I have been holding on to this idea for awhile but have forgotten to bring it up: Why did Borders die and not Barnes and Noble? The answer was Borders wasn’t in the same league as Barnes and Noble was in the new technology scene. Borders had a strong figures when it came to standar book sales, however, they fell short in the virtual sales. Unlike places like Amazon or Barnes, these two companies found it more financially sound to invest in new technology in selling books. Obviously we all know how this story plays out: Borders dies.
The failure of Borders isn’t because they couldn’t sell books, but they could sell the same number of books as Barnes and Amazon could. They had two different ways to sell essentially the same type of product and right know statistics show that it is a 50/50 split between the number of people that buy books electronically ans thise that buy the old fashioned way.
My reason fro bringing this up is more or less to argue that the death of Borders indicates that we are abandoning the use of physical books and are quickly turning to new ways to buy reading materials, and this is important for the digital humanities because this might mean that English lit. Majors might actually be using devices like Kindle for fututre use for their education.
Your last point is true, in fact, it’s already happening. I’ve seen more and more classmates using Kindles or Ipads in various classes. Admittedly, these are only in English Lit. classes where the instructor does not care about the editions being used, but still it is interesting.
I would hope that physical books do not die out. There is something nice about holding the real book in hand, the smell of paper, the heft of it…Also there is the issue of annotations. I know that for the digital readers you can add notes by typing, but is that the same kind of engagement with the text?
I was just discussing this in another class of mine, and my professor brought up the fact that Amazon is opening up “brick-and-mortar” stores in the near future. We hypothesized about the motivations, and ended up coming to the conclusion that the digital shopping experience can only go so far. Yet, as you mention, without the digital component it seems a bookstore cannot compete in today’s market. So, I guess the answer is a hybrid of both the digital and physical experience.