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?