/lit/ - Literature

>>18575849
>how can you rationalize opening an even more niche offering of a waning medium when even a standard bookstore is lucky to survive without non-book gimmicks?
Easily, by separating the experience of reading from the content of the manuscript itself.
Bookstores sell identical cheaply printed perfect binds at a large markup. People don't bother with these because they can just download a pdf, which causes booksellers to slash quality even more in an attempt to stay relevant. Of course this will always fail because you can't undercut free p2p file sharing software.
You can however offer the physical experience of sitting in a comfy leather chair, perhaps next to a fireplace, sipping espresso and flipping through a beautifully illustrated leather bound edition of your favorite book.
If booksellers want to survive as an industry in the next hundred years, they need to completely turn around from the direction they've taken for the last 500-or-so years (which is mass reproducibility at the expense of quality) and focus on the producing high quality products that people want to pay for EVEN THOUGH they could just as easily download the book for free online. Clearly coffee shops like Starbucks do quite well, even though people could easily make a coffee at home, so there must be some appeal there.