How to save our bookstores

Libraries and bookstores are the intellectual lungs of a city. You can’t imagine a city without bookstores and museums, the repositories of art and artifacts. In the past, whenever looters and marauders attacked a city, the savages would ransack these very places where valuables (ideas; arts) remained stored. The Al Qaeda (rebels in Mali) still do it as we saw in Timbuktu.

Yet, the very existence of these suppliers of art is under threat due to the successful arrival of digital bookstores and book distributors like Amazon.com. The result is that the whole traditional ecosystem of the publishing business has been rattled.