Articles appearing in the media recently have both upheld the virtues of the independent bookstore and heaped disdain on it. In The New York Times’ (@NYTimes) Op-Ed piece, “Amazon’s Jungle Logic,” novelist Richard Russo lashes out against Amazon’s promotions as an attempt to squash local retailers.
....my writer pals and I took personally Amazon’s assault on the kinds of stores that hand-sold our books before anybody knew who we were, back before Amazon or the Internet itself existed. As Anita [Shreve] put it, losing independent bookstores would be “akin to editing ... a critical part of our culture out of American life.”
But over on Slate (@Slate), technology columnist Farhad Manjoo (@fmanjoo), in “Don’t Support Your Local Bookseller: Buying books on Amazon is better for authors, better for the economy, and better for you,” criticizes Russo’s argument.
Rather than focus on the ways that Amazon’s promotion would harm businesses whose demise might actually be a cause for alarm,...Russo hangs his tirade on some of the least efficient, least user-friendly, and most mistakenly mythologized local establishments you can find: independent bookstores. Russo and his novelist friends take for granted that sustaining these cultish, moldering institutions is the only way to foster a “real-life literary culture,” as writer Tom Perrotta puts it. Russo claims that Amazon, unlike the bookstore down the street, “doesn’t care about the larger bookselling universe” and has no interest in fostering “literary culture.”
That’s simply bogus. As much as I despise some of its recent tactics, no company in recent years has done more than Amazon to ignite a national passion for buying, reading, and even writing new books. With his creepy laugh and Dr. Evil smile, Bezos is an easy guy to hate, and I’ve previously worried that he’d ruin the book industry. But if you’re a novelist — not to mention a reader, a book publisher, or anyone else who cares about a vibrant book industry — you should thank him for crushing that precious indie on the corner.
And then, on Huffington Post Books (@HuffPostBooks), Hillary Rettig (@hillaryrettig), author of 7 Secrets of the Prolific, weighs in with an open letter addressed to independent booksellers.
As someone who likes indie bookstores a lot, and who always seeks them out in her travels, I feel bad that so many of you are going through such a hard time. And so I have a suggestion for a solid new book-related revenue stream that not even Amazon can touch. Before I tell it to you, however, I need to share a recent experience I had with a bookseller.
That experience was cold and disheartening for Rettig. She left with the feeling that many “booksellers remain mired in what indie publishing proponents...call the ‘legacy’ publishing world — and a fundamental element of that world is disrespect for, and exploitation of, writers."
Indie booksellers, you have a natural friend in us, the indie authors. Even though Manjoo is right and Amazon is a boon for us, many of us are also discovering, to our chagrin, that sales still often requires a personal touch — and we're also discovering that it's expensive and time consuming to enter a new market.
You've already got those personal contacts, and are in that market. So my humble suggestion is that, in 2012, you resolve to work with us — as equals.
You may also be interested in visiting the American Booksellers Association (@ABCGroupatABA & @IndieBoundMeg).
For all book lovers, we (@smrsault) invite you to make our SomersaultNOW online dashboard your personal computer homepage (see instructions).