The Death of the Independent Bookstore

For a few years we had a real treasure in our neighborhood: a locally-owned bookshop. It was in a shopping plaza nestled between a coffee shop and a bike store. Both those businesses failed but the book store persisted. And then it expanded: from a fairly mainstream setup, like a smaller-scale Barnes & Noble, it went niche and grew. They acquired another location nearby — though not, unfortunately, adjacent — and opted to brand themselves as a children's bookshop. One location stocked mostly baby through middle-grade books, with a few shelves of nonfiction; the other concentrated on YA books and speculative fiction, although it had a healthy stock of general fiction as well. Around Christmas, when I went in to do my usual holiday shopping, I saw they were clearing a space for a coffee bar. A few months later I went in on a Friday night and a local band was playing: this was, they told me, a regular Friday event now. The YA store had become (appropriately) a hangout for teens. Only ... very few teens were actually in the store. Nobody was really in the store.

Then, last week, I saw the news on their Facebook page: "With heavy hearts we are facing the last days of our wonderful bookstore adventure. We will be closing our doors this summer." I can't say I was entirely shocked, as too frequently I was the only shopper there, but I was very disappointed. This bookstore added to the community what independent bookstores always add: a place to meet other book nerds, a warm and intellectual richness to the plaza, a shopping space that was quiet and peaceful, and a place to go and get book recommendations from real people. Knowledgable people. I had come to know the men and women who worked at our bookshop, and we'd fall into long geeky conversations about our favorite books, often excitedly running to the shelves to pull out some treasure, pressing into each other hands and gushing, "You have got to read this!" The kind of recommendations I got from these guys was totally different than what Amazon's big-data bots would tell me to buy. Just yesterday, the Bookshop Guy handed me this book to read — a quirky little delight, he said, that I'd never have heard of otherwise.

So what's killing these bookstores? I suspect one problem in this case was just a matter of sinking too much money into the store too quickly, expanding beyond what it was able to sustain. It was doing OK when it was just the one store. But in general, one cause is obvious: print books are giving way to ebooks. For a quality rant on this topic, you can read Seth Godin's grumpy-old-man screed here. Although I do find it a bit odd for a young technophile to be this curmudgeonly about ebooks, he has plenty of company. Most people, I have found, feel and think this way about books these days ... even as they participate in the new, "worse" paradigm.

Another cause, which encompasses the former, is capitalism. As much as I favor Adam Smith over Karl Marx, it's not hard to see various downsides of laissez-faire these days. Market forces are rarely going to favor tiny-local over giant-corporate, so any shop that is local and independently owned is inherently fragile. You can find lots of blogs and articles urging consumers to buy local, to support independent alternatives, to keep City X "weird," and so forth. But exhortations are unlikely to overcome the allure of cheap goods ... especially when said goods can be delivered right to your door. (Or to your e-reader.) I can't see a way out of this, myself: it seems we're on an irrevocable course to the disappearance of all things small and local and to the Walmartization of everything.

Hmm ... now I'm the one being curmudgeonly.

But wait! Rescuing me from this doom and gloom is a wisp of promise. As I began writing this piece, I googled "death of independent bookstore," because of course. Curiously, however, most of the hits I got were about the resurgence of independent bookstores. Apparently, in spite of the death of my neighborhood shop, many indie bookstores are doing all right. The key seems to be "small and niche." Of course, our store tried that tactic and it didn't work, but they may have been working against a few other obstacles, too. Expanding too quickly, as I noted earlier, and locating themselves in a shopping plaza without much foot traffic. When I've gone to successful indie bookshops in other cities, such as this one and this one, I've noticed that they're located in pedestrian-heavy areas, especially in vibrant downtowns. Foot traffic and local-indie go together. People who are out shopping as an event, like tourists, or girlfriends having a shop + coffee afternoon, are the kind of people who end up patronizing the cute little bookshop. It's not the sort of destination people build into their schedule, like trips to the grocery store.

For local indie bookstores to survive and thrive, they (and we who love them) have to think of what they offer that Barnes & Noble does not, that Amazon does not. What magical ingredients could we think of to help this happen? Combining bookshop with coffee shop? Book shop with ... wine bar? (Now that would draw me in.) Cookbookery shop with cookware and specialty foods store?

What do you think could keep these community assets alive ... or do you (like Farhad Manjoo) think it's time for these "cultish, moldering institutions" to give up the ghost, already?

Parnassus Books: author Ann Patchett's own indie bookshop

The Novel 2.0

Jonathan Franzen is afraid: should you be, too?

“When I read a book, I'm handling a specific object in a specific time and place. The fact that when I take the book off the shelf it still says the same thing – that's reassuring." This is author Jonathan Franzen, speaking on the evils of the ebook earlier this year. Like many über-literary types, Franzen is not a technophile. He would like the publishing industry to stay the way it is, which is to say, aggressively static. "Someone worked really hard to make the language just right, just the way they wanted it. They were so sure of it that they printed it in ink, on paper. A screen always feels like we could delete that, change that, move it around. So for a literature-crazed person like me, it's just not permanent enough ... Everything else in your life is fluid, but here is this text that doesn't change ... Will there still be readers fifty years from now who feel that way? Who have that hunger for something permanent and unalterable?” Franzen's fear of change extends to a dislike of people who disagree with him: if you, dear reader, are a consumer of ebooks, you are not a "serious reader." Not according to Franzen, who might just possibly still be reading books in cuneiform chiseled onto clay tablets.

I hate to break it to Franzen and his fellow Luddites, but the ebook is not going away. As papyrus was superseded by parchment, and the quill was superseded by the printing press, the Kindle will almost certainly be superseded, eventually, by some new bit of technology. The point is that in spite of Franzen’s obvious desire to freeze the world in place, things do change. Gutenberg's technology didn’t bring the end of civilization (in fact, it might have helped it along), and I think it’s fairly safe to assume that neither will the inexorable march of the ebook herald the apocalypse.

Old harbinger of doom

New harbinger of doom

First, it’s worth pointing out that the static-book concept is something of an illusion. Books can change from their original; we call those changes “editions.” Orson Scott Card, for example, had the chance to change some things about his bestselling novel Ender’s Game, originally published in 1985, but with an “author’s definitive edition” released in 1991. Other books have been changed against their author’s wills: Huckleberry Finn suffered a more ignominious rewriting when the n-word was recently expurgated by well-meaning but clueless censors. D.H. Lawrence and other authors ahead of their times have had their words changed: the fact that their books were printed in ink, on paper, did not make them immutable. Actually, D.H. Lawrence benefited from the passage of time: unlike Twain, his original words were released in later editions, as reader sensibilities liberalized.

Not "permanent and unalterable"

So, Mr. Franzen, even before the ebook, novels were not always "permanent and unalterable." But they are about to become quite a bit more dynamic, and as writers we have to prepare ourselves for this change.

In 2007, ebooks accounted for one-half of 1 percent of the trade book market, according to an annual survey conducted by the Association of American Publishers. Just a few months later, the Kindle was introduced, followed by the Nook in 2009. Ebooks went from a trickle to a tsunami at that point: their sales and markets have doubled every year since then. In 2011, ebook sales were up 117 percent, representing nearly 20 percent of all book-publishing revenues. 

It’s not simply that books are moving from paper to digital format, though. The book itself is changing, as indicated by Franzen’s fretting over “permanence.” Authors can now get immediate feedback on their work from readers, before the book has even been officially published. Authors may begin releasing their books bit by bit, with readers giving feedback nearly in real-time on plot development and character. This means the book becomes something like a collaboration between writer and reader.

Dominque Raccah, CEO and publisher of Sourcebooks, calls this the “agile publishing” model. “You really are publishing into a community already," Raccah says in this NPR interview. "So what you are going to be doing is developing that book in front of that community, having the community interact with the author to develop the book [and] provide feedback."

The writer and her readers, collaborating

I find this concept rather mind-boggling: exciting, a little bit scary, and full of possibility. We may even need to rename the book itself, replacing it with a "word that will describe the digital, transmutable, readable, platform-agnostic, weightless, immersive, elastic creation, hitherto known as a book."

I’m not an especially adept technophile — I always feel I’m limping along after trends, trying to keep up, and missing a variety of revolutionary boats. But I am not afraid of the future, for the most part, and I think some of the changes in the publishing world could go our way, as writers. If e-publishing is a tsunami, we writers have a choice to run screaming from it, or to grab our surfboards and ride this sucker.

What do you see as the pitfalls and possibilities of this frontier in publishing?