Cross my palm with silver... - Simon Cheshire

Meet the future

DON'T FORGET THE WORLD BOOK NIGHT GIVEAWAY! SCROLL DOWN!

          With World Book Night just behind us, we've all been celebrating the published word in all its glory. But in a few years' time, I reckon, what bricks and mortar bookshops that remain will all be little kiosks: you'll go in, search and order using a touchscreen (which will be swamped by adverts put there in the last dying gasps of the legacy publishing system), then have a coffee while the nice lady behind the counter prints off a paperback on the Espresso Book Machine out the back, or transmits an ebook to your tablet PC. If chains exist at all, they'll be chains of franchises run by the online booksellers.
          I think I'm havin' one of me mystic blasts here. I'll stick a tea towel on my head and dangle a couple of shower curtain rings from my ears. Let us gaze into the crystal ball (well, the goldfish bowl turned upside down), and let us see what else the future brings for the book trade...

• June 2012: A midlist author discovers one of their titles on the shelves in WHSmith. The media are alerted. Red-faced, WHS remove the book and apologise.

• July 2012: Independent bookshops launch a new sales drive to promote a diverse marketplace, by burning effigies of Jeff Bezos outside parliament. A spokesman comments "watch it, book buying public, you're next if you don't smarten your ideas up!"

• September 2012: An old lady from Bournemouth buys a £50 premium bond, thus guaranteeing the UK public library budget for the 2013/2014 financial year.

• October 2012: Waterstones think about getting rid of those horrible shelving units. But don't.

• January 2013: A blog post entitled "Shut up! Shut up! Shut up!" marks the start of an armed uprising of indie writers against J.A.Konrath and John Locke.

• February 2013: Amazon buys up several impoverished European nations, and puts the inhabitants to work making knitted covers for the Kindle Fire.

• March 2013: Another major publishing company gives up and runs home in tears, leaving a pack of interns called Charlotte and Penelope to wander the streets of north London in a state of confusion.

• December 2013: The marketing team at Barnes & Noble in America make a rude gesture at the  development department of Apple, and are challenged to a fight to the death. There is an unseemly brawl involving hand-paddling and screwed-up eyes, which results in a broken Nook.

• June 2014: Archaeologists unearth what they believe may be the fossilised remains of the last ever Sony Reader.

• August 2014: The number of books by James Patterson published each month passes infinity and creates a hole in the space/time continuum.

• November 2014: Waterstones have a serious rethink about those horrible shelving units. And decide to keep them.

• April 2015: Publishers from across the UK and America attend the London Book Fair. They chat, gulp wine, sell each other assorted rights, and do everything they did at the same event in 1974. They reassure themselves that this ebook thing will definitely blow over very soon now.

• May 2020: The manager of the last surviving independent bookshop turns into Khan from Star Trek II and launches a nuclear strike at an Amazon warehouse near Slough, screaming "with my last breath I stab at thee" etc etc. The warehouse is undamaged.

• The far end of time: Amazon grudgingly agrees to pay UK authors by bank transfer instead of by "check". The universe ends before any payments are due.

Simon Cheshire is a children's writer who'll be your bestest friend ever if you buy his ebooks. 

His website is at http://www.simoncheshire.co.uk/ 
And his blog about literary history is at http://bookhistorystudies.blogspot.com/