Editorial 8.12, December 2006, by Deirdre Helfferich Save A Bookstore this Christmas! A bookstore is one of the only pieces of evidence we have There’s something about bookstores that makes them very special. I suppose that for an editor, writer, and publisher, a bookstore affects me the way a hardware or a lumber store affects a carpenter: I’m in the very coolest place that I could possibly ever be. A bookstore outranks even a library, because the place is filled with books that, if I have the money and the desire, could be mine. New books that libraries don’t have yet fill the shelves of bookstores, and the best bookstores have comfy chairs and couches, little cafés or espresso stands, and nooks and corners where you can get pleasantly lost in a world of ideas for hours and hours. My favorite bookstores have shelves and stacks full of used and hard-to-find books that surround you and make warren-like passages among the literature. They enfold you in the marvels of the mind, tempt you in the best way to explore points of view, places, people, everything! The best examples I’ve seen of this was Powell’s Books in Seattle, and Shakespeare & Co. in Paris. These stores are jammed with books, shelves and shelves, stacked under the stairs, in every room, over the doorways, piles and boxes and humongous doddering towers of books and magazines and manuscripts.... But you don’t have to go that far to find an exemplar of the literary marketplace: Gulliver’s Books, right here in College, is a good example of the book person’s bookstore. Gulliver’s has been around for twenty-one years. Dave Hollingsworth, the owner, started his original store on Minnie Street, opening his second location in College, which eventually became the main store. Gulliver’s is a good bookstore not only because it has a great selection of both used and new books, stocking all manner of delightful titles (not to mention little gew-gaws like the librarian action figure and the floppy pens), but because it is one of that increasingly rare breed, an independent, local bookstore. Readers of my editorials have seen me expound on the value of local retail stores before: locally owned stores put far more money into the towns in which they operate than do chains, which vacuum money out of a community (and the state) and send it to the national or international headquarters. According to Big Box Toolkit, chains and big-box stores put only about 30 to 40 percent of their proceeds back into the community, mostly in the form of wages, whereas local stores put 60 to 70 percent back into the local economy. Gulliver’s independent status also makes a difference in the books they are able to get; large chains will only buy books they can get for maximum discount. This means that smaller publishers, which can only afford smaller print runs and therefore have higher per-book costs, often cannot meet the 45 to 60 percent off-the-top cut that the chains demand on even very small orders (two to twenty books or more). There are other costs, too: when I worked at the University of Alaska Press, I found that it wasn’t uncommon for big chains like Borders, Barnes & Noble, and Baker & Taylor to wait four to six months to pay. Some wouldn’t pay for shipping, and all made dealing with returns a nightmare. Amazon was better, but not by much. These corporations demand wholesaler treatment from publishers, or they won’t buy their books. So, many titles from small publishers or self-published authors simply aren’t available in a chain store. This translates to one survival tactic taken by local bookstores when a big chain comes to town: specialization. One longstanding and successful example of this in Fairbanks is the Comic Shop. However, specialty bookstores have to have the market to survive, so in smaller towns (as opposed to cities with 100,000 people or more), the only game around is the mainstream literature that is printed in runs of hundreds of thousands or millions. The Comic Shop has been doing well, situated as it is near Fort Wainwright, and is even able to encourage local authors such as Layla Lawlor and Jamie Smith. But most of their stock, although in a specialty niche such as manga, gaming, or comics, still comes from mainstream companies such as Marvel Comics, or the larger independents, like Dark Horse Comics. In many small towns, there are no bookstores left, and the only place to buy books is at the supermarket. As local bookstores fail, the Internet has helped fill the gap a little, but the online standards like Amazon also pressure small publishers in the same way the chains do, so independent publishers are finding it harder to sell their books, and self-published authors face even more difficulty. And as independent bookstores and publishers are squeezed out of business, authors whose manuscripts might have found a home with them are facing the daunting prospect of having to submit to publishers who receive thousands of manuscripts a year and will accept only those that their marketers think might be bestsellers. Even the large independent distributors like Ingram or Blackwell or smaller bookstore chains like Waldenbooks face intense competition from the big chain bookstores, and so also are requiring more onerous terms from publishers. Smaller independent distributors such as Alaska Small Press (in Homer) are filling this niche by specializing in self-publishers and micropublishers (less than ten books a year), but they are feeling the pressure, too. Publishers and bookstores are fighting back, forming alliances such as the Independent Book Publishers Association or the American Booksellers Association. New authors, facing too many rejections, are turning to print-on-demand printer/publisher/resellers like Lulu. Gulliver’s, being an independent bookstore, deals directly with many Alaska publishers and authors. Hollingsworth estimated that they have about 1,800 Alaska titles, approximately three times the selection that the Fairbanks Barnes & Noble offers. Still, he doesn’t think that specialization is the answer, given the local population. Since the Barnes & Noble opened, Gulliver’s has had a twenty to twenty-five percent drop in sales, about forty people a day. “There’s not many businesses that can take a hit like that and still survive,” he said. Fortunately, Gulliver’s customers are helping to make up the difference, at least for December: sales receipts are about normal for the pre-Christmas rush, even though the actual number of sales are down. In other words, fewer people are buying more. Hollingsworth thinks this is because they are making an effort to help the business by choosing to shop for their gifts at Gulliver’s first; the bookstore started to let its customers know in November about the impact that the chain store across town was having on its sales. One thing that many people don’t realize is that they have significant power over the survival of a business when they choose where to shop. “A ten-dollar purchase may not seem like it’ll make a big difference, but think of forty people a day buying a ten-dollar book: that’s $400 a day, $12,000 a month. It adds up,” said Hollingsworth—and many of those customers are going to buy more than ten bucks’ worth. Hollingsworth is all for more choices; he’s just asking his customers to come to his store first. Although he’s been advised to close his doors, Hollingsworth thinks that the bookstore will be okay: so long as his customers continue to support him, Fairbanks will have the option of perusing the shelves of its last remaining independent general bookstore. But what if his customers shrug off the importance of their first choice for book shopping? We’ve seen it happen before: Fairbanks has no more local general grocery stores, only supermarkets and specialty shops. Where you spend your money makes a difference, and while the big stores help expand your choices, if you don’t shop locally, soon you simply won’t have a choice. For more information, see these websites, magazines, and books: American Independent Business Alliance, www.amiba.net The Ecologist The Big-Box Swindle: The True Cost of Mega-Retailers and the Fight for America’s Independent Businesses, by Stacy Mitchell Eat Here: Reclaiming Homegrown Pleasures in a Global Supermarket, by Brian Halweil, ISBN 0-393-32664-0, $13.95 Going Local, by Michael Shuman The Home Town Advantage, by Stacy Mitchell | ||
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