Bookshops are closing down like nobody’s business. So do they need rethinking for the electronic age? Rosanna de Lisle asks four firms of architects and designers to create the bookshop of their dreams
From INTELLIGENT LIFE magazine, May/June 2014
When online shopping offers choice, convenience and competitive prices, why would anyone go to an actual shop? To try on clothes, perhaps. To sit on sofas or lie on beds. But if you’re after music, film or books, you’re more likely to go straight to the internet. In the digital age, bricks-and-mortar shops have to work much harder to attract our attention, let alone custom. Brands rip out and refit their stores every few years: interior design is, clearly, already crucial to their fortunes. But could design go further, and lure us away from our tablets and back onto the high street?
Curious to explore this territory, we asked four leading architecture and design practices to create a shop. Specifically, in the age of Amazon and e-books, a bookshop to save bookshops. Traditional bookselling has been hit particularly hard by the shift to online shopping. First the sales went digital—to Amazon. Then the product went digital—again, largely to Amazon, whose Kindle e-readers are configured only to read e-books in Kindle format. In Britain, the number of independent bookshops fell by a third between 2005 and the end of 2013, to 987; in America, it fell from 2,400 to 1,900 between 2002 and 2011, although there has been a modest revival since. Some of the reasons for this decline apply to the whole high street—the recession, edge-of-town superstores, crippling business rates—but Amazon has struck by far the mightiest blow.
Still, independent bookshops inspire great affection, and the best of them, such as Lutyens & Rubinstein in west London, run by literary agents, offer more astute personal advice than an algorithm ever could. What indies seldom do is integrate technology beyond the till, or sell e-books. They will surely need to innovate to survive.
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