Spending Money Is a Political Act

Jeff Waxman is a bookseller at Seminary Co-Op Bookstore in Chicago, one of that city’s oldest and best independent bookstores. He’s also a reader and writer who has been involved in the online literary scene to a large degree.

His editorial at Three Percent on the future of bookselling is essential reading:

Today, we are struggling to sell books online according to a fifteen-year-old model. And we’re not, respectively or together, even a pale shade of the polished and soulless retail machine that’s destroying us. But mimicking Amazon is too much like loving the beast that’s chewing our entrails, and what we do best, we still do in our stores. What we do online is a poor imitation. Amazon has done nothing wrong, and we have done nothing.