When Authors Guild boss Scott Turow said that brick-and-mortar stores are the future of book sales, it was hard not to laugh. Tim Cushing & I joined forces to supply him with an ad for his quixotic campaign, and as expected, defenders of the joy of printed books and brick-and-mortar bookstores appeared in the comments to sing their praises in a non-satirical fashion.

But the thing is, if people love bookstores, then bookstores will survive. But the market will inevitably scale according to demand—and there can be no doubt that demand is declining. I count myself among those who get a warm feeling from shopping in a nice independent bookstore full of mismatched shelves and handwritten signs, and I think that's what most people are pining for when they talk about bookstores, not big box retailers with display tables of pop-psychology books and extraneous Twilight supplements. The latter originally thrived on convenience, selection and price—and in those areas they have been rendered completely obsolete by online retailers. But the former subsist on community, personality and charm—things that can be accomplished online, but in a much different way that will never wholly replace a physical space, and that are not really a part of Amazon's arsenal. That doesn't change the fact that independent bookstores are struggling, or that many have shut down and many still will, but the impassioned defenses of the neighbouhood bookstore that pop up in every discussion of this topic show that there is absolutely still a market to be served, even if the size of that market is still uncertain.

There's an additional fear that even if stores offer a superior experience that keeps customers coming in the door, many of those customers will simply browse and then order the books online at a lower price, thus reaping the benefits of the small store without paying for them. I'm not sure how justified that is. People still like to leave a store with something in their hands—and if you build an engrossing retail space with a sense of community, where people interact with the books and each other, they won't be thinking about their smartphones or Amazon's superior prices. A bookstore can also go a step further: Jim O points us to the story of the Harvard Bookstore, where the new owner set up an on-demand printer/binder to see if he could leverage the opposite trend. People don't just shop physically then buy digitally—they also shop digitally and buy physically:

Maybe access to the vast universe of digital content could also save the bookstore. Maybe the bookstore, while limited in inventory, could evolve in the digital world and become a destination where people had access to every digitized book ever published.

To truly compete, he would also have to solve consumer’s expectations for instant gratification and delivery. Jeff needed a complete production, distribution, and fulfillment model. He has likely shocked a lot of people by building one in his own backyard.

Essentially, Jeff installed a printing press to close the inventory gap with Amazon. The Espresso Book Machine sits in the middle of Harvard Bookstore like a hi-tech visitor to an earlier era. A compact digital press, it can print nearly five million titles including Google Books that are in the public domain, as well as out of print titles. We’re talking beautiful, perfect bound paperbacks indistinguishable from books produced by major publishing houses. The Espresso Book Machine can be also used for custom publishing, a growing source of revenue, and customers can order books in the store and on-line.

You can walk into the store, request an out-of-print, or hard-to-find title, and a bookseller can print that book for you in approximately four minutes. Ben Franklin would be impressed.

I've been excited about the prospects of the Espresso Book Machine for a while. Though print is obsolete in many ways, a lot of people still like printed books and express distaste for e-readers. Personally I don't see myself ever giving up printed books entirely (or selling my small collection of antiques), but I also don't mind reading electronically—and unlike many print defenders, I don't condemn those who do truly make the switch. Print still has value to the end consumer, and as such it is not entirely obsolete as a product—but the incredibly wasteful system of printing off huge runs of books and shipping them thousands of miles is. On-demand printers could solve that paradox.

So how is it working out for the Harvard Bookstore? There are no firm numbers, but the owner reports double-digit sales growth monthly over the past year. Can every town and city support a store like this? Certainly not—nothing changes the fact that demand for bookstores has gone down, and it's naive for those who still love them to expect the market not to shrink accordingly. But the reverse is also true: as long as some demand exists, smart entrepreneurs can find ways to stay relevant and succeed.

We've noted how frequently the entertainment industry -- especially the big record labels with the help of the RIAA -- seem to sue innovative upstarts. They usually do this as part of a two-part plan: they either want to kill off the innovation, or they use the lawsuit as the opening gambit in trying to get a big chunk of the equity of the startup (which they then stifle and kill). News broke recently that online music storage locker MP3Tunes, one of the first of its kind, filed for bankruptcy in large part due to the years-long legal attacks from EMI. The thing is, MP3Tunes basically won its case, showing that the basic service was completely legal. In fact, what MP3Tunes provides is basically the same service that Amazon and Google now offer with their music lockers. MP3Tunes was one of the pioneers in the space... and for its troubles, it gets sued into bankruptcy, despite being legal.

We keep hearing people insist that the record labels are adapting. And it's true that they've been pulled, kicking and screaming, into parts of the 21st century. But the second that anyone comes along doing anything remotely interesting and which provides real value, they freak out and sue. And it goes beyond that. As Robertson describes in his blog post about this, EMI apparently went to great lengths to destroy MP3Tunes, even if it was legitimate:

At every opportunity EMI dragged out the legal process making it costly and burdensome. One example is the interrogation of company employees in all-day inquisitions called depositions where attorneys try to trick people into making admissions. In our case, they deposed not just management but nearly everyone in the company all the way down to clerical help and customer support personnel. They even paid $25,000 to get an ex-employee to agree to a deposition. For management they deposed everyone - some multiple times with me getting deposed 3 separate times.

The legal pressure was not just confined within MP3tunes. EMI sent legal demands to existing partners and potential partners were told they could not work with MP3tunes or risk losing their license to sell EMI music. More than one digital company told us they wanted to work with us, but were prohibited from doing so by EMI. They used their government-granted copyright monopoly to get MP3tunes blackballed in the industry.

EMI spent an estimated $10 million dollars with multiple law firms to arm their attack against MP3tunes in an attempt to thwart unlicensed personal lockers. They know it's difficult if not impossible for startups to fight long costly legal battles. Their hope is that the startup cannot fund a protracted legal battle and they win by default. This happened with the music search engine Seeqpod, Muxtape, Favtape and many others that have quietly faded away. They know that even if the digital upstart prevails in court, they will be terminally weakened. Veoh won multiple rounds of their copyright battle outright only to be forced into bankruptcy after spending $7 million on legal bills.

As Robertson notes, fighting the legal battle was one thing, but blocking the company from partnering and building out its business was the really deadly part. Robertson, of course, has been outspoken in his criticism of the RIAA over the years, and has been through previous legal battles with them as well. In part, some of EMI's infatuation with this case appeared to be personally vindictive (they sued Robertson directly as well as the company). Whether or not MP3Tunes could have succeeded may be an open question. But it seems clear that the company had no chance at all given the barriers that EMI put in its place. Of course, during this same period we've witnessed the collapse and sale of EMI (in pieces) as well. Perhaps, instead of suing the innovations that would help move it into a modern digital era, it should have been looking for ways to embrace them.

Okay, this one's just for fun, but seeing that Canadian national newspaper the Globe & Mail has announced that it's following on the pointless trend of putting metered paywalls up for online publications, and announcing it like it's a big deal, we figured it might be nice to remind people that some (actually, er, most) online publications are still doing just fine publishing for free. But, if they can get news out of making life worse for their readers and community, why can't we make some news out of the fact that we like to treat our community right, and let them read our stuff for free, and freely share it and talk about it? I don't see how making life more difficult for readers, limiting them, demanding that they pay and letting them do less in terms of sharing the content will do much to make people more interested in the site. As for the claims that the Globe & Mail is struggling, as Globe alum Mathew Ingram points out, perhaps they shouldn't be building new office space...