The Booksellers (D.W. Young, 2019)
This hits on a really important point libraries have been trying to get across for YEARS!
Data rot is a thing. Look around for a file you made 7 years ago and you’ll have trouble opening it, if at all. I’ve lost entire novels this way.
A book? That will last for centuries. I can throw a book in a deacidification bath and guarantee it a long life. But a computer file? It’s only a matter of a very short time.
And ebooks have the issue of license agreements. You don’t buy ebooks. You license them. You purchase the ebook license and suddenly, a year later, you don’t have it because of license terms that you don’t understand and are under the control of the publisher.
Book stores aren’t dying because of millennials. Millennials are really the driving force behind saving them. What’s really killing bookstores is a combination of cost of print vs value, average salary compared to inflation, and the monopoly of large book sellers hedging out the market and driving up the price of print.