No picture today, just a bit of a rant about the state of Photography books and bookstores.
I will be out of the country next week, and I wanted to take along some reading. Since I got a view camera recently I thought I would pick up The Negative by Ansel Adams. This book is a classic of the genre, and I thought it would really help me learn what I need to know in order to make better pictures. While I could have ordered the book online, it would not have arrived on time to take with me. It was not available as an ebook. Note to Kindle et al: I won’t really take the concept of eBooks seriously until you expand your catalogs! It’s not as if you need to rent more warehouse space.
The only option I had was to go to a physical bookstore, so I went to downtown Toronto to a couple of the larger bookstores in the city. In the first store, it seemed that every photography book had the word digital in it, regardless of how digital-specific the content was or was not: Digital Lighting, Composition for Digital Photography, Shooting the Digital Nude. (That last one was a puzzler; maybe a proctology fetish book?). The store did not have what I was looking for, so off to the second bookstore.
I saw more of the same at the second store, but luckily they did have one forlorn, semi-hidden copy of The Negative, so I went ahead and bought it.
Except for niche, specialized, high-end or used bookstores, maybe this is one more reason the death knell is sounding for the typical physical book store; if you can’t compete on price, selection or experience, what is left?
My Third Eye 
Recently read The Last Summer of the World – fiction – but lots of information on Steichen and Steiglitz.
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John – While a agree that it IS maddening that it seems to be getting more and more difficult to find books that are not within the confines of “pop” culture, I understand why the bookstores are doing it. They need to stock whatever moves the fastest.
I too get frustrated when I walk into a bookstore to try to locate a book about songwriting or music creation and have to wade through shelf after shelf of books about Justin Bieber and Lady Gaga in the ‘music’ section. However, I know that for every copy of “Zen and the Art of Mixing” that moves out the door they’ll sell TEN copies of “Justin Beiber’s Favourite Colours”.
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True. What bugs me is that technology exists to enable niche publishing and make small run or on demand publishing cost-effective, but businesses like some bookstores act in a manner both self-pitying and entitled, blaming the rest of the world for passing them by, instead of looking for ways to evolve and adapt.
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It’s not always the bookstore’s fault, though. The people who hold the rights to older or less popular titles may elect to not publish them, either in hard copy or as ebooks. The same thing keeps older recorded music and films from being available.
They can’t stock what’s not being produced.
All of which could lead me off on to a copywrong rant… if only copyrights were like trademarks, where you have to “use it or lose it”, so older works would revert to the public domain if the rights holder just sat on the work and didn’t publish it in some form (digital being the obvious medium for limited appeal works, since the production and distribution costs would be low).
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I love the “use it or lose it” idea, as a response to the artificial scarcity model you allude to!
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Hi John,
Thanks for the message. I will to hold on to my library a while longer.
I just know Janice and you are on “vacation” and enjoying every second of it. Please, it time for “you.” Do yourself a favour and try not to send any more analyses. Time to decompress, let the mind empty and come back refreshed.
All our love,
Guru Rod
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