The Yellow-Lighted Bookshop, page 17
Like other developments in the book trade in the last thirty years, corporate ownership and accountability are not going to go away, but it’s possible that the corporate structures have become so immense there’s enough space for a cottage industry to establish itself in the cracks. Eccentricity always seems to find a way.
The future of our literary culture remains a heated issue, and the reports, if you believe them, are rather gloomy. The book is dead; the novel is dead; literacy is dead; the computer has triumphed. Despite these predictions, we’re publishing more books than ever, and while there is a good deal being published that we probably won’t be reading fifty, or even five years from now, this has always been the case. One look at the best-seller lists from the last 100 years will confirm this; most books fade away. But with so much being published, we’re bound to find a few keepers.
It’s important to remember that the death of literature, of a literate culture, is not an idea that we twenty-first centurions invented. In the nineteenth century, the invention of the bicycle was believed to mark the end of civilization; we would become leisure addicts and reading would surely cease. The same was said of radio in the 1920s, and of television in the 1950s. And at later dates, rock-and-roll, premarital sex, and the jet ski would be cited as literacy destroyers. Let’s not forget that critics also wailed and gnashed their teeth when parchment replaced papyrus, and when Gutenberg printed his first Bible.
The literary culture within any society—those who cherish books, who read, write, publish, and sell them—has always been a small community. We must be realistic about the size of this community. The best-selling hardcover novel of 2004 was Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code, which sold 4.3 million copies. In that year only eight hardcover novels sold more than one million copies. The average book has a print run of between 3,000 and 5,000 copies, and will never be reprinted. As I write this, in the first week of August of 2005, the dead heart of summer, the top-rated American television show was a rerun of CSI: Crime Scene Investigation; it had nearly 14 million viewers.
Literary culture may comprise only a fraction of our society, but its role is crucial. In the bookstore the individual can meet that culture, become part of a river of creation and imagination that has flowed without interruption for thousands of years. The bookstore is still the place where we may engage in the free and unrestricted congress of ideas. In the bookstore, we may be alone among others, but we are connected to others. Even if we were to stop all publishing today, it would take a very long time for all of our books to find homes, and we would still need the bookstore to offer its gathering place because the bookstore is not a virtual space, but a real one with many pleasures to offer.
At Black Oak Books around the corner from me, I have a nodding acquaintance with James, one of the employees. On my way into the store, I often catch him outside on a smoke break. We talk about the weather, the uprooted piece of sidewalk that’s being replaced, the new Indian restaurant down the block. We also talk about books. We talk about new titles—have you read this? We are both fond of a freshly stacked feature table, and I have spent more than a few moments enjoying the bounty and order of all those books. We’re both book geeks.
Today when I swing by, he’s standing outside smoking, “It’s kind of slow,” he says. I’m on my way to pick up Maddy from school, but I have a few minutes to spare, a hunch that tingles the back of my neck, and I haven’t been in the store for a few days. James tells me the new collection of Jim Harrison novellas has arrived, The Summer He Didn’t Die. I’ve been reading Harrison for nearly thirty years, a writer I think should have parades thrown in his honor. Even though cash is tight these days, I know I’m going to buy it. I turn and go into the store.
Not Dead Yet: An Afterword
The figure surprises me, and pleasantly so. I had expected Internet sales of the hardcover edition of this book to be somewhere around 50 percent. Instead, it was closer to 15 percent. Which does make sense, I suppose, for a book that does nothing but extol the virtues of the brick-and-mortar bookstore. If a reader were tempted by this book, they’d more than likely be an old friend to the traditional bookstore, and so buy it at their local shop. But like every hopeful author, I checked my Amazon.com sales more than daily—oh, such vanities; we used to have to wait months to stoke or calm our egos—and the book seemed to be thriving there, certainly more than I’d expected. I was also delighted by numerous blog postings and e-zine reviews, and by a slew of e-mails from sympathetic readers. The Internet had taken some notice.
I think I was led to imagine a higher percentage of Internet sales simply because of the general cultural climate. Since this book was first published in the spring of 2006, I’d heard nothing but gloom and doom for any aspect of our culture that couldn’t be consummated with a computer. News headlines, in print and online, especially here in Silicon Valley, claimed daily victories for the digital world. And on the street, people were suddenly wearing gizmos in their ears at all times, phones and buds and wires, everyone connected in some way, if not to their neighbor, then to someone miles and miles away. Everyone but me and a few die-hard book-geeks seemed connected. At a dinner party recently, a very serious young man told me in a very earnest tone, “If it can’t be done on computers, people just won’t do it.” I immediately thought of three things people needed to do that they could not, as yet, do on a computer, but I held my tongue.
Most troubling of all, I suppose, was that in the last two years, I’d had dozens of heated conversations in which I was practically scoffed at for my naiveté, my slim optimism. Books were dead, I was told repeatedly, I just hadn’t capitulated yet. And if books were dead, then certainly the bookstore was more than dead, meaning irrelevant. It was time, I was told, that I woke up and smelled the high-speed coffee.
What struck me about these depressing conversations wasn’t so much what I heard, but who I heard it from. I was invariably warned about the demise of the print world by other people of the book—writers, booksellers, publishers. Those who should have been most passionate about the printed word were the most cynical; they sounded defeated to me, as if the victory were complete. Such pessimism appalled me, and still does. But after a time, I did begin to think, hmmm, maybe it is just me, after all, maybe, just maybe, I was a fool.
So I went searching for the a more verifiable figure, some number that could paint the big picture: What was the percentage of new books in the United States purchased online? Now, you’d think in this age of way too much information, such a figure would be easy to find: Google and click. But it wasn’t. After dozens of phone calls and e-mails, time in the library, and yes, time surfing the web, the best I can come up with is a ballpark-ish figure, but it’s a figure based on some real numbers, and is just general enough to be true. It appears that about 20 percent of all new books were purchased online in the last few years. Some publishers report more than this percentage, as much as 30 and 40 percent, and some report less, but 20 percent, which is cited by some surveys, seems to be the mean figure. So my little book isn’t that far off the mean. Still, I was surprised. I had expected it to be more.
And yet, here is a book that was primarily purchased in brick-and-mortar stores, but was in some way abetted in its small success by the Internet, the bookstore’s greatest nemesis. People who loved bookstores as much as I do sought out the connection with those of the same ilk, and used the Internet to make that connection happen. I know this from the readers I spoke with, and those readers who were kind enough to, yes, e-mail me. One reader would see the book in a bookstore, pick it up, and write something nice about it in her blog, and that blog posting would circulate elsewhere on the web. Readers of those reviews would then buy it and pass it on to others, almost always in some electronic form, and they, in turn, would go to their bookstores to buy it. The web was—somewhat to my Luddite chagrin—connecting readers, and it did not keep them out of the bookstore. I saw this most when readers from far-flung places ended up with the book—Malaysia, India, Australia, Norway, and so on. I had proof that the brave new world didn’t have to be an either–or proposition. Bookstores, at least for the moment, could continue to exist, and the newer technologies could actually help, at least a tiny sliver’s worth.
And as I was researching the figures on Internet sales percentages, my good friend Katie forwarded, wouldn’t you know it, an electronic copy of a BBC online article about worldwide Internet sales. Nielsen Online reports in a 2007 survey that books are far and away the items most purchased on the Internet, and this number is rising. In 2005, 34 percent of Internet users had purchased a book online; in 2007, that figure was 41 percent. This news should disappoint me somewhat, that so many books are being purchased online, but it doesn’t. Rather, it gives me hope. The Internet is here to stay, a case I’ve made repeatedly, but at least people are buying books there.
There’s no doubt about it, though—it’s a bad time to be a bookseller. The San Francisco Bay area, where I live, is a clear enough reflection, I believe, of what I’ve seen in the national bookselling community to serve as a microcosm.
Since this book’s publication, the San Francisco Bay area has lost some important and legendary institutions. Cody’s in Berkeley, one of the world’s great stores, closed it doors after fifty years. After more than thirty years in business, A Clean Well-Lighted Place for Books closed the last of its three stores, this one in the heart of San Francisco. Both of these losses were more than disheartening; they were crushing.
But there was good news, too. Another Bay Area bookselling mecca, Kepler’s in Menlo Park, did actually close, surprising everyone, but re-opened quickly with the financial support of some fiercely loyal customers. Red Hill Books in San Francisco’s Bernal Heights neighborhood has nearly doubled its floor space. Books Inc., a northern California chain (whose first store opened in 1851!) immediately occupied the vacant Clean Well-Lighted Place location, and Neal Sofman, one of A Clean Well-Lighted’s former owners, has opened the terrific and thriving BookShop West Portal. Best news of all, City Lights, yes THE City Lights, over fifty years old and going strong, posted its best years ever in 2006 and 2007.
This past year, Gary Frank, who has owned The Booksmith on Haight Street in San Francisco for more than twenty-five years, sold the store and retired. This alone makes his story newsworthy. He didn’t close the store; the store didn’t close. The Booksmith was purchased instead by an enthusiastic group of new owners, all newcomers to bookselling, and it’s open and selling books and hosting its amazing series of author events. It’s something of a miracle, really, in bookselling—a story with a happy ending that is only a new beginning.
Nationally, the news also has its silver linings. The major chains have posted some increased sales over the last year or two, and while the percentage of sales from independent stores is still too small to make anyone happy, it’s been holding steady at nearly 10 percent for the last few years. Indeed, the number of new independent stores in the United States has risen dramatically after more than a decade of plummeting. More independents? Now that is good news.
Of course, numbers don’t tell the story, and they never have. It was my good fortune over the last couple of years to speak with hundreds of booksellers around the country, in their shops and at various conventions, as I toured the country to promote this book. And what I heard from booksellers was exactly what I’ve heard for the thirty years I’ve been in the business, and what I used to spout myself, in those days long before the Internet.
Booksellers still talk about 1) the low mark-up on books, 2) imposing rents, 3) high payroll costs, and 4) competition from, well, you name it—the bicycle, radio, TV, the Internet, and so on. Let me reiterate something I tried to make very clear in this book: It’s never been an easy life for booksellers. We still have the same complaints today that we’ve had for countless years, if not centuries. And yet, we still open bookstores, still struggle to keep them open.
Why? Because booksellers love books. And when the booksellers I’d spoken with had exhausted their litany of complaints (and these are honest, meaningful complaints), we always fell to talking about books. Had I seen this new novel, how had I missed this new history of food, weren’t we all excited about the forthcoming biography of … books, books, books. It’s why all booksellers get into the business, and it’s why all readers should be grateful that there are people foolish enough, rash enough, courageous enough, and pig-headed enough to open bookstores.
In every shop I visit—and that is a considerable number—I’m always surprised by a book I don’t yet know about but absolutely must own. As is most often the case, it’s a bookseller who literally puts the book into my hands and says, “You’ve just got to read this.” I know, I know, there are algorithms in computers that will put together a list of books I will “in all probability” enjoy. But I’ve yet to have an algorithm put a book in my hands. The day that happens, I’ll concede and buy some gizmo to stick in my head.
What’s really heartened me in my recent bookstore travels is a new trend I’ve noticed, a model of bookselling that might be one answer to keeping brick-and-mortar stores, especially independents, around for longer than the techno-prophets anticipate.
In 2004, lifelong people of the book but first-time bookstore owners, Ann Leyhe and Marion Abbott Bundy opened Mrs. Dalloway’s Literary and Garden Arts on College Avenue in Berkeley. It can best be described as an elegant neighborhood/specialty store. One half of the store is dedicated to new and backlist fiction, nonfiction, and children’s books, a small but exclusive selection that caters to the neighborhood’s book browsers. The other half of the store specializes in gardening, with books and magazines on the subject from all over the world, as well as a lovely array of tools, vases, pots, and other gardening supplies. Mrs. Dalloway’s took over the space once occupied by Avenue Books, and so was able to keep the local clientele, but their gardening specialty has allowed them to reach a wider audience, from all around the Bay area and even farther afield. Much ahead of their modest projections, the store is thriving in its fourth year, with annual sales growing, well, like weeds.
No matter the city or region I visited, I found shops executing a similar plan—a keen specialty mixed with a smaller but inviting selection of titles for the neighborhood reader. Mystery and suspense bookshops, children’s bookshops, art and framing bookshops—any number of combinations, all intended to create a new sense of the neighborhood bookstore. It is possible to get any book in the world these days, but sometimes an infinite selection is overwhelming. And it’s just impossible for smaller bookstores to carry an overhead that can compete with the Internet, or even with the chain superstores. In shops like Mrs. Dalloway’s, one can wander in and wander out, hands stuffed with books the algorithms don’t even register. If such a model can tide us over, then we’ll all be the better for it—booksellers, publishers, and most importantly, readers.
Lewis Buzbee
San Francisco, California
June 2008
E-ppendix
Well, I guess I was wrong. Really wrong.
In the first edition of The Yellow-Lighted Bookshop—a small hardcover with a beautiful matte jacket, sun yellow endpapers, deckled edges, and a bold typeface on creamy paper—I wrote that electronic books and their electronic reading devices posed no significant threat to printed books. Rather naively, I suggested that electronic books might end up being the province of professionals—doctors and scientists and such—who needed to update their materials fast and often. That was in 2006, and in 2008, when I wrote a “state of the book” afterword for the paperback edition, I didn’t even mention e-books.
And yet here we are, you and I, reading this in a paperless wonderland. It’s cool, but, I have to admit, a little weird. Even the publisher thinks it’s weird that this book, which is nothing more, really, than a paean to printed books and the brick-and-mortar shops that sell them, should now exist in a digital form.
It also seems inevitable. When I was doing the final fact-checking of the first edition, in the fall of 2005, Amazon’s Kindle was a fairly new device, and it was having trouble gaining a foothold with readers of “real” books. Sony was also in the e-reader business, and not faring much better. At the time, there were only 50,000 e-books available, around the same number of titles you’d find in a large bookstore. Today, in the spring of 2010, Amazon’s Kindle has broken through, and is quite common; you see it on buses and commuter trains, on airplanes, on university campuses. Last summer at the beach—fittingly, this was an artificial beach by a water park’s wave pool—I saw a woman in a lounge chair engrossed in her Kindle. The e-book has arrived.
The number of e-book titles has increased dramatically. Amazon boasts over 450,000 titles today—the number increases each month it seems. The Barnes & Noble bookstore chain has its own e-reader now, the Nook, with over one million titles. Readers are buying these titles, too; in 2008, a little over $50 million was spent on e-books, but in 2009, that increased more than threefold, to $169 million. Books for Apple’s iPods and iPhones, and the brand new iPad, can be read via a Kindle program, or downloaded directly through the iBooks app.
