The End of the Real Bookstore

[purplerabbit]

Not long now and the only place you will be able to buy a book is online or in a big chain store.

Cody's Bookstore on Telegraph in Berkeley is closing.

A Clean Well Lite Place for Books in San Francisco is up for sale.

Soon, only a handfull of corporations will control what you can read.

Comments

too late for that

[metaphorge.livejournal.com]

Soon, only a handfull of corporations will control what you can read.

Actually, they already do, since Ingram controls the bulk of the book distribution industry, and indy book stores serve as little more than fronts for them and the large publishing houses.

The real arbitrar over what you find in a book store mostly breaks down to what kind of deal its publisher has made with Ingram, influencing what the discount is for the bookseller.

One example of how this works out is that it actually costs most bookstores money to sell you most books they do not have on their shelves, so in most cases you're doing the bookstore a favor to make special orders through Amazon instead of having them special order it... a chronic weakness of indy stores is that they will not say "no" (as they should) when someone orders a book they will lose a substantial amount of money on, often because the booksellers are not familiar with discount/return policies for various publishers.

It's my view that any independent bookstore that doesn't put a lot of its business model into a used section (such as Powell's) is doomed, unless they want to offer an identical or lesser selection than your average B&N or Borders, which kind of defeats the purpose of the store's existence. The exeption to this is niche stores, but they often make the bulk of their profits off sidelines.