An LA Times article about bookshops in San Francisco being driven out of business by climbing rents and online competition got me to thinking about the state of the bookshop trade in my hometown, Dublin.

Despite all the touristic guff about this being a writers’ town, the situation isn’t particularly good. It’s not that bookshops are going out of business (although some likable dingy second-hand stores (remember Dandelion Books, anyone?) have disappeared). It’s just that the ones that do get by don’t seem to take their core business very seriously.

This struck home the other week, when I visited the Dawson Street branch of Waterstone’s with a store voucher. It had been a while since my last visit, so the fact that around a third of store is now a caf� was new to me.

With a reported markup of 7,000 percent on the transformation of coffee bean to artistically presented latte, it’s clearly far more lucrative to flog java than books. But looking around the space that was left over for those awkward, space-consuming volumes, I began to get the impression that the bookstore was now actually an adjunct to the caf� rather than the other way around. 

With around a third of the display space having vanished, the range of content available must shrink. And room in the lifeboats is given over to only the newest and the most popular.

Time and again, a particular title I had in mind was not available. And what was infuriating was what was being offered instead. For example, not a single book by Thomas Bernhard was on the shelves, but in the space that could have been occupied by Concrete or Frost (newly translated by Michael Hoffman), there were several copies of bloody Captain Corelli’s Mandolin, by bloody Louis de Berni�res.

Waterstone’s is not alone–both Eason’s and Hodges Figgis on the same street have similar caf� “facilities” and mainstream-only selections of books.

Although city planners love the idea of bookshops, with their role of “enhancing” the urban fabric, the contemporary bibliophile usually finds them a pretty poor resource. (Anyway, the best bookshop–in terms of range, at least–in Dublin is probably the Borders out in Blanchardstown, an exurb outlet that hardly fits in with the New Urbanist vision of the compact city.) 

In the age of the so-called “Long Tail,” a bricks-and-mortar establishment has to be fairly vast to satiate a consumer whose appetite has been supersized by research on the Web.  The sprawling Powell’s City of Books in Portland and the five-floor Waterstone’s in the old Simpsons building in London are the only two stores I can recall with the shelves to meet the more recherch� of requests.

In Dublin shops, however, I end up going to the “Information Desk” almost certain that I won’t be going out the door with the title I’m about to ask about.

So, if rents and the predations of e-commerce do drive out bookstores from pricey central Dublin, would I care?  Yes–for the obvious reason that browsing in the flesh is a more immediate and enjoyable experience than online searching.  Sometimes even, a fortuitous discovery can be made with a glance that could never be replicated by clicking hyperlinks.

But if trends continue, I will end up regretting the loss of little more than a handful of tarted-up cafeterias.