With Borders Bookstores drowning in debt—on the verge or not on the verge of bankruptcy, depending on who you ask—and Barnes and Noble putting itself up for sale, unable to compete with the online shopping habits of book-readers the world over, those of us who write and read, let’s face it, the sort of artsy, intellectual literary fodder that is never likely to sell well with the masses, are left with a frightening prospect: is it true, what many people are predicting for the not-too-distant-future? Are brick-and-mortar bookstores rapidly becoming a relic of the past? Will the children born from today forward never have the experience of wandering through the aisles of a physical bookstore, picking books off the shelf, examining their covers and reading the first few pages, discovering new authors that will not come up if you simply click “Browse” at an online store?

Damien and I fell in love at a Barnes and Noble. Well, maybe that’s oversimplifying things a bit, but one of our go-to dates back when we first started dating was to head over to Barnes and Noble, each get a coffee or tea, and then find some aisle or corner with no other customers and sift through the books there together. In fact, our very first date was having coffee together at the Barnes and Noble café.

It makes me feel like an old biddy, complaining about the basic fact that the world is changing. Of course the world is changing, Damien reminded me when I brought this up with him the other day. We don’t have Victrolas anymore, either. We don’t have to crank the phone to talk on it—in fact, most of us don’t even have landlines at all (Damien and I don’t).

True. But I’m someone who loves to stumble upon authors by rolling my sleeves up and sorting through the aisles, who is horrified at the thought of never stumbling across the sort of books that I’m most likely to read—the ones that publishers either can’t (in the case of small presses) or won’t put a lot of money into marketing. Those books will be harder to find without the physical shelves of a bookstore on which to find them. It will be like only hearing about new music from the radio, which naturally only plays the top, moneymaking hits. The major bookstores, of course, mostly sell the top, moneymaking books, but you can still find the less popular books hidden on the shelves, if you really take the time to look.

I know this is doomsday, extremist kind of worry. As brick-and-mortar bookstores slowly die off, we’ll find new ways of discovering good, “underground” sort of books. Small press authors will have to step up and change with the times—something that scares me, I must admit, as I feel somewhat overwhelmed by it all, not at all sure how to get my book into the hands of the people who will want to read it—and surely, surely this increasingly virtual world that we live in will bring with it new, innovative ways to market books. Facebook, Twitter, and author blogs (like this one) are useful once you’ve already got people interested in you, but what ways will come about, I wonder, that will help literary fiction authors reach audiences who have not already heard of them?

While I do believe that authors and readers alike are going to have to find new ways to find and market books, it’s also true that we can at least try to keep the small, independently owned bookstores in business. Businesses like that are, as a rule, financially unstable, so if we can, we should shop at them. They are our best bet at keeping brick-and-mortar bookstores alive, and as long as there are physical bookstores, the lesser known authors will continue to get their books on the bookstore’s shelves and do readings/book signings at them.

Perhaps the truth is that I want physical bookstores to stick around for sentimental reasons, but I do want them to stick around. And if you do, too, well, we’re going to have to make even more of an effort, now, to make that happen. But I say, let's do what we can. I want there to be as many access lines as possible to the really good books that will, at the online stores, get buried beneath the noise of the bestseller lists.