When sliding sales forced Cody’s to close its store next to the UC Berkeley campus, the poet Ron Silliman wrote on his blog that it was once the anchor of “the best book-buying block in North America.” But in the discussion that followed, the attitude was one of resignation if not indifference.
“Why would anyone want to perpetuate small independents by paying higher prices?” wondered Curtis Faville, a poet who sells rare books on the Internet. “Most of these proud little independents were poorly run anyway.”
Less harshly, Silliman suggested in an e-mail that “we’re simultaneously caught in the wonder of the new and true mourning for the losses of the old.”
It’s an unsettling if inevitable process. Half a century ago, Silliman said, he would play chess and checkers with his grandfather as they listened to the radio. “That stopped once the TV arrived, because now we all had to face the same direction,” he wrote.
Those for whom “browsing” has much more of an online connotation than a physical one barely register the shift.
“Bookstores, small or large, don’t carry what I’m looking for,” said Logan Ryan Smith, a 29-year-old accountant who publishes a literary magazine and poetry pamphlets. “I’m not going to find an Effing Press or Ugly Duckling Presse book even at City Lights or Cody’s.”
The L.A. Times has a good story on the problems of independent booksellers in our changing culture. The point Silliman makes on isolating ourselves through entertainment has impact the world over. It touches on one of reason people don’t read. We seek the tantalizing over the fulfilling. We fail to taste the richness of interaction because consumption is more immediate and comfortable.
“Isolating ourselves through entertainment…”
Yes. I was at Fry’s before Christmas looking through DVDs for a present, and realized, not for the first time, that I did not have enough lifespan left to sit and watch all the DVDs present in the dcollection around me. Even if I live another 54 years, there would just not be time.
And more content is generated every day.
The wealth of diversion is a very seductive thing. One wonders how it will play out over the next couple of generations.
Here’s a prediction:
Not only will the Internet close most mom and pop bookstores (and even a few of the larger independents), but will also allow authors to increasingly bypass traditional publishers.
Authors are not get the kind of marketing support a publisher once brought. Many publishers request that authors do their own book-flogging. Authors are hiring publicists to do the work publishers once did and spending more of their time hawking books.
Given this market reality and the increasing sophistication of the self-publishing industry, why even go to a traditional publisher? They take a large chunk of a book’s profits, but then give little back. Most of the authors I know kill themselves to flog their books, so why not self-publish? Your book never goes out of print, either. With online bookstores handling more and more self-published titles, traditional publishers may be the next to go the way of mom and pop bookstores.