a beach front. The students sit frozen in a transcendental state, massaging hand held devices, clicking or swiping ad infinitum as the aroma of coffee pervades what has become a ‘dormitory away from school.’
What are the ramifications of this?
For an author scheduled to do a reading or a book signing in one of these cyber station universes, the experience can be challenging. The cyber zombies, you see, view the bookstore as primarily a bricks and mortar physical space where they can catch up online, snapchat or cavort with friends. The zombies divorce themselves existentially from the soul of the bookstore and in the end the bookstore might just as well be a hardware store with a large café, a church basement or a gift and novelty shop that’s gotten into the muffin and coffee trade.
Some naïve ‘futures experts’ have perceived the rush of students into bookstore cafes as a good sign. They see it as increasing book sales but that simply isn’t true. In a café setting books are taken off the shelves to accompany the coffee drinker to the table but more often than not end up back on the shelves with coffee stains on the corners of the pages. Classic book lovers tend to wander the shelves and might occasionally sit in the café but certainly the tendency with them would not be to linger all day unless they happen to be homeless novelists or get off by posing as wannabe Sartre’s or Beauvoir’s trying to write in an imaginary French café.
The majority of bookstore café lingerers are students doing homework or cyber stuff that has little to do with books. Many are there because they fear the solitude of their rooms.
The current reconfiguration of bookstores into full service cafes or restaurants has contributed to this craze. The idea of a bookstore has been demoted and denuded so much that The New York Times reported that Barnes and Noble has taken the word ‘bookstore’ off the labeling of their college stores. That is significant because even B&N realizes that college bookstores are not real bookstores but student homework hangouts and mini-department stores.
Philadelphia’s UPenn Barnes and Noble is a perfect example of this. Nearly half of the UPenn B&N is devoted to school apparel. There are racks of university-branded polos, windbreakers, backpacks, pompom hats, scarves (stripped, of course), baseball caps, coffee mugs and assorted knickknacks. The books are still there, of course, but they appear weirdly sidelined almost as an 11th hour afterthought. God help the unsuspecting author who has agreed to do a book signing or talk in one of these university department stores because the laptop students won’t budge from their mass hypnosis. Susan Sontag, revisiting from the land of the dead, could appear and begin to speak but these students wouldn’t even raise their heads to see what was happening.
Dead to books, alive to digital--that’s the truth of this new age.
Matthew Norman, a first-time novelist, wrote an article entitled, “On the embarrassment of confronting an empty space,” in Literary Hub.
Norman’s relates what happened to him during his author’s talk in a downtown Baltimore bookstore:
“[The events manager] looked over at the café and nodded. “There are a few people there,” he said.
Technically, he was right. There were some people—students, it seemed—sporadically hunched over laptops drinking coffee at some tables. “I don’t think they’re here to see me,” I said.
He sighed. In retrospect, I suspect this is a conversation he’d had before with writers like me who’d found themselves suddenly thrust into literary obscurity. “Well, there’s really no way to know,” he said. “Maybe give it a few minutes. Wait and see. Maybe some more folks will roll in.”
But nobody rolled in, as it turned out, because the students just weren’t interested. And Norman was their age, a millennial twenty-something.
Shakespeare and Company on Walnut Street opened with a great deal of fanfare and promise. I attended the opening press event and was very impressed with the beautiful store and the friendly staff. The store’s potential at that time seemed limitless…until, of course, the invasion of student cyber homework zombies. Student cyber homework zombies live in small frame fishbowls and rarely have any intellectual curiosity beyond the confines of their world. To some degree, this is a perfectly natural attitude when you are twenty-something. At that age, we think we know everything. It’s a time when harsh criticism and (sneering) cynicism sometimes comes as naturally as breathing.
It’s the mass indifference enhanced by the new digital world that I don’t like.
Shakespeare & Co.’s CEO Dane Neller was quoted as saying that “Each new bookstore should be rooted in the local community and offer a cultural sanctuary where customers can escape from their daily routines, turn off their smart phones, relax, unwind and indulge in the luxury or reading.”
Obviously, it doesn’t seem that anything digital has been turned off.
The fact is, real bookstores are disappearing. Earlier this year, The Guardian published a piece about the disappearing bookstores in New York City. The blame for this is attributed to several different sources: competition from Amazon, Kindle, Tablets and Smartphones. One must also add the fact that bookstore have had to become café/restaurants in order to survive.
The Guardian also noted that reading has become a specialized, elite activity, seeming to contradict what Forbes magazine reported in an article entitled, Millennials: A Generation of Page Turners, that praised millennials as “reading more than their elders.” (Of course, what they’re mainly reading is suspense novels and Harry Potter).
Way back as 2011, Authority Publishing published an article entitled, Why Book Signing Events are a Waste of Time for Authors.” The author, a former bookseller, wrote:
Back when I owned a bookstore, we held author events every weekend. The vast majority of authors sold eight books or less. I remember one author who didn’t sell a single book and many who sold less than five. Ouch.
The authors who sold more than eight books typically invited in their following. They had mailing lists, alumni groups, coworkers, and other networks that showed up to give support. Once in awhile, coverage in the local paper or news would stir up some shoppers, but even those mentions fell flat more often than not.
