Top Gun: Maverick was released on May 27, 2022. The view here is that the movie was boring, trite, and even quite “woke” despite a popular perception that it trampled on the overused notion. But that’s not the point of this opinion piece.
Good or bad, the astounding box office for Top Gun: Maverick was lucrative evidence that the death of movie theatres had been greatly exaggerated. After the movie’s release, the film industry along with the screened entertainment industry owed Tom Cruise a big thank you.
Figure that your studio didn’t have to have had any stake in the second Top Gun, nor did your movie theatre need to have screened the long-awaited sequel to gain from it. As is always the case, we benefit from the doings of the brilliant few. In reviving a dormant movie franchise (the first Top Gun was released in 1986), Cruise lifted the film industry along with film adjacent sectors like movie theatres.
It all raises a question of why Amazon would be any different in relation to bookstores. About the previous question, it’s accepted wisdom that Amazon’s 1995 entrance into the books space foretold the end of the local book store. The perception has always read as simplistic.
To see why, think the second Top Gun once again. It pulled people back into the theatres, while also reminding people of the genius of movies themselves.
Applied to Amazon, it doesn’t stock endless amounts of books because readers have disappeared from the marketplace. Quite the opposite, obviously. Which is why bookstores large and small should be grateful for Amazon’s existence.
In selling books en masse to the buying public, it routinely reminds people of the unique fun that can be had with a book. Far from shrinking the market for books, Amazon logically expands it. As Mark Mills pointed out in The Cloud Revolution, more books are published and sold than ever.
Amazon looms large here. By inventing an all-new way of buying books, it unearthed a passion for books that previously didn’t exist. Evidence supporting this claim can be found not just in the empirical care of Mills, but in the anecdotal reality that the typical American house is populated by exponentially more books than was the case in 1995 when Amazon first opened its online doors.
No doubt some will reply that Amazon didn’t just invent online shopping, it also won the vast majority of a massive market for books. Which seemingly explains the disdain some feel for Amazon. Its success is said to have killed off the local bookstore in concert with it factoring into the sale of so many books.
Of course, the problem with such a view is that it presumes a static market for books that has in fact been dynamic. See Mills again. More books are published and sold than ever. Which is why the local bookstore (large or small) is by no means extinct. The market share that Amazon took via retail innovation it plainly gave back in the form of an exponentially larger book sector.
In other words, the local bookstore can claim much smaller market share, albeit in a much bigger market. It’s a long way of suggesting that the unseen with Amazon and books is what would have happened to local booksellers without its arrival. If Top Gun: Maverick is any kind of indicator, Amazon arguably gave life to what it’s said to have disrupted.
Republished from RealClear Markets
