“Every time a bar closes, a hundred songs are lost,” began the famous “Blessed Bars” video campaign that Coca-Cola launched in Spain in 2014. The video appealed to the emotions binding us to those establishments and was designed to go viral. That year, for the first time since the beginning of the economic crisis in 2008, more bars opened than shut down. Why haven’t Planeta, Grupo RBA, or Penguin Random House taken a similar initiative? Why hasn’t the book industry set about defending bookshops as emotional shrines for their readers? Amazon—which began to sell food in October—still doesn’t publish sales figures. That’s one of the reasons why, I imagine, there has never been a “Blessed Bookshops” campaign.
Other reasons can be found in Anita Elberse’s Blockbusters: Hit-making, Risk-taking, and the Big Business of Entertainment, which uses statistical data to show how, in the internet era, it’s still more profitable for big content producers to back just a few mainstream products rather than many niche ones. In other words, it makes more sense to invest a million euros in a single novel by Carlos Ruiz Zafón than on five hundred novels by other writers. The Harvard professor analyzes cases as different as Lady Gaga and Real Madrid, whose galactic model was inspired by Disney. She argues that, from a global market perspective, the fans who go to the Santiago Bernabéu stadium are essential as extras, because without them the content the club produces would lose most of its interest and profitability. I would argue that the same goes for most of the titles published by the big houses: they won’t earn much money, but they ensure permanent visibility for their publishers in bookshops, online platforms, and the media. For Coca-Cola, each bottle or can has the same value. For the big publishers, there are two kinds of books: the extras, who are legion, and a select band of star players.
Of the forty-six products advertised on Amazon’s main page, only six are books, though they are the first and the most visible. Paradoxically, at a time when bookshops don’t inspire mass consumption, the world’s most powerful virtual supermarket has appropriated books’ prestige. Not only that: it has opened a physical bookshop in Seattle. This move immediately becomes global news and makes us forget the company also sells mixers, televisions, and frozen food, or that in 2012 Internet Bookshop Italia, which has been selling online for almost twenty years, became a chain of bookshops with branches across the country, some as spectacular as the one on the Via Nazionale in Rome. The mass media tirelessly broadcast Amazon’s expansion while repeating that bookshops are on the way to extinction.
But old booksellers never die. And there are countless others who take up the baton. We must recognize and redeem these individuals, who have remained in the shadows while authors, publishers, and agents have become highly visible—even famous. Booksellers’ memories preserve a heritage that can almost never be found on the walls of their bookshops, or on web pages. We are used to restaurants displaying photos of their most famous customers, so why don’t emblematic bookshops do something similar? Casa Amèrica Catalunya and Xavi Ayén have just created two routes related to the Latin American Boom in Barcelona, whose points of interest include publishing houses, writers’ homes, and their favourite restaurants and bookshops. We shouldn’t scorn the non-material heritage that was once material and current. Or the economic importance of cultural tourism. There are many readers in the city who want to know where Bolaño bought his books, or where Cristina Peri Rossi, Enrique Vila-Matas, or Jorge Herralde still do.
Book chains are never going to be able to compete with Amazon. It’s becoming clear in the United States that only independent bookshops, rooted as they are in neighbourhoods, can withstand its challenge. As emotive centres, as cultural centres, as centres for distributing books to those who still prefer to buy them in person. Most prefer to acquire children’s books, hardback non-fiction, and art books physically. Gift-wrapping, dedications, and coffee are part of the rituals and artistry we continue to associate with book culture.
While those small writerly bookshops will survive, at the opposite extreme, Big Data and narratives of immersion will eventually converge. Our profiles as consumers are nourished by all the information we keep giving away, as, at the same time, the video-game industry and virtual reality fuse. Fed by information from all the books in our lives, fattened by our comments and likes on the internet, technology will construct a mirage of our ideal bookshop, along the shelves of which our literary avatar will stroll, spellbound. A personalized bookshop where every single title, which we can touch and browse thanks to virtual reality, will possess a virtue no real bookshop does: they will all be of interest to you. It isn’t outrageous to think that this future will belong to Amazon, because, in the final accounting, it is best positioned economically and conceptually to achieve that end. But Borges already warned us that if you carry the memory of Shakespeare in your head, you will soon come to hate him. As soon as you have access to social media in your ideal bookshop, each user, in order to interact, must abandon their exclusive space and enter a common one: a bookshop shaped by terabytes rather than real books made of paper. And we will tire of this, too, and will need to seek alternatives with physical spaces, stable horizons, volume and three dimensions: everything our blessed bookshops already offer us.