The Novel Experience is closing up shop, which makes us the last of the literary Mohicans.
An inevitability, but sad for anyone who loves the printed page.
They've been in trouble since the day B&N came to town- a business can survive on the protest vote, but it can't thrive and eventually whoever's running it grows weary of not getting paid.
Used book stores can be more sanguine about the big chains- our official comment when B&N opened was "great, more books for us!" The internet and ereaders are different, being cannibalistic rather than symbiotic, but we never had anything to fear from B&N (and later Borders).
But this should be instructive to the kindle/nook/ipad users who are as we speak eager accomplices in the murder of whatever hardy independents survived the advent of the chains.
Taken separately a small operator could certainly survive a big chain stealing customers, the internet eroding their sales or ereaders cannibalizing their function. But the danger of locust swarms are their cumulative appetite, not on how many leaves this or that individual locust will consume.
Which, as they say, is what it is- I'd hardly blame a locust for following its instincts.
Unless that is it insisted on mounting a tiny soapbox and delivering a self-serving paean to its love of the small farmer, mandibles still a-drip with the gore of said farmer's crops.
It's an unbecoming habit, and epidemic among the ereader enthusiasts I run across at the store.
In any case, RIP Novel Experience/Bookland.
You'll be missed.
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