Edited by author 06-18-2004 11:52 PM
From the sound of it, it seems like you guys think that the print book is already on its way out the door. I personally don't hold too many romantic feelings towards ink on paper, but many people do, and like Charlie mentioned, good e-book readers a while away.

Of course that doesn't mean the current state of affairs couldn't be improved. Robert J. Sawyer briefly mentioned an intriguing possiblity in his _Flashforward_ novel that I keep bringing up whenever I get the chance: print-on-demand bookstores.

Robert basically described a large Canadian bookstore chain completely changing its image, turning itself into a cafe/lounge area with very few actual pre-printed books available on the stands. The majority of the store's books were individually created and sold via a simple printing/binding machine connected to a data server that held books. A customer would select a book, pay for it, browse some magazines/catalogues or drink some caffe lattes while it printed, and voila, a few minutes later and a brand new paperback would be resting on their lap.

Now this wouldn't necesserily have to completely disturb the current publisher/distributor relationship; hard-cover encyclopedias, large atlases, children's pop-up books and guaranteed best-sellers would still fill the bookshelves via external suppliers. But the casual paperback, oh man, it could go through a veritable renaissance!

Aside from the two most obvious advantages of such an approach--i.e. the almost complete removal of both the middleman and inventory-management--a lot of other great perks could materialize: cheaper prices (for a product that's already fairly cheap), no worries about a book ever being sold-out, in-store Amazon.com-style browsing that would include intuitive algorithms suggesting related books/writers, more lax publishing procedures for aspiring writers (publishers wouldn't be so reluctant to risk publishing something new because the number of books sold would always equal the number of books printed), potentially higher payouts for everyone involved (on account of all the money print-on-demand would save, plus the expansion of the market through chic, new coffee-houses that would promote reading as being cool and totally back in), instant access to statistics such as who is buying what book and where (which would be just a neat thing for the public to view, but would prove much more vital to publishers and authors for the obvious reasons), and many, many more.

Bah, I might be needlessly ranting, but I honestly don't know why not a single book-chain--at least to my knowledge--has yet to try this. The technology to make it happen is already here, and dammit, I really want my books-on-demand!