No. Not by a long shot.

A variety of sources, most notably Jack Shafer at Slate magazine in his recent article The Fallen Status of Books - Hard times for hardcovers, are pronouncing the demise of the book, and the hardcover book in particular. They are wrong.

The main issue put forth is that hardcovers are not as much of a valued item in people's lives as they once were. 

Schafer and others use as evidence of hardcover demise that he can find what he wants on Wikipedia, that book review pages are being trimmed or eliminated, that Barnes & Noble and Borders are now selling 'stuff' instead of books, that books are free online or easily bought for a penny because their value has "dropped" and that buying in a shop seems like hard work.

He displays a fundamental misunderstanding of hardcovers and how people use them, because many use them differently than he does.

I use Wikipedia - many do. But I understand it for what it is and use it (or Google or Amazon Look Inside) only a quick overview for a fact - but I do look at the cited source of that fact if I can. It does not preclude me from buying a hardcover that covers the subject in greater depth if I wish to know more. If I am only keeping a book because of one or two facts, I too think it a good idea to shed the book. But it does not mean that books have lost their status - it is that the particular book has lost its notably limited usefulness to me due to other tool. Those folks who just needed a bit of information before the digital revolution wouldn't need to buy an entire biography either.

As for book review pages being trimmed - is that truly a loss of status for the book among readers, or does it say a lot more about the business of newspapers and the corporation invading the the newsroom? Or, perhaps, there are other outlets for reviews, so that the monopoly of particular regional reviews is broken and readers, avid as ever, simply go elsewhere

Amazon, and this last Christmas Target and Walmart, moved heavily into those bestsellers and midlist titles Borders and B&N used as a foundation, with the added ability to discount deeper than the stores. That the two B's have moved away from books is simply the only way forward they are able to imagine, since they seem unwilling or unable to move upmarket to compete. They want to be, I suppose, low-end, large overhead boutiques, pursuing a path that I have no doubt will end badly for them. "You do sell books here, hmmm?" will be a more frequent question at the chains I imagine. It doesn't mean that hardcovers have lost status - it means the big box bookshop model is failing. In other words, the old men have given up yelling at the kids to stay off their lawns.

Many people bought (and buy) hardcovers because they can't or don't want to wait. The events surrounding the first appearance of a "major" book is often a big deal for publishers and booksellers alike, so the public is naturally excited. Many of those folks bought a hardcover copy at B&N or Borders because that's where the events were. However, they may not intend on keeping the hardcover. They sell it to the likes of us used booksellers, or give it way, or share it with friends. And, if the price is low enough, they forgo the event and get the cheaper copy.

Free books online, or penny books, are simply worth what you pay for them, and declining prices have little to do with status. Paperbacks and cheap reprints are more likely to suffer greater ill effects from electronic books and penny books than hardcovers. Folks who wanted cheap books before the intertubes bought paperbacks or used copies and didn't really have an affection for hardcovers. As for declining prices, is it really that status for hardcovers has declined, or is it that everybody and their dog is currently selling book online, each undercutting by a penny or a dollar the earlier listed copy?

Is shopping hard work? Really? Do people who really value hardcovers say - well, I could get this from Amazon or a bookshop, but buying an e-book online is just so much easier? I truly disagree - waiting two days for a book you want to keep from Amazon is not hard work. Dropping by a shop to see what serendipity has in store for you is not hard work. Calling a local shop to see if they have a book is not any harder work than texting and driving, is it? Those who are looking for a nice hardcover copy of book important to them do not see this as hard work any more than a hungry person visiting a restaurant.

Books of quality, well-written and well-made hardcovers, always have a place and a status. In my used bookshop, reasonably-priced hardcover classics simply fly off the shelves. Why? Because those books have ongoing meaning to the readers, beyond a mere reference or passing trend. People may sell their paperbacks, they may sell their expensive signed first edition, but that nice hardcover copy of "Sense and Sensibility" or of "Watership Down" or of a John Adams biography remains on their shelf.

More than 85 percent of what I sell is hardcovers, and sales are slowly growing, especially in my shop. I think that instead of looking deeper, the author gathered a number of book-related facts, dropped his outlook onto them and then pulled the disparate strands together in a kind of textual platypus. The causes and effects simply do not add up here.

Gene Alloway owns Motte & Bailey Booksellers in downtown Ann Arbor.