The Abstract and the Particular

I believe, in my heart, that something is lost when independent bookstores are driven out of business.  But I'm hard pressed to tell you what it is.

Independent store owners are better local citizens.  That's something lost when chains move into town.

Okay.  Definitely.  A reason to worry.

However: I'm struggling to understand why it's bad for consumers that "Amazon.com and the chain bookstores ... deliver deeper discounts and wider variety than independent shops."

How ever shall we live without our independent booksellers to see us through these dark woods of greater choice at lower cost?

Do you blame the decline of the independent bookstore on "the acceleration of our culture” that makes bookstore browsing an ancient and unpracticed ritual?  Do you even see this phenomenon in action?

Our nearest Barnes & Noble has a discount-and-promotions section alone that's probably half as large as the entire shelf space of the B. Dalton [that bastion of book-buying greatness] where I shopped as a child and teenager. There are couches and cozy chairs in almost every section.  Where's the evidence that book-buying has become less browsing-friendly?

Or that people want to do less of the browsing in the first place?  I've been in B&N twice in the last forty-eight hours and seen any number of people "slowly meandering, making a small pile of books, being very selective, coming away with six or seven gems they wanted."

I went to B&N precisely because I'm joining the neighborhood bookclub, impulsively enough not to be able to order the book from Amazon, so I'm wondering just where, in this post-Oprah, post-pixie-party world it might be, that people have reverted to "discussing books ... very much one on one."

Can any of us offer any insight as to "the moment when movies and television shows replaced books as the cultural topics people liked to talk about over dinner, at cocktail parties, at work"?  Because my best guess would be about 1934, but I'm willing to debate that date.  Maybe it was 1939.

I'm also wondering what the children's book buyer at Micawber's is seeing that I'm not, that she can claim children's book publishing is in crisis, driven by marketability instead of creativity.  I rarely have time to get beyond the monthly Scholastic flyers, with its distressingly large offering of Barbie and Superman and phonics-by-numbers choices, and yet I'm drowning in creative children's books myself.

We average ten new children's books a month here, and only a small fraction have featured  "pirates, wizards, one of a series."  None have been written by Katie Couric at all.

I'm also wondering what it means for marketability to trump creativity in the first place.  That lots of badly written children's books are so well-marketed that they're given as gifts?

Does the current celebrity-driven popularity of bad children's books stop actual readers and their parents (as opposed to their grandparents and their parents' child-free friends) from buying the good books that reviewers and readers praise?

Was 1981, when Micawber Books opened its doors, such a great year for children's books in the first place?

How does a growing market in children's literary schlock hurt any book seller, anyway?  Children's books are being published in such vast quantities that any B&N in the United States has a children's section as large as one entire Waldenbooks in my local mall in the mid-1980s.

Was Micawber Books taken down by the vastly expanded array of product choices it could sell?  Why not just stock more books about pirates and wizards and make your customers happy?  I'm confused.

I suppose I'm supposed to feel bad because the book selling market has changed, that one respectable bookseller sold his business for a tidy sum to another company that will use his space for a different purpose.  Oh, the decline of American reading.  Oh, the decline of the struggling local business-owner.  Oh, the horror of it all.

But I can't bring myself to care.  One relatively privileged man got to run a bookstore for 26 years and now he won't do that anymore.  It might, maybe, be bad news for him.

But bad news for readers?  For reading?  For poor, book-impoverished Princeton, New Jersey?

I don't see it.

Is it just that I'm spending too much time reading about the nineteenth-century railroad industry?  Reading about people who thought the world would end when Montgomery Ward started mailing its dangerous catalogs and threatened to drive the local general stores out of business?

Someone help me out.

Comments

[mamacate]

Okay, so here's the thing. Fox is clearly a prig, and I agree that the tragic circumstances of the merchant class are not as tragic as they are sometimes portrayed as being.

I do worry about the disappearance of specialized bookshops like feminist and gay/lesbian bookshops. My town used to have two women's bookshops, a gay book and gift shop, a rotating handful of used bookshops, a new age bookshop, a recovery bookshop (briefly), a sci-fi bookshop, and two broadly-focused independent shops, not to mention leafy women's campus bookstore pre-Follett.

We still have two independents, a good used bookstore and the sci-fi/mystery place (the space-crime continuum--I know), and the glbt book/gift place. But I miss the women's bookshops, and I worry for the future of the others. On the other hand, when the oldest independent treats me with contempt when I ask them to punch my discount card when I've purchsed a damaged book at a very skimpy price reduction off the cover price, I feel less guilty about ordering from amazon. Maybe that's a symptom of financial stress, but it sure doesn't help.

Anyway, the thing that scares me is the day when B&N has so much control over the publishing industry that they decide what is read. I think some would say that day is here, but it's even scarier if you bring it a little farther along and imagine that leftist writers and those critical of the media cannot get their books placed on shelves because all the shelves are controlled by one media conglomerate.

I suppose the scariest scenario could be summed up in one dystopian headline: "Murdoch Purchases Controlling Share."

Eek.

[liz]

I'm sad that Murder Ink closed its doors last month, but mostly because of my personal connection to it. I'd actually been shopping with Amazon for the last several years since I couldn't actually go to NYC every week or so to browse their shelves.

[Lisa C.]

There is still a market for independent booksellers on the web and through used book sales though. Or maybe that's just my impression. I grew up in a town with a ginormous independent used bookstore. Every other used bookstore I've been to pales in comparison. It rivals a B&N in size and selection. I love that store.

However, since I don't live next to that store anymore, I tend to buy things from, you guessed it, Amazon and B&N. I am a bad, bad, book lover, apparently.

I also shopped at B. Dalton as a kid!!! My mother would buy me a new book every week for doing my chores. I still remember the color of the shelves, where the kids' section was located, everything.

[Mrs. Coulter]

I do think that there is an awful lot of cross-marketed children's drek (I suppose you've managed to avoid the TV and movie tie-in books?). I try to steer Lyra away from that stuff, though I've recently caved on Dora the Explorer, because the stories aren't any lamer than the TV show and she seems to love them so much. I can't see how you can blame the fall of the independent bookseller on cross-marketed drek, though.

The things that recommend the independent stores over the big chains:

1. Used book sections. Not always present, but more likely in an independent store.

2. Staff more likely to be knowledgeable about the product. Back when we lived in NYC, I was in the B&N at 86th St. and asked one of the employees in the fiction section if he knew if the new Pynchon book (Mason & Dixon) was out yet. I had to spell "Pynchon" for him so he could look it up in the computer.

3. Quirky stock that reflects the buyers' interests and local taste rather than simply the best-seller list.

I prefer Borders and B&N over B.Dalton's and the like, however, because they have a much broader stock that is more likely to have some books that interest me. Mall chains are the lowest of the low.

[Mrs. Coulter]

Since we're talking about books, how did you get your collection into library thing? I've been tempted by it, but daunted by the prospect of entering data for our large collection.

[Mrs. Coulter]

Never mind my last question. I see that all I have to do is enter one or two random books and it starts recommending other books I already own. Now if I could only figure out how to edit my template in a satisfactory manner...

[Phantom Scribbler]

Jody, sometimes I heart you so much I can hardly stand it. My response is going to be far too long for a comment, but let's just say that, as someone who once helped open a Big Box Bookstore in a mid-sized industrial city that had not previously had ANY access to book purchasing beyond the contents of a small B.Dalton, I cheered out loud when I read, "But bad news for readers? For reading? For poor, book-impoverished Princeton, New Jersey? I don't see it."

Word!

[Maria]

I've been guiltily harboring secret feelings similar to yours for a while now. Amazon is cheap, convenient, and a hell of a lot easier than chasing a shrieking 3 year old (never mind 3 of them!) through a bookstore. And B & N is large, convenient, has a nice train table, easy bathrooms, and pastries (though the shrieking 3 year old problem does dog me there). I think books and reading are a far bigger part of our culture now than they were 20 or even 10 years ago, and I think that's largely due to these cheapo, mass-marketed outlets.

I echo previous commenters, though, in that I mourn the loss of local independents for sentimental reasons, for customer service reasons, and for fear of the monolithic, culture-controlling multinational conglomerate.

As a vendor of independent children's music, I can tell you that it is next to impossible to get carried even in the local B & N or Borders if you don't have distribution through their established channels. The – established, stated – ratio is something like 90% Disney to 10% everything else, and small independent record companies are truly unrepresented.

I know you are talking about books and I've digressed. But I'm sure the problem is the same for small publishers and authors.

[Shandra]

I can speak to the problem in Canada but I doubt it's as difficult in the US. But anyway, here's why it's a problem up here.

We have one monolithic B&N type chain: Chapters/Indigo (it used to be separate but one bought the other). It also owns Coles which is the "mall-sized" subchain. (Amazon actually thankfully competes with them.)

It is nice to browse in, has great to good selection, and I do think that the ubiquitous Starbucks brings people in who might not otherwise be impulse buying books.

However. Publishing is a weird business. Publishers sell their books to bookstores. If the bookstores don't sell the books, the stores "remainder" them (used to be sent them back but now they basically rip off the covers and pulp them), and then the publishers refund them the money for those books.

They refund them, is the key.

Well up here let's say there's a mid-sized press (if those even exist any more) that are publishing a quirky novel with some buzz, but that also contains - I don't know - gay sex. Chapters' buyers think it might get listed for a literary prize so they order eleventy-million copies, basically the whole print run or possibly the publisher does an extra run. (Which in Canada would be like, 2000 copies, I guess.)

Joe Schmoe Independent Guy can't even GET his precious 8 copies for his store, so he goes out of business anyway. (For example, he's a children's bookstore that can't get Harry Potter on time... etc.)

But then the buzz-book doesn't do so well - maybe it doesn't get a prize, or maybe people boycott it for having gay sex, whatever.

Chapters remainders their copies and the publisher has to ante up all that money back. At once.

1. The publisher may go out of business. Probably does, because it's not a high-margin business. Costs of development & printing are high. Independent booksellers, spread out, can't all make the same ordering mistake that Chapters made. And also don't tend to remainder their copies all on the same day. Which is why the monolithic purchaser is so difficult.

2. If the publisher doesn't go out of business, they probably won't be taking the same risks on authors - new ones, sure. A new author with a great first novel is great! But mid-list authors... whose first books didn't do so well or did okay but their second ones didn't... get hammered. Really badly hammered.

3. The publishers start to say to the Chapters' buyers, "hey.... what do YOU think will sell this year?" Or they make deals like "we'll sell this book to you for X if you take Y." All that jostling does trickle down to which projects editors take on.

Also, Chapters can set prices which affects publishers' ability to take on risky/unknown projects that may not pay off, since it lowers their margins. That also gets passed on the authors in the form of lower advances.

So up here anyway, it makes it really hard for those mid-list voices to continue to be heard. Whether or not a reader cares about that is of course their thing. :)

[Shandra]

Oops sorry for the super long comment all over your blog.

[susoz]

What are yu reading for the bookclub?

[merseydotes]

I'm with you, Jody. And also...since we're being anecdotal here...I don't see so many local bookstores folding in DC/northern VA. Just in Old Town Alexandria alone, I can think of three local stores - Olssons (local chain), A Likely Story (children's) and Pauline Books (Catholic/religious). Of course, there is a Books a Million in Old Town, too. And you know what? Everyone seems to be doing fine. I visit three of the four stores (guess which one I don't visit...not to open THAT can of worms!) fairly regularly, all for different reasons. Olsson's for quirky staff recommendations, Books a Million for discounts and A Likely Story for recommendations from people knowledgeable about children's books. I think the system is sorting itself out fine. In the words of Austin Powers, 'Yay capitalism!'

[Ally]

Yes, what Shandra said. The situation is similar in the US. My aunt owns a children's bookstore that she's managed to keep open for 25 years. There have been years where she's sent employees out to buy up stock of the hot Christmas book at the big chains because the distributor fills B&N's orders first and shuts out the independents because they don't have the same buying power.

Should you care? My aunt's store is a local institution. And since I spent many, many years working there and it is an embodiement of her heart and soul I certainly care. Her customers that "settle" for a 10% off book club discount care. The local schools care. The children that grew up there care. But you're right, the general population really doesn't care. If she closed sure, the middle class white folk that live in her neighborhood would have access to the same quality literature she carries, they can educate themselves and don't really need her customer service or her expertise. But there's more to life than getting the lowest price and more than a good corporate citizen would be lost.

[Sarah]

I want to be more upset about the closure of independent bookstores (and hardware stores and all of the other stores eaten by big box and discount chains.) I have to admit my childhood memories are all locked into libraries. My mom was of the view that there were almost no books worth re-reading, which meant we bought almost no books. Perhaps as a result, I love to buy books, but usually feel guilty about the cost and space they take up. I find my passion caught between the B&N discount member card and the Borders Rewards program. I like discounts and rewards, I guess.

I have a friend who is self-publishing--she formed her own publishing company to get her books out there. She has no real hope to get into the chains, but I thought it was insulting that one of the local independent stores was only willing to carry if they kept all of the price--she'd lose money on each book they sold. Not the way to get more voices into the maretplace. I think the internet is filling that role. Amazon is very open to authors from all sorts of publishing arrrangements. And even letting them profit from their work.

[Jennifer]

I must admit I've got faintly irritated in the past at some US bloggers refusal to link things to Amazon - for me in Australia, Amazon is a place I can get books that just aren't available here.

We have an independent bookshop in my local shopping strip, which is nice, but I buy more books from my local chain at the shopping centre up the road, because I'm not that interested in the architectural and art books that the independent shop mostly carries.

We had a specialist children's bookshop that opened and closed after six months recently - it looked fantastic, but as someone who, like you, buys on average ten childrens' books a month, I could never find the things I wanted there - they were too focused on quality only. I do buy series books - Maisy, Spot, Hairy McLairy, Mr Macgee, Dr Seuss, Dorling Kindersley non fiction but they are wonderful books that I am happy to have in my library.

Our chains are franchises, which means that you can get some degree of quirkiness or local selections, which to me is the best of both worlds.

A rambling comment, sorry, but this was a great post, and I have to add my agreement.

[Sara]

See, I have a hard time with the whole thing because I grew up with Borders as "Book Mecca." Really.

Borders started out as a small college-town bookstore. My parents would drive two hours to visit College Town, see old friends -- and go to the Wonderful Bookstore. Living in the land of BDalton, I thought of it as Wonderland.

I grew up, I went to college in College Town (okay, anyone familiar with Borders knows by now this is Ann Arbor). And my last year, when I needed only 1 class and was out of cash, I got a fulltime job at Borders. I was the Kids Clerk for over a year.

They were a chain, but they offered decent pay, real health insurance, assiduously trained their employees in customer service. At the time, you had to pass a "book test" to get hired - basic literary literacy. We were given book credits and free copies of the NY Review of Books and NYT Book Review. The manager had been there since it was still just the one store (at that point it had become a regional chain). We'd special order anything, and had clerks who specialized in gay/lesbian lit, or drama, or 20th century communist theory... It was *still* Book Mecca.

The Borders brothers started with a small store, and made it into the kind of store that people in other towns wanted to be able to shop in. I can't get too angry over them being successful at it...

[carosgram]

I love books and reading and have never been able to walk pass a bookstore without stopping in to browse. I have no problems with B&N or any other chain. I love shopping on line and Amazon does great things. I also like Alibris.com for rare or out of print books as well as Powells.com for price and availability. I would thing that many specialized independents could serve their clients through the web. If people are disappointed with teh quality then stop buying them, the companies are in the market to make money. They serve what we buy. That is why romance novels are so plentiful. You may not approve but they are a fun read and have big buying power. Good luck!

[APL]

I didn't know the history of Borders till Sara posted it (and now all I can think about is the "South Park" Starbucks episode--basically reminding us that Starbucks started as a small, local coffee shop and, because it offered a good product, it grew to become the oft-criticized bohemoth it is today).

[SheilaC]

Shandra's description of the Canadian situation is excellent. We are fortunate in our mid-size city (220,000 people) to have a large independent bookstore, which has been so successful that Chapters/Indigo has avoided coming to our city. This independent store has branches in 4 or 5 western Canadian cities, and works hard to promote and celebrate authors from our region. They have a small cafe restaurant on the premises, they hold half a dozen book or music recording launches every month, they have live music on Friday and Saturday nights. The children's book section is large, and superb, and offers free story-times. I can find music recordings here that aren't for sale anywhere else in town. It's a wonderful store, and I wish more communities had similar big independent stores to choose from.
This year for Christmas we gave many of our local friends gift certificates to this bookstore. But we also gave a lot of Amazon certificates to distant family members and friends, and that made a lot of people happy too.

I am happy to support our local store, but I'm happy to look up books and recommendations on LibraryThing and Amazon as well.

[shannon]

Whoa!

As the daughter of a now overthrown independent bookstore owner AND a one-time employee of the B&N in Princeton, NJ, I can tell you unequivocably that much is lost to readers when independents are pushed out by chains (especially B&N).

B&N has a top-down corporate structure that cares not one whit for the book knowledge of its local staff. I was the only employee of that store (I was a member of its very first staff when it opened) who had any previous book store experience at all. Everyone else had retail experience at department stores or places in the mall like the gap.

So, when customers came in looking for the pulitzer Prize winning "Independence Day" of example, they were given the novelization of the recent movie by the same title.

The top-down structure also meant that as an employee of the lower-management tier, I had no authority to decide what books we should have in stock or how many copies we should stock. Hence, 500 copies of the new Stephen King and zero of the interesting small press book I had reviewed for the Trenton Times. And even when the King didn't sell, and I sent it back (in the book business, you return unsold items), the corporate computer would assess our inventory and send it right back again, without any regard for my knowledge of what was actually happening in the store.

Also, the top-down structure meant that we had to rely on the computer to tell us how to organize the store. When the computer said the libretto for Mozart's "Magic Flute" was a new age book (a real example) we had to put it in new age, not in sheet music and librettos, because everyone but me had no book experience and the store had to be idiot-proof, thus the computer's judgement ruled, not the people serving the customers (or people who were smarter than the computer inventory system).

That store, and subsequent B&N's I've known do not, in fact have the variety of the good independents I've known (particularly my favorite ones in DC, two of which I worked for). In fact, B&N carries a thousand copies of the latest Oprah book and very little else. They go for the big sellers and leave out many lesser known writers, works from small presses, etc. My father often sent me B&N credit when I was in grad school and I could rarely find more than one or two books out of twenty that I needed in the store.

An independent roughly the size of B&N's coffee corner had most of them on the shelf, to the contrary. That same independent employed me part time for several years and I can attest to the fact that nearly every book in that store was hand chosen by someone who worked there. The breadth was fabulous. Maybe there were only 50 copies of the Oprah book, but there were more titles than in the chains.

Because of that pressure to shelve only the big-sellers in the chains, I absolutely believe that press freedom slips away as independents do. Knowing that books are only marked up 30%--yes, only 30%!--over the wholesale price, I am more than happy to pay full price at a good independent rather than save 30% myself on some chain's loss-leader.

I consider it a democracy tax, and well worth it.

[Ailurophile]

I'm here via Elizabeth's Half Changed World blog.

Ah, independent bookstores. Wonderful and terrific and well worth supporting - IF, and this is a big IF, you have access to them in the first place.

I wonder if the people who mourn the plight of the independent bookstore have ever lived where there were no bookstores at all? Or the one and only bookstore mostly stocked the blandest of self-help books and spy thrillers? For these people, Amazon et al are a godsend. You can live in East Podunk Nowhere and still have access to the same books someone in San Francisco does. Yay!

I grew up in a suburb where the local bookstores existed, but stocked the most conservative and bland selections. As a pagan teenager, I had to make special trips to Berkeley to shop at Shambhala and Cody's for my OMGSatanic! books. If only Amazon (and the Internet) was around then.

Independent bookstores are a good thing and worth supporting, but it's elitist to say "Boycott Amazon. Shop at an independent!" Not everyone has this choice. People who live in large cities and college towns need to remember that not everyone lives in independent-bookstore nirvana.

[Phantom Scribbler]

I have to note that Shannon's experience as a B&N employee does not accord with mine at. all. Some of my fellow employees had little book expertise, but most of them did -- just not in the areas that I generally read. But how many booksellers with an expertise on literary fiction, history, and lit-crit did one store need, anyway? Especially given that most of the customers were looking for books in other genres?

We also had quite a bit of flexibility to tailor our ordering to local conditions. I know -- I used to do the ordering for the kids' book section. It was tough to find a way to get self-published local books in our store, but as long as a book was carried by our distributors and we saw some interest in it from our customers, we could get some for the shelves.

Independent book stores are certainly better for independent book store owners, yes. I can't dispute that. And I appreciate the urge to keep one or two players from swallowing the business whole. When I do my twice-annual bookstore splurge, I take my dollars to an independent. But to imply, as Shannon does, that it's better to buy fewer books for more money? Why? That certainly doesn't benefit the authors of the books that don't get bought. Nor does it do much for the health of the publishing industry as a whole.

[Sandy D.]

Ha. I was going to comment about Border's (when I moved here to Ann Arbor twenty years ago as a poor grad. student, I probably spent more there than on food), but I see Sara beat me to it.

You can still see vestiges of its former greatness at the downtown store, but the selection and the addition of so much schlock (and I'm NOT a literary snob, I'm talking about so much non-book crap) just makes me sad.