Are bookstores just a waste of space?

Just a rando on the internet disagreeing with a man awarded the National Humanities Medal. What do I know?

Are bookstores just a waste of space? Should independent bookstores shut their doors? Such stores have no purpose in our modern era. We have the internet now.

When we want to buy a book, after all, we want to buy the book we want. We’re not interested in finding an author who is new to us, a forgotten gem from 10 years ago, or a midlist book with a concept that is exactly our speed. We want the book and title that we know, likely the same book and title everybody else knows. Who cares about the smaller books, the newer authors, the stranger works? 

We should just all buy our books on Am–buy on Amaz–

Nope. Nuh-uh. You can’t make me type it. Not even for a punchline.

In what was ostensibly a New Yorker review of two books about bookstores, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Louis Menand took some time last week to disparage independent bookstores. Menand barely focuses on the books he claims to be reviewing, nor does he delve into the ways digital consumerism affects physical retail businesses, or the vocational awe through which independent bookstore workers are often discussed–which, given the way vocational awe provides a reasonable framework on which he could hang his dislike for both Evan Friss' The Bookshop and James Patterson and Matt Eversmann's The Secret Lives of Booksellers and Librarians, seems like a missed opportunity for what could have been a far more compelling piece. Menand doesn’t even really do more than skim the surface of his most intriguing idea, what he calls the “distribution problem” of publishing, in which “no retail space can accommodate” the millions of books published a year.

Instead, Menand is focused on the comfort of buying books–specifically, his comfort:

[Amazon] still discounts many titles, and you don’t have to go out of your way to take advantage of the savings. My office is across the street from Harvard Book Store, one of the best independent bookstores in the country for people like me. Even so, if I go there for a copy of “Middlemarch,” I’ll have to elbow my way through a gaggle of tourists to get to the literature section in the back, and there’s a chance that “Middlemarch” will be out of stock.

But I can order “Middlemarch” from Amazon in less than the two minutes it would take me to walk to the store. I will get a discount (currently thirteen per cent on a Penguin edition), and, if I have Amazon Prime (a sunk cost), the book will ship for free and appear in my mailbox tomorrow. Oh, and as long as I’m online, I’ll get a new grill brush, too. Harvard Book Store does not carry grill brushes.

Menand is missing the point of independent bookstores. 

Let us set aside the many (many, many, many) community benefits of independent bookstores, both emotional and economical. The value of independent bookstores does not come from the ability to–ugh–“fondle the product,” as Menand suggests, nor does it come from the work of “introduc[ing] people to books that will help them overcome grief or minister to confusions about life choices or personal identity.”

The point of independent bookstores is for you to buy books–specifically, books that are new to you.

During a conversation with Chris Hayes on his Why Is This Happening? podcast, Institute for Local Self-Reliance cofounder Stacy Mitchell observed, “There's some data that shows that if you're in a physical bookstore, you're in a local bookstore in particular, you're about three times as likely to discover some book that you didn't know about that you'd like to read than if you're shopping on Amazon.”

The greatest benefit and greatest joy of independent bookstores is in their curation. No two independent bookstores carry and display the same titles. When I want to find a new book, I don’t go searching on the internet, where the algorithm only rewards books that other people are already searching for. Instead, I go to independent bookstores, where a single book beloved by a single bookstore can eventually find its way into the hands of tens, hundreds, even thousands of people.

The curation of independent bookstores behooves everybody in the book industry and beyond. It benefits publishers seeking to create readerships for new authors and powerful backlist sales. It benefits writers who may otherwise struggle to break out amid a sea of already successful authors. It benefits readers who want to read something new. The ripple effects of sales in independent bookstores creates unique experiences, more viable businesses, and concrete economic benefits—which enriches everybody, regardless of how many books they buy in a year.

Menand technically agrees with me. “[T]he key to a good bookstore, for me, is the curation,” he writes “In this area of life, anyway, size doesn’t matter. I don’t want two hundred thousand titles to choose from. I want the staff to have selected, from the zillions that are out there, the kinds of books that interest me.”

But Menand writes so contemptuously of bookstores that current exist, as well as bookstores long closed, that it’s hard to imagine him going into a bookstore to buy a book at all. Receiving an “offbeat” book recommendation from “a person with green hair, a tattoo, and a sense of humor”–not a quirky sense of humor, just a sense of humor at all–is at odds with the kind of book-buying experience Menand is interested in. His ideal experiences do not involve running into enthusiastic readers visiting his local bookstore for their weekend read, thank you very much. They certainly don’t involve genre-devoted bookstores such as The Ripped Bodice and Steamy Lit Bookstore, both of which Menand mentions dismissively in the final two grafs of his “review,” as if the romance genre is a new concept to him, thrown in for little more than an SEO bump. Given how enthusiastically Menand writes about Amazon and complains about the secret bookstores he was never invited to, it’s hard to imagine that he would deem any modern bookstore acceptable for him to visit–and such a store certainly wouldn’t be suitable for him, or any writer, to cover.

But the passion of those green-haired booksellers and their colleagues for offbeat books ensures that the publishing industry can continue to thrive, even as the books they sell are increasingly threatened by forces that drive homogeneity. Independent bookstores ensure that small presses can flourish, that new authors stand a chance, and that readers can find something beyond the top 100 most-recommended books on Amazon.

After all, you can only read Middlemarch so many times.

Spread a little bit of joy. Please comment on this essay with an independent bookstore you love–and if you can remember a book you picked up from that bookstore, even better.