My quick post about the close of indie bookstores generated a wonderful discussion of around 20 lengthy comments. Several meaty issues are being analyzed. I’m really intriuged by the meta-issues the close of independent bookstores represent: Can the culture of books and the associated community survive even if the store closes? Is "culture" transitory or inextricably linked to its container?
Below is the some of the discussion so far (all of it here). Steve Silberman is a Contributing Editor at Wired. Jesse Berrett is a book reviewer/critic and chair of history dept at SF UHS. Chris Yeh is an entrepreneur. Jenny Lawton owns her own independent book store. Others chimed in, too.
Ben Casnocha:
When people bemoan the closing of their local independent bookstore, I always shudder. Why such cultural pessimism? Why such misguided attempts to flagellate capitalism? Tyler Cowen masterfully explains why bolstering the indies will not reverse any of the trends about culture people complain about.
Steve Silberman:
Steve Silberman:
Ben:
Thanks for your thoughtful reply.
First, we would look at diversity of selection. I think we’d both agree that a superstore has more selection than an indie store.
Only if you believe that a food court at a mall has "more selection" than a farmer’s market. What’s available at a food court? Hot dogs, nachos, and other processed items — albeit by the hundreds. What’s available at a farmer’s market? Whatever’s in season. This means that in certain months, tomatoes are simply not available — but apples are. Arguably, the food mall offers "more selection" all year round.
Indie stores indeed offer fewer titles than superstores — but in a way, 50 diet books are all the same kind of book, and 500 romance titles are barely different. Superstores offer bigger selections of the same kind of book, whereas indie bookstores are famously stocked by cranky intellectuals who tend to favor real literature over potboilers, timeless books over the big-seller-of-the-week, and so on. A Clean Well Lighted Place for Books (one of the great SF bookstores which will soon close — it was announced last week) probably stocks a tenth the number of books of any Borders branch; but the likelihood of my finding 100 titles that I want to read there are much higher than in most chain stores, because the titles in chain stores are determined by one thing only: the potential of mass sales. If a book underperforms, it’s off the shelves. But the titles in stores like A Clean Well Lighted Place are chosen by at least two criteria — sales potential, and the worth of the book as a reading experience. To extend the farmer’s market analogy, there’s less junk food on the shelves of a store like A Clean Well Lighted Place than in a Borders.
Why would indie stories possibly buy an obscure book that’s only going to sell one copy a year?
Because it’s a great book that you should read, instead of the latest cookie-cutter knockoff of the last bestseller. And yes, that’s part of why many indies are going out of business.
the Long Tail
In my mind, Amazon and Alibris on one side, and superstores like Books A Million on the other, are two very different things, not the same thing. I like Amazon and Alibris because, in a way, they do what indie stores do but better: they have huge offerings of even obscure books. They’re like farmer’s supermarkets. Admittedly they don’t nourish the intellectual life of a neighborhood the way a great bookstore does, but I’m willing to trade that for the immediate availability of the title I’m looking for — which puts me at odds with many "book people."
chains have lower prices
Of course. Just like Wal-Mart has lower prices than the corner drugstore that’s now out of business. No argument there.
But just because Border’s — or an indie store — doesn’t want to carry that memoir doesn’t mean it won’t get published. In fact, I would argue that now more than ever those small-audience books can be published and sold.
Sorry, but the superstores are definitely having an effect on what gets published — and even how they look once they’re published. Case in point of the enormous power of superstores, from last week’s New York magazine:
Sessalee Hensley Fiction buyer, Barnes & Noble Editors like to attribute the surprise success of books like The Lovely Bones and The Historian to “word of mouth,” but the word that matters most is Hensley’s. She can banish a new title to the bottom shelf, showcase it in the window, or, like Bones or Historian, promote it through the chain’s sales-boosting Discover Great New Writers program. (She also gets credit for touting a certain erstwhile mid-list writer named Dan Brown.) Backed by CEO Leonard Riggio’s virtual monopoly on bookstores, she even has the power to change covers. ‘She’s right up there with Oprah,’ says Sara Nelson, editor-in-chief of Publishers Weekly."
That’s a rosy portrait of a brilliant buyer. What’s not said is what happens to the books and book ideas that superstore buyers don’t like — they vanish.
I’m highly skeptical that the number of books published are decreasing. A quick Google search didn’t reveal any stats around this, but my guess is the number of books being published is increasing.
"As a result of slowing book sales, publishers have decided to cut back on the amount of titles they put out, publishing only 172,000 books in 2005, the lowest number of books published since 1999.… "In 2005, publishers were more cautious and disciplined when it came to their lists," Gary Aiello, chief operating of Bowker, which compiles publishing statistics, said in a statement on Tuesday. "We see that trend continuing in 2006. The price of paper has already gone up twice this year, and publishers, especially the small ones, will have to think very carefully about what to publish."
By "very carefully," of course, Aiello means that publishers will have to focus more tightly on books that are guaranteed sellers.
They recently paired Freakonomics with "Hackoff," a self-published book about a dot-com CEO. No indie store can do this.
Well, that’s simply incorrect. Clerks at neighborhood bookstores make recommendations all the time to familiar customers. By "serendipity," I’m talking about something subtle: spotting a physical book on a physical shelf that turns out to be great, even if you’ve never read a book anything like it before. Granted, people can click on "random categories" in a place like Amazon, as you apparently do — but how many people spend a half an hour doing this, compared to spending half an hour browsing in a bookstore on a rainy afternoon? How many people go to Amazon knowing just what they want, and order it, and then surf away to other sites? It’s one of the best things about Amazon: the book you want is one click away.
Ben, you’re very very smart, and I agree with about 2/3 of what you’re saying. I’ve said all this to rebut the use of the word "silly" in your headline. Thinking about how the culture of books is changi ng because of a wave of extinctions among indie bookstores, or because of market pressures applied to publishers by superstores or rising paper prices is not silly. That’s what we’re doing so thoughtfully here.
Another analogy: the Apple Music Store, which I love and use often, vs. Amoeba Music, which I honestly believe is the best record store on Earth, and visit twice a week.
I love the Apple Music Store because I can buy just one track off an uneven album, and because I can hear what I want to hear, now, even from a hotel room in a podunk town in the middle of the night.
I love Amoeba Music because the experience of going there is marvelous. I’ve met a couple of close friends there, which I’ve certainly never done at the Apple Music Store! More pertinently, I’ve been turned on to many, many albums I didn’t walk in the store to buy because I happened to see them while browsing the racks, and was curious about them.
The Apple Music Store certainly "stocks" hundreds of thousands more titles than Amoeba Music. But if I could choose between a $10,000 gift certificate at AMS, or one at Amoeba, I’d take the one at Amoeba in a second, because after finding a few out-of-print jazz records at AMS that have thoughtfully be put online by Verve, I’d quickly find myself in a vast shallow sea of pop music. Granted, there’s a lot of classical and world music there too, but once you leave the pop realm, the descriptions borrowed fron allmusic.com become few and far between. I assume that in five years, the recommendation software at AMS will be amazing, and Amoeba will be gone. I will miss Amoeba, because I’ve found literally hundreds of great CDs there that I would never stumble on at AMS, even with better software and a larger inventory.
I want both AMS and Ameoba, and for a brief historical moment, I have them.
Mmmmm… not so masterfully, really. I’m a huge Amazon fan, and online ordering has mostly replaced my visits to used bookstores; so I can hardly be called a Luddite. But a few of Cowen’s assertions are either thinly supported or outright bogus.
He writes, "Bolstering the indies will not reverse any of these trends, nor are the chain stores to blame for their spread. The indies themselves aren’t always paragons of cultural virtue, either. One indie owner quoted in Reluctant Capitalists notes that he keeps book prices high ‘not from greed but as a way of reflecting what he sees as their worth as cultural artifacts.’ (On that basis, how can he possibly sell a paperback volume of Proust for $15.00?) Many of the smaller indies have financed themselves by selling, in a separate part of the store, pornography; indie stores are not all intellectual powerhouses like Powell’s in Portland, considered by many to be the best bookstore in the United States."
Well, having made a point of browsing through used bookstores in every city I visited from the time I was a teenager, I have to say, this secret gray market in porn keeping indies afloat is totally news to me. I’ve been to a very few bookstores that sold risqué books under the counter I suppose, but before the Internet, most porn was sold by mailorder and in magazine shops in dicey neighborhoods, not in bookstores. It’s an overwrought assertion by Cowen at best, which plays upon a prudish impulse to discredit the supposed morality of indie sellers.
Cowen writes: "f you don’t like the superstores, it is easy enough to expand your viewing horizons through other means. Just go to new sections of your superstore (the best popular book on geology, gardening, or basketball is very good, whether or not you like the topic). Stoop or stretch to slightly uncomfortable levels. Use the stool. Peruse books randomly. Look at other peoples’ discard piles."
He’s ignoring an elephant in the room to point at a mouse of serendipity. The elephant is that superstores, with their closely-tracked inventories pegged to quick selling items, and their legendarily ruthless buyers, simply do not order books from publishers unless there is a reasonable expectation that they will sell. Most superstores maintain an inventory of "classics" by Dickens and Shakespeare and whatnot — which will dependably sell to students if there’s a college nearby — but these sections seem like windowdressing to boost the apparent gravitas of the store, so that it’s not all diet books, romance novels, and buzzy hits like Freakonomics. The issue is not that more obscure books are on the lower shelf of Barnes and Noble; the issue is that many worthy books will never be carried by the superstores at all, and this knowledge plays an ever-increasing role in determining which books will be published by publishers in the first place. This is particularly true with rising paper and gas costs — as a newspaper article recently pointed out, a significantly smaller number of titles were published last year than the year before for these reasons.
On the other hand, I have a much higher chance of finding a used book I need online than heading out to a used bookstore and hoping it’s there.
Having visited Powell’s in Portland two weeks ago, Cowen’s certainly correct that it’s the best bookstore in the US. I can’t think of another one that even comes close. But I also noted that many used books and worthy remainders on the Powell’s shelves were priced much higher on their website than in the store. Aggregators like Alibris seem to be engaged in something like price-fixing for in-demand used books; I suspect that clerks in used bookstores simply look up a title to see what the market will bear — another reason why online bookselling limits serendipity in a way local bookshops do not, even when we’re talking about the same store.
I welcome the online used-book age, but concerns about what we’re losing in the process are certainly not "silly." What’s silly is dismissing the previous generations of booksellers as gray-market porn merchants and insisting that I would be able to find the first-edition memoir of Walt Whitman’s housekeeper — which I stumbled across at Moe’s in Berkeley a couple of years ago — on a shelf at Books A Million if I was only willing to bend over.
Ben Casnocha:
Steve — Thanks for the detailed comment. It is an eloquent, if unconvincing, critique.
Let’s first agree, as a matter of protocol, that Powell’s is the best used book store and that Cowen shouldn’t have thrown in that worthless graf on porn. These are minor points.
There are two main factors I would use when comparing an indie store vs. a superstore. First, we would look at diversity of selection. I think we’d both agree that a superstore has more selection than an indie store. Even though you include an anecdote about finding an elusive memoir at a bookstore, you say earlier that you’re much more likely to find a hard-to-get book at an online bookstore (or even, I would argue, at a Border’s). So, I think we can agree that your experience finding that memoir is more of an exception than the rule. Second, prices. This is an obvious one: chains have lower prices.
Now….You make the interesting argument that chain stores only want to buy books that will sell, and books that will sell are likely to be diet books and not Walt Whitman’s maid’s memoir. I agree. But isn’t it the same for indie stores? Why would indie stories possibly buy an obscure book that’s only going to sell one copy a year? If they did this, they’d go out of business (like many do). Unless an indie store operates in a very distinctive kind of community, where they could anticipate they kind of obscure needs of their clientele, most indies will need to stock the same percentage of best sellers as a chain.
But just because Border’s — or an indie store — doesn’t want to carry that memoir doesn’t mean it won’t get published. In fact, I would argue that now more than ever those small-audience books can be published and sold. This is the phenomenon of the Long Tail. This is the phenomenon of Amazon. Moreover, I’m highly skeptical that the number of books published are decreasing. A quick Google search didn’t reveal any stats around this, but my guess is the number of books being published is increasing. Self-publishing has n ever been easier. The tools and research needed to publish a book are at the tip of any computer user’s fingers.
Your next interesting argument is that of serendipity. I don’t understand when you say: " Aggregators like Alibris seem to be engaged in something like price-fixing for in-demand used books; I suspect that clerks in used bookstores simply look up a title to see what the market will bear — another reason why online bookselling limits serendipity in a way local bookshops do not, even when we’re talking about the same store."
My sense is that serendipity is just as much at play if you make an effort to browse a random bookstore as it is if you make an effort to click at random categories in books on Amazon or stand on a stool at Borders. I, for example, have found many interesting books through Amazon’s extensive "recommendation" tools. They say, "You liked book X, you will probably like book Y." You can play this game for as long as you want in a database of millions and millions of titles. They recently paired Freakonomics with "Hackoff," a self-published book about a dot-com CEO. No indie store can do this.
All of these arguments, though, are less persuasive than the one most indie bookstore fans make which is harder-to-pin-down: the cultural contributions they make to local communities. The value of knowing owner Joe. The waterhole quality for neighbors. I don’t buy this one, either, but I admire you and others making the more analytical and difficult argument, no matter how much I disagree.