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Every year when the mistletoe goes up, the plea goes out from America’s dwindling band of independent booksellers: Please, people, keep us alive! Buy our books, give them as gifts!
For decades, small bookshops have battled the twin menaces of massive, price-cutting chains and the vast, easily browsed shelves of on-line retailers.
Many have failed. Not a month seems to go by without the lights winking out at yet another small store. Washington’s own Olsson’s closed in September after 36 years in the business.
Now, it’s a shame when any company folds, but the bleating from independent bookstores has often seemed rather tiresome. Why should readers conspire to make prices higher for themselves?
The sympathies of conservative book buyers are further strained by the seemingly inevitable lefty aura of independent bookstores. (Can you imagine Politics & Prose replacing its supply of mocking anti-Bush paraphernalia with, say, anti-Obama stocking stuffers? Neither can I.)
Yet now it’s no longer just precious, tweedy, bookstore-owning progressives who are in trouble. The book business itself has entered a new and frightening stage that even the arrival of mistletoe seems unable to forestall.
Barnes & Noble is forecasting fourth-quarter sales declines of as much as nine percent. In the last two weeks, major publishing houses -- Simon & Schuster and Random House among them – have announced sweeping layoffs that are taking down even some of the most commercially successful editors. Macmillan U.S. has just frozen wages; San Francisco’s Chronicle Books is downsizing.
Scariest of all for authors and agents was last week’s news that Houghton Mifflin Harcourt has apparently stopped buying any new manuscripts. To say this sent a wave of panicky terror through the industry is an understatement.
Books, like automobiles, have a long production process. If a publisher doesn’t buy titles now, it won’t be in a position to deliver boxes of glossy new hardbacks to bookstores later.
“A ban like this is most worrisome to me for what it says about publishing’s bet on the market 18-24 months from now,” observed Publisher’s Weekly editor-in-chief Sara Nelson. “Will the market just be smaller—or nonexistent?”
Now, perhaps you don’t care whether bookstores exist, and maybe you are not, yourself, an avid reader. Still—don’t be indifferent. You live in a culture that since Gutenberg has been more open and free because of the wide availability of books. Even today, when we’re all inundated with reading material, books stand as a particular measure of liberty.
Societies in which books are a rarity are simply not as open or inquiring or free as those with an abundance of them. Consider: The UN’s 2002 Arab Human Development Report found that more books are translated for sale in Spain every year than have been translated into Arabic, for sale in the Arab world, in the last thousand years.
Books -- even bad ones, even cheesy romances, even snooze-worthy political biographies -- don’t simply furnish a room, they furnish the mind.
Fine, you may say, but why should I give someone the gift of a lump of dead tree when they can read on their computer? And if I want to give them a book, isn’t it more hip to buy an e-book and a Kindle? One answer: Real books don’t need a power source. Another: The Kindle is sold out until 11-13 weeks after Christmas.
A couple of weeks ago, the publisher Random House launched an ad campaign with the message: “Books = Gifts.” It may be unabashed self-interest for a company to try to push the products it creates, but in the case of books it’s arguable that we all benefit.
So for the holidays this year, please, people: Buy lots of books. Wrap them up. And give them to the people you love.
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