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Farhad Manjoo hits us with the old indie bookstores are some of the “least efficient, least user-friendly, and most mistakenly mythologized local establishments you can find.” They’re also “cultish, moldering institutions.”
My first thought when I read this was, “man, I feel sorry for poor Manjoo. He must have some really shitty bookstores around him. Because places like The Booksmith, Moe’s Books, Pegasus and Pendragon, and Green Apple, where I shop for my books, are not cultish and moldering at all. In fact, they are about a million times more vibrant and pleasant to be in than a Borders or an Amazon web browser window.”
And as for inefficient, Mr. Dalloways Books in Berkeley will order any book for me I want and usually have it available the very next day. Even Amazon Prime can’t do that for me.
Outsourcing this rant to Chad Post, since he pretty much says it all.
What this all boils down to is Manjoo’s unabashed desire to operate like a rational consumer. If the goal of every entity—business, consumer, etc.—is to “maximize surplus value,” then you should try and wed yourself to the principles of neo-classical economics, in which the free market determines the price (there’s nothing preventing bookstores from discounting, and thus increasing demand), and it’s your job to only purchase things in which you get the biggest bang for your buck. It is absolutely 100% economically irrational to purchase a book you’re willing to pay $30 for for that $30 if there’s a $20 version available through means that don’t entail a lot of opportunity costs. This is the primary consumer advantage for online retailers. It’s just as easy (or even easier) to buy the Steve Jobs bio via an online retailer than it is to drive to a store and buy one, and that way you’ve accrued surplus value.
OK, fine. Tech people and stock brokers and MBAs and some Slate writers think like this and want to live like this. Two things: first off, people don’t behave rationally, especially when it comes to price, and secondly, there are hidden opportunity costs in this scenario that relate to community.
Manjoo, in a myopic fashion that is stunningly boneheaded, equates the “buy local” movement with bookstores supporting local authors. That is foolish and beside the point. One of the primary purposes of bookstores is building a literary community. Sure, you can point to readings (which, unless it’s Richard Russo are generally attended by 10 readers and a few homeless) as a physical representation of this, but it’s actually something much larger. A good independent bookstores is a place where you know you can interact with people who read as much as you do. It’s a safe haven for the literati in a world that’s increasingly rationalized and scary. It’s one of the few physical spaces where you can talk about literature and art after college.
I’ll just add to this that America is in a very weird place right now with regard to cheapness. We seem to have raised being cheap to a national value alongside the great Enlightenment values of liberty, equality, and fraternity. (And I would say that cheapness is the value we are currently most passionate about.) We seem to presume that it’s always the best thing for the economy and our own well-being if we can get an item for the absolute least money possible to spend on it without actually stealing it.
Pace Manjoo, Amazon has probably done more than any other company (with the exception of maybe Wal-Mart) to instill this passion for cheapness into the American public. And well, that’s really, really bad. Because if you want nice things, you have to pay for them. This is a truism in all sorts of things, books included. You can’t just cut costs and sell 12 books for the price of 1, dictate incredibly harsh discount schedules to publishers, and expect the book industry to absorb the losses and continue to be able to support authors that barely break even, if that.
I’m sure that market triumphalists like Manjoo will continue with their neo-liberal arguments about how quality of life and all that is a bunch of nonsense and that we’d all really like it better if we ate one huge bean instead of a bunch of little ones and did all of our shopping at Wal-Amazon-Mart-Emporium instead of going from store to store like a bunch of 19th-cetury freaks. I don’t have the time or energy to go into a whole breakdown of the failures of neo-liberal economic policies (see Paul Krugman for that), but suffice to say, I believe in a diverse world, and one where one-stop-shopping is not a dream but a nightmare. That’s why I like indie bookstores and why I buy from both indies and Amazon.
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I had the following difficulty making sense of Manjoo’s piece: it’s my experience that Slate authors (and, in many previous instances, Manjoo himself) attempt to gain interest for their articles by pointedly and intentionally defending positions contrary to those of most of their readers (presumably with the recognition that Slate readers, in general, enjoy contrarianism).
Intentionally taking up a contrarian position, however, requires understanding the arguments in favor of the position one is going to oppose; and in this piece Manjoo appears genuinely not to understand those arguments. For example, he describes how bookstores do offer some good services – and then mentions coffee shops and ‘free magazine reading.’ Of course, none of the great local stores that I care about (say, Unnameable Books in Brooklyn, for example, or Carmichael’s in Louisville) offer ‘free magazine reading,’ and only the latter has a coffee shop attached (but, I believe, under separate ownership). In other words, Manjoo appears to be identifying ‘physical bookstore’ with ‘Barnes and Noble.’ And I don’t think he’s doing it intentionally, either; he just genuinely has never had the kind of experience that he’s attempting to discount, and so he’s unable to do it effectively.
Thank you for mentioning the negative externalities associated with amazon. I’d also add that amazon’s lower prices are, in fact, actually bad for authors, because they get fewer royalties off of them, and that amazon’s current behavior is monopolistic and predatory.
Everyone seems to be ignoring the giant pink elephant in the room – epublishing. The real problem that Amazon represents isn’t physical books, but electronic books, which in ten years will dominate probably 90% of the market. Who is going to go down to the local Indie bookstore to buy an ebook? No one. They are finished, gone, kaput. So are most physical bookstores. Will this be the end of literary culture? Of course not. People will buy even more books than ever before, and authors will get a larger share of the pie than ever before. Literary people will still find ways to hang out, but it won’t be at bookstores. Authors will do their personal appearances at literary coffee shops most likely, not bookstores. The good news is there will be more authors, and less middleman, and they will be available online for contact much more easily than they have been in the past. Some things will be lost, other things gained. As always.
We had this same conversation 15 years ago except then it was evil to go to Borders and Barnes&Noble and we had to go to independent booksellers. Now apparently they’re not the bad guys any more, Amazon is.