From Front Porch Republic: Local Bookstores and the Writers Who Love Them.
That said, the confident positivism of business schools aside, it is in the nature of any historical moment and of any aspect of it to be unpredictable. Has a certain confluence of unanticipated circumstances made it conceivable once more that local bookstores are something other than a superannuated business model? Retailers in general have found impressive, if not always happy, ways to adapt in the age of internet sales, while the entrepreneurs of the internet have had to discover, or reconsider, the obsolecense of so called “brick and mortar” businesses in order to make themselves profitable. On the whole, I think these changes still amount to the destruction of small, locally owned businesses and of the kind of town centers that provide a place for culture and community to take root. Our natural appetitiveness once again promises to undermine the conditions of our happiness — a conundrum of longstanding in regard to man’s love of God but of more recent vintage and more obvious sorrow in destroying the places where we used to live. The series described below may provide clues to what kind of future we can hope for on these matters.
