Response to a comment - Whither goest Internet bookselling?

I find the following comment left on my blog on bookselling:

“I think that this is an interesting, well thought out, post but I wonder if you could elaborate on your final sentence, 'The generalist Internet bookseller, however, either needs to develop a specialized market niche, or to adapt to the realities of an online marketplace.' It seems to me to be a contradiction in terms.”

I can understand how some confusion might occur in regards to my statement. Simply rephrased, it means that – given the proliferation of books available on the Internet -- anyone who is now a generalist bookseller needs either to become a specialist with a specialized inventory (thus being no longer a generalist) or to be able to sense the direction of the general book market and take steps to move with it.

I have thought and thought on what to say regarding the general book market. But, since I don’t sell in that category, and since I don’t sell on the sites that cater to mass market books, all I could offer would be hunches and guesses about where that market is headed. I leave it to the general-interest booksellers to figure out how and why and what affects their businesses.

I don’t think we yet appreciate the profound influence that the Internet has had on contemporary culture. It is huge, it is global, it affects every aspect of our lives these days. And it is very, very young. There are still many opportunities for it to be exploited, or regulated, or used and misused.

Bookselling was one of the first successful retail businesses to make use of the Internet, but it is being swirled around now like a woodchip in a whirlpool. With so much changing so fast, it’s no wonder that we feel that we can barely keep afloat. The only sure thing is that things will not go back to the “way they used to be,” and they will continue to change at a breathtaking pace. We can only try to anticipate what some of those changes will be, and what they will mean to us as entrepreneurs (not to mention, as consumers).