(Photo courtesy of Barnes & Noble) “Barnes & Noble has seen its first expansion in the 2020s after a rough 2010s.”

Maxwell Valin

Connector Editor

If you’re a consumer of entertainment in any form, you’ve most certainly found yourself having to make less effort to access the content you want than you would’ve had to, say, 15 years ago. New methods of being able to shop and enjoy different mediums such as film, music, and television through Amazon, Netflix, and other services mean that you don’t even have to leave your house to have access to most things anymore. For the most part, this has spelled doom for many brick-and-mortar retailers such as dedicated record store chains (not counting businesses like Newbury Comics, which incorporate CDs and vinyl records into their wider range of products), Blockbuster, RadioShack, and likely GameStop before too much longer.

Without a doubt, this drastic shift in demand for brick-and-mortar stores for most of these products has led many to believe that the same will inevitably happen to bookstores, with big chains of retailers being forced to close their doors, leaving only small, local options around to attempt to get business. However, I do not believe this will be the case, and the numbers seem to agree with me. Business for large bookstore chains like Barnes & Noble seems to be doing just fine. Despite having a rough run in the 2010s, some smart business choices in recent years have allowed the company to begin expansion again, showing the desire is still there for in-person book browsing. 

The question, then, is this: if people were so ready to stop going out to shop for things such as music, video games, and movies, what exactly is it that makes it so much more enticing to go and buy books in person? I believe this is a complex and multi-layered discussion, but I also think some reliable answers perhaps speak to human behavior as a whole and illustrate the difference between books and the other types of entertainment we enjoy.

Physical books are what is known as Lindy. What does this mean? Well, the Lindy effect is essentially the theory that the longer something has been around, or used by humans, the higher the odds are of it being used more distant in the future. I’ll give some examples. In a world of rapidly changing fashion trends, the suit-and-tie is Lindy. In a time where music can be created and perfected digitally better than any human could ever perform it, hearing the personal touch of someone physically playing the guitar is Lindy. Do you get the general idea?

While we’ve only had the technology to mass-produce books and pamphlets for about 500 years (give or take), human beings have been reading written texts for thousands of years. Simply put, this is the format we are very used to using as human beings, and we don’t seem to want to stop. While digital forms of consumption now make up the majority of every other aforementioned medium, digital book sales just have not caught up to sales of physical copies.

So, you may be wondering–if we love physical media so much, why isn’t that true for music, movies, or games? Why don’t those follow the Lindy effect as well? The thing is, the actual consumption of those mediums doesn’t exactly change based on how you buy them. Sure, a record may sound better than digital audio. But you’re still listening to the music all the same. With games and movies, who cares whether you put the disc in or just scrolled through a digital library? You’re still playing the game and watching the movie in the same way you would be. Books, however, are different. With an e-book, you can’t flip through pages and leave physical notes sticking out. You can’t stick a bookmark between the pages and be proud of how much you’ve made it through. E-books take away some of the humanity in the process, in a way digitization doesn’t do with others.

There’s an analog element to books that is indisputably unique and strongly correlates with the Lindy effect theory that rings true for many other staples of culture. Purchasing printed or written works has been a common practice for far longer than purchasing other forms of entertainment. As humans, we think our deep innate desires can be so quickly derailed and overruled by digitization–perhaps, in this case, we ought to think again.