One of the saddest events of the past ten years or so has
been the inexorable demise of the brick and mortar book store. Fully half of
the bookstores in the United States have vanished in the past ten years.
Gone are places like Borders, Crown Books, B. Dalton,
Kroch's and Brentano's, Oxford Bookstore, Atlantic Books and Davis-Kidd
Booksellers.
A few are still hanging on. Barely. Barnes & Noble, for
example, and Follett's, Book Off USA, Hudson News and places like the sprawling
and immensely popular Powell's Books in Portland, Oregon.
But for the most part, physical books stores are being
shoved aside by online booksellers like Amazon, Alibris, AbeBooks.com, Biblio.com,
ValoreBooks, etc.
The exception to this trend were recent reports by CNBC and
Wall Street Journal that Amazon is planning on putting up a physical retail
book store across from New York City's Empire State Building.
So far there has been no confirmation from Amazon.
But even if that were to happen, most experts see the demise
of brick and mortar book stores continuing as more and more readers chose to
buy their physical and e-books online.
So what can be done?
I recently received an e-mail containing an intriguing idea.
It came from author Doug Preston, who along with co-author
Lincoln Child, has written such bestselling books as Relic, Riptide, Mount Dragon,
Gideon's Sword and The Lost Island.
Preston attached a note containing an idea for saving book
stores and helping authors sell more books in them. The idea was from author Daniel
Handler, aka Lemony Snicket, who has written books like The Basic Eight, Watch Your Mouth, and Why We Broke Up.
Rather than paraphrasing Handler's note and idea, I will
include it here verbatim and add some final thoughts:
"Dear
comrades-in-ink,
"Whether or not
you are an author published by Hachette (as I am), you may lately feel as if
you are engulfed in a rather unpleasant flood -- as if the fate of your books
is whirling dreadfully out of your control, battered by the waters of some
enormous South American river, the name of which I cannot remember at the
moment.
"While all this
fierce sword fighting rages on without you, you may find yourself feeling even
more hapless and hopeless than authors usually do, while your local independent
bookstore struggles with a similar feeling that it's some sort of jungle out
there.
 |
| There is Nothing Like a Book Store |
"As a tonic,
allow me to suggest a new program, cooked up by assorted interested parties and
named, after some tipsy debate, Upstream.
The idea is to connect authors with their local independent booksellers
to offer signed books as an alternative to, say, larger and more unnerving
corporate machinations. Upstream was
test-piloted this summer and is now spreading steadily, like optimism or syphilis.
"How does it
work? Easily, hopefully. Here are some numbered steps.
"1. Choose and
contact a bookseller close to your home.
If you cannot find one, the good folks at Indies First, coordinated by
the American Booksellers Association, can be of service. They are quite excited about the launching of
this new and hopefully enormous campaign.
"2. The bookstore
will order and sell your books; you will sign them. Perhaps you'll stop by at regular intervals
with your pen, or perhaps you can convince, with cake or gin, the bookseller to
come to you.
"3. Both you and
the bookseller will promote this arrangement as best you can, spreading the
word not only about an exciting source of signed books to your readers anywhere
in the country, but about a program anyone can join.
"Feel free to
tell your publicist you're participating.
Upstream should be in full swing in time for the holidays, when signed
books are good gifts for loved ones and distance acquaintances alike.
"Will Upstream
rescue us all from strife and worry? Of
course not. But the hope is that it will
remind both authors and booksellers of their local, less monolithic resources,
and improve general esprit de corps at a disheartening time.
"With all due
respect,
"Daniel Handler,
aka Lemony Snicket"
It sounds like a great idea. I have yet to approach any of
my local bookstores about it, but I plan to. It seems like a win-win
proposition. It's an opportunity to have authors in the store signing books and
for readers to interact with authors.
E-book sales are fine. I have nothing against them. In fact,
most of the sales of my own books have come as a result of Kindle, Nook and
Kobo book sales.
But as convenient as e-books are they are also impersonal.
You can't sign an e-book or talk to readers.
And let's not forget. What exactly are e-books? They are a
collection of computer code that we essentially lease from companies like
Amazon. Think about it. You can loan your physical books to as many people as
many times as you wish.
But that is not the case with e-books. You may think you own
an e-book, but you really don't. If you want to loan a Kindle e-book to a
friend you must make sure the person you are loaning it to is using compatible
e-book software. Then you can lend it only once for 14 days--and even then, you
need to belong to Amazon's "Prime Program," which costs extra.
For an author like me, another frustration with e-books is
this: if everybody on a train, or bus or plane is reading an e-book, I can't
tell what they are reading. There are no covers, so I don't know if they are
reading one of my books (highly unlikely) or one by J.K. Rowling, John Grisham, or Stephen King.
Finally, (and for me this may be the most important point) I
like bookshelves. And I like bookshelves with lots of books sitting in them. An
office or den or family room without a bookshelf filled with books seems naked
to me.
Maybe that's why I like brick and mortar bookstores and why
I hope they never vanish completely.
They have LOTS of bookshelves filled with books that you can
pick up, handle, thumb through, take home and put in your own bookshelves.
It's one of life's simple pleasures.
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