Getting back to books and the discomfort booksellers and publishers, including Catholic ones, are experiencing right now, there appears to be an analogous situation in the movie industry. Take, for instance, this commentary from our Salem, OR arts observer, Ron Cowan, on the opening this weekend of an eleven-screen theater in one of the local malls:

You don’t need to do the numbers to get the irony of what’s happening with our movie theaters. Movies seem to be getting worse than ever, and the only end-of-year release with much public buzz is the latest 007 flick with new star Daniel Craig; Netflix, the mail-delivery DVD service is thriving; windows between theater and DVD release dates are narrowing; and people have more alternatives than ever for seeing movies, from your car to the home computer.

But we are building more theater auditoriums at a rate outpacing the growth of population.

We are huge movie fans in Clan Murphy, but two of us in one household use Netflix to supply our family viewing requirements, and the last movie I saw on the big screen was, let me see…wow, I can’t even remember offhand, but it’s been months. Part of it’s a dearth of movies I want to see, and the other part is a growing frustration with the movie-going experience, what with the exponential rise in communal rudeness. It seems to me that if movie theaters are to survive the movies-on-demand revolution of DVDs and Netflix, they are going to have to insist on their patrons exercising better manners (i.e., NO TALKING!), and create an altogether more welcoming and pleasant experience. A special experience, like a night out at a fine restaurant, or at least a cozy cafe.

Similarly, I think bookstores that want to survive the current Long Tail/used booksales/books-on-demand shakedown are going to have to find a way to cater to the often quirky, genre-specific tastes of readers who read outside the Bestseller Box, without losing their shirts on outrageously huge inventories and cartons-by-the-truckload of ruinous returns. (Ruinous both for booksellers and publishers.) Booksellers are also going to need to make their stores so inviting that they become destinations in themselves–places to go and relax and spend money on things other than books. Done with a sense of flare, a good bookstore/cafe (howsabout a bookstore/wine bar?) can be one such answer to this latter need. The eventual installation of Instabook-type machines in stores for printing all but the biggest titles on-demand, might be the eventual answer to the first.

Better yet…both!