Bookstores and newspapers are in an unhappy race to see which can disappear first. In Detroit, the newspapers have decided they won't do home delivery on the low-interest, low-ad weekdays. It's the next step on the path to oblivion. Hartford, meanwhile, seems one of the first large cities to go bookstore-free. "The person looking to drift in from the street and get lost in a wonderland of books has nowhere to go, except out of town or online," the Hartford Courant laments. The last survivor is the Jumping Frog bookstore, which has gone down from 100,000 books to 6,000 and now concentrates on non-book gift items. "It's not unlike the story all over America," Steve Fischer, executive director of the New England Independent Booksellers Association, told the paper. "A lot of downtowns haven't — in some instances, for the past 10, 15 years — been able to support a general-interest bookstore."
