Page 62 - AC/E Digital Culture Annual Report 2014

AC/E digital culture ANNUAL REPORT 2014bookshop into a co‐working model, a place people can go to work, read their e‐mails, participate in talks about literature or reading groups and so forth while they leaf through and comment on publishers’ latest offerings and, of course, buy books. An outstanding example is the case of the Tipos Infames bookshop which defines itself as “a bookshop specialised in fictional literature that also offers other services including a café, wine cellar and exhibitions”. This bookshop, located in the centre of Madrid, has known how to reinvent itself, above all, as a meeting place, and as a beacon.It goes without saying that the physical experience, what really happens in a bookshop, is something that can never be digitally substituted. And it is here, in redefining the customer’s experience, in creating new values, that the digital withdraws into the background where it forms just part of the new model of bookshop.We are faced with the reinvention of bookshops, museums and cultural spaces in all shapes and forms. In the cultural industries there is much at stake in the process as they seek to find these points of contact between customers and the content of any of the existing spaces and settings.The aim is to live and participate in cultural content and experiences, where they originate is no longer of any great importance.According to Javier Celaya, one of the leading experts on the cultural industries in our country, “There will be booksellers who want to stay in business and they will do everything possible to keep up to date and maintain their position, and to do this they will transform themselves gradually according to the changes that take place. There will be others who are not interested in the new model of bookshop because it does not conform to the idea of what a bookshop should be which they have had all their lives and they will allow their bookshops to bid farewell along with their careers as booksellers”.It is the eternal debate about how a totally analogue sector (atoms) is to adapt to the new digitalAC/Eenvironment (bits) and one that already has an antecedent in the music sector between record shops and platforms such as Spotify.Last August the US edition of the Huffington Post published an interesting article proposing 28 ideas to “save” the bookshops based on proposals that some bookshops had already decided to implement. The majority of them have a point in common: to create and strengthen the greatest bond with the community of readers/customers using every available channel such as social media, the sending of newsletters, etc.On the other hand, we can not, and do not want, to forget the “romantic” side that books have as one of the objects most evocative of thought and memory. FewWHERE WE ARE HEADING: DIGITAL TRENDS IN THE WORLD OF CULTURETHEME 5: CULTURAL SECTOR MARKETING AND CONSUMPTION THROUGH DIGITAL TECHNOLOGY“attainable”pleasures existsuch as that ofentering abookshop withits heady smellof paper, ink, ofbooks waitingto be opened,the recommendations of the bookseller, who knows you, the joy of collecting this book that at last has been published after weeks of waiting.According to this study 62% of young people between 16 and 24, the so‐called digital natives, prefer to buy books made of paper rather than ebooksThe strangest thing is that the paper book is not as dead as some would have people believe. According to a survey carried out by The Guardian newspaper on 25 November 2013 amongst students in the United Kingdom, 62% of young people between the ages of 16 and 24 years of age, the so‐called digital natives, prefer to buy books made of paper rather than ones in digital format. The study suggests two reasons for such a result.The first is that the perception of value is greater in the case of a paper book on account of its being a tangible object. Many people, 28% of them, think that the cost of e‐books is expensive while only 8% think their cost is correct. The second reason is that the paper version is attractive because of the way it CURRENT PAGE...62