Last night, Matthew Stadler gave a lecture titled "What Good Are Bookstores?" to a few dozen people at the Henry Art Gallery. He began by reading a passage from his novel The Disollution of Nicholas Dee that was inspired by Magus Books. Because he visited Magus Books earlier in the day and couldn't find a copy of his own book there, he read from the Google Books edition of Disollution. That was the first example—a book that isn't available in most bookstores is now suddenly available everywhere—in a talk that ranged from the birth of the department store in Paris (which Stadler noted was quickly followed by the birth of kleptomania) to Third Place Books, which Stadler envisions as being on the very beginning of the road to what bookstores will become.

Along the way, he brought up a lot of provocative ideas. Bookstores, he said, are not in the business of fostering a shopping relationship; they are in the publication business, the business of assembling a public to take part in the life of the book. He noted the strange relationship between books and commerce (unlike, say, food, a book doesn't exhaust itself when you consume it; in fact it gains potency as you pass it on to friends) and admired books as an object of beauty. As opposed to the idea of books as outmoded buggy whips, which most e-book supporters have adopted as an argument (an argument that has been overused to the point of cliché), Stadler said that books are like bicycles: A sturdy, simple technology that will live alongside newer technologies.

At this reading, I saw one bookstore owner sitting off to the side whose face blanched when Stadler praised e-books; as the lecture went on, she looked sicker and sicker. This is probably because Stadler didn't offer a whole lot of ideas for the future of bookselling. He said that bookstores should charge for events* because book events have value, even if the public is used to thinking of readings as something that is free. And he praised Third Place Books' encouragement of community with local commerce and neighborhoods and their Espresso Book Machine as forward-thinking concepts. But he didn't really present any practical ideas for bookstores to use. (Stadler excels at theory, and booksellers are in dire need of a plan of action right now.) Another bookstore owner, during the Q&A, presented his own ideas of what the future of bookstores will be: Tourists from areas with no bookstores will flock to coastal cities to marvel at these few remaining boutique shops that used to be absolutely everywhere. Nobody argued with his vision.

* I disagree with Stadler's premise, here, that readings should cost money. I think one of the best, most populist elements of book culture are the free readings. Nobody is turned away, and all are welcomed to live inside the book for a moment. How beautiful, how inclusive, is that? Stadler used the example of going to see a friend's band as it's just starting out and being happy to throw three bucks in a jar to support their friends. But that's a false equivalency; rock shows cost a lot more money to put on than a reading, and rock venues are very different, and much less welcoming, venues than bookstores. Stadler's model is highly dependent on employing one's circle of friends and acquaintances as a community of readers; I think publishers should want to reach far beyond that circle to find readers who are strangers. It's harder to do that if your readings mostly consist of $50 wine-and-dinner affairs like the one Stadler held the night before this lecture. You don't want to put any more barriers than you have to between the reader and the book; commodifying the reading is perhaps the biggest barrier of all.