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ArishMell · 70-79, M
Almost certainly, for books anyway.
After some dip in sales with the introduction of instruments like the Kindle, and various sooth-sayers saying the days of the printed publication are numbered, book sales are as strong as ever.
Apart from any emotional attachment to them books do have certain advantages over electronic media, especially ready portability, ready reference, easy use, and longevity. A book might have gone out of print decades ago but copies will still be readable long after that lot in Silicon Valley have made their Very Latest monopolistic software totally unusable!
Book shops, maybe less certainly as retailers of all kinds suffer ever more from high overheads, rapacious shop-chains, building developments inimical to town-centre shops, and of course the massive drive by a few giant US-based companies to take as much retail trade as possible while being unlikely to offer much real choice or to support new and independent producers.
After some dip in sales with the introduction of instruments like the Kindle, and various sooth-sayers saying the days of the printed publication are numbered, book sales are as strong as ever.
Apart from any emotional attachment to them books do have certain advantages over electronic media, especially ready portability, ready reference, easy use, and longevity. A book might have gone out of print decades ago but copies will still be readable long after that lot in Silicon Valley have made their Very Latest monopolistic software totally unusable!
Book shops, maybe less certainly as retailers of all kinds suffer ever more from high overheads, rapacious shop-chains, building developments inimical to town-centre shops, and of course the massive drive by a few giant US-based companies to take as much retail trade as possible while being unlikely to offer much real choice or to support new and independent producers.