Posted on 07/22/2006 10:02:02 PM PDT by KneelBeforeZod
As independent bookstores scramble to compete with chain stores and online retailers, one small Marin County bookseller found a way to survive. He got rid of the books.
"The space was so small that people sitting in the cafe were practically on top of the bookshelves," said Gary Kleiman, who founded BookBeat in Fairfax in 1999. "You couldn't get to the books."
SNIP
His strategy is just one way independent bookstores in the Bay Area and across the country are adapting to the changing marketplace for books. Today, fewer than half the books sold nationwide are purchased in bookstores, according to industry experts. Such competition has forced some stores to close, while fewer new ones have opened.
Meanwhile, small, independent bookshops like BookBeat are coming up with inventive survival strategies: selling fancy coffee drinks, reading glasses, greeting cards, posters -- even hats, if the store's in a sunny enclave.
SNIP
(Excerpt) Read more at sfgate.com ...
the liberal cows have come home...
after infecting the schools with an absence of the 3 R's, now they are reaping the results of no emphasis on thinking or reading.
people want their books to be like MTV.. quick flashy and easy. liberals who spawned this generation can't figure out no one longer has the brainpower to read their intellectual phonies like chomsky
So, last fall, Kleiman jettisoned seven bookcases from the center of the cozy, wood-paneled shop -- keeping just those along the walls -- and gave most of the store's 4,000 books to charity.
He also built a stage, where musicians play three to four nights a week, got a beer and wine license and began offering free wireless Internet access.
Now BookBeat is mostly a virtual bookstore. Instead of stocking a large inventory of new and used titles, Kleiman offers next-day service for most book orders. Customers order books by phone, then pick them up at the store. And, unlike online retailers, there is no shipping charge, since books are ordered in volume from nearby distributors.
Now you got online bookstores, pirate copies, etc.
I remember when a Harry Potter book came out in the UK. They were posting chapters by midnight Eastern time.
And as far as Chomsky goes, the bright side is that more and more people have better things to do and/or are apathetic.
However, I do wonder that a coffee house is a type of restaurant... Except for the clueless and Stalinists, most thinking people had Chomsky's number a long time ago.
About around the time people started waking up to the lies and omissions of the LSM.
Put the barristas in Hooter's outfits?
I buy books off of the internet. When I want to read up on a subject, I'll query froogle. Often I can order 4-5 used books plus shipping for the price I can buy one new one in a retail outlet.
I rarely go into a retail book store these days, although I do visit half-priced bookstores.
In the last 24 hours, I've read 4 or 5 books. Some classic fantasy by Zelazny.
And I'm only 27. I think I read and reread about 5-10 books a week. I also listen to audiobooks when I don't have time to read, or when I'm driving. History non-fiction, and scifi/fantasy.
By the time I was 8, I had read all of the 34 Wizard of Oz books.
Oh you are GOOD!! At eight I was still reading "Goosebumps" and the "Fear Street" series by RL Steine. I graduated to Stephen King at around fourteen, fifteen I think.
It's most likely because I went to en English type boarding school when I was five years old. And they didn't let us play that much so we would read a lot.
I have a soft spot for bookstores; I hope they do well.
Americans. They don't read books, but want to be seen with them.
Clearly you are the exception and not the rule.
Glad to hear it too! ;)
YOu and coconutt2000 need to get together ;)
On FR, it isn't surprising. This site will attract more informed people but it is not the rule that people your age want to be informed or dare I say, able to be informed. I suppose public school education takes its toll ... .
I think around 8 I was reading the detective Brown series. By 10 I was reading James Michener, some adult horror, as well as popular young adult fiction like the Hardy Boys. I think I read L. Ron Hubbard's "Battlefield Earth" in fourth grade, and the Asimov's "Foundation" series in either third or fourth or fifth grade.
I have to read. I can't stop. I'm addicted to books and blogging. FR satisfies my need to access new information. I think Jim Robinson probably thinks my account is trying a denial of service attack because I'm hitting refresh every few seconds when things are slow on FR. Baen's webscriptions satisfies my need to access new books. If I'm not rereading what I already have, I'm hunting on Baen's web site for new books to read. And when I'm not reading, I'm listening to talk and news radio, or audio books.
Oh Lord... I'm a junkie. I need an intervention.
See #17. ;-)
And when I'm jumped up on coffee... Sometimes I read a book, listen to an audio book, and watch Fox News at the same time, with frequent stops in my reading to check up on FR to see what the world is writing about.
I'm still in highschool (public school unfortunately) and I read all the time. Mostly Sci-Fi/Fantasy. I'm currently working through Go Tell the Spartans by Jerry Pournelle. I'm also reading Rise to Rebellion (a Novel of the American Revolution) by Jeff Shaara. AND I'm reading a school-assigned summer reading book, Beowulf.
Only 4,000 books? Well there is his problem right there. I have well over 4000 books in my apartment. You could probably find a better selection at Wal-mart and at a lower price too.
Really rotten selection.
You can thank the schools for the whole language approach they have been using to teach reading. If you want to raise a bunch of illiterates, just teach them to read using whole language. It destroyed the abilities and incentives to read for a generation of children in California public schools.
LOL, same here... Except I'm a shower person, and I jack up the volume on my stereo so I can hear my latest audio book while I shower. I also try not to read anything when I'm behind the wheel, even when stopped. I'm a little paranoid about other drivers... I don't trust them. Taking my eyes off the road at a stop light to try and read something makes the hair on the back of my neck rise up and I feel strangely detached and unfocused.
When I discovered the Sluggy comics, I think it took me three days to read four years of dailies. Took all the spare time on my breaks, all my free time at home, and no phone calls. The frustrating part was waiting for the darned comics to load.
Local Books-A-Million is good for a laugh. A dozen Bush-hating titles front-and-center...and one Ann Coulter book nestled in (for 'balance' presumably).
I don't think Barnes and Noble or some of the other major retailers are hurting, but the independents and the smaller chains are. All the malls around here used to have a B. Dalton or Waldenbooks, but I haven't seen one of those in a couple of years. I think the reason is because they have maybe 1/8th the floor space of a big freestanding retailer.
As for me, I like getting a cup of coffee and wandering the big book stores, and I've generally found B&N to have a great selection of books. Their fiction and literature section has a great selection. The college library where I work is the one in trouble, as NOBODY researches in the library anymore. I'd hate to be an encyclopedia salesman today.
Amazon is probably more left-wing than the major book chains. The last time I saw a story on them, several of their male employees wore dresses to work. Actually, they're a strange combination of ultra-capitalism and marxist ideology, kind of like Google.
Waldenbooks got bought up by Borders.
Just my observation, but the last few times I've been to a mall, it seems like 90% of the stores are aimed at tweens and young teenage girls. With the exception of the anchor stores, almost everyplace seems to be selling Bratz clothing, hair clips, bracelets and shoes. The stores that sell books seem to have given away to big magazine and newspaper stands. I think the mall bookstore, along with other mall stores catering to adults are a dying breed.
There used to be at least two bookstores in every mall. Now there's only one, if there is one at all, and then it is usually placed somewhere off to the side.
"You can thank the schools for the whole language approach they have been using to teach reading. If you want to raise a bunch of illiterates, just teach them to read using whole language. It destroyed the abilities and incentives to read for a generation of children in California public schools."
EXACTLY!
By design, we have our daughter in a private school. It's phonics all the way. It's old fashioned math - no fuzzy stuff etc.. It is a tragedy what is going on in public schools.
OH,MY!!!!
:)
I have no idea what "whole language approach" to reading is.........our daughter was able to read long before she started kindergarten, her father and I taught her, just like our parents taught us.
Most of my students are male, and have never read a book they were assigned in English class. I think the problem is the feminized, nihilistic reading that dominates high school reading lists. The kids can read, though, and I can have them talking about having shivers run up their spine with one specific reading from The Right Stuff.
A friend once complained to me that she didn't want to teach using phonics because the memorization necessary to learn phonetic rules for English is so repetitive and boring. It struck me then that whole language is nothing more than rote memorization of every word in the English language.
You be the judge of which method is more compassionate.
http://www.halcyon.org/wholelan.html
Whole language has been a disaster so now they are mixing in traditional phonics.
Ah, there's hope yet!
I adopted a policy, years ago, that if a book can't hold my attention on the second reading, I throw it off the back of the boat, whilst exclaiming, "semi-literate trash."
The reading list for kids in the local high school includes gang life, witchcraft, racism(white privileged americans against everyone else) and Noam Chomsky.
There you have it.
Thankfully in the school my daughter attends they do use phonics, judging from the groupings of the spelling words that have been coming home for the past 3 years.
She starts 3rd grade in September and reads with 98% accuracy at 7th grade level, although her comprehension is only that high at 5th grade level.
She still encounters words she has difficulty "sounding out" but those tend to be the same words we all had trouble with - the exceptions to the rules....
I know about Amazon. And I also noticed that a couple of orders of conservative books had damage to them. I returned them with a note as to what was happening and they sent me new books without damage. As Leftist as they are, if it hits them in the wallet, they'll clamp down on the attempted censorship.
It hasn't happened since.
I see I forgot my sarcasm tags. I have eight-foot bookshelves in almost every room of my house. It is a rare occasion indeed that I can bring myself to throw one away. (I still have vacuum tube manuals.)
The replacement of books by coffee is one reason that I go to the chain stores rather than the independents. The independents seem to be trying to run off their customers (at least those who read). Of course, maybe more money is available if all the independent stores just become Starbucks or Starbucks wannabes.
LOL, I just got rid of a box of green/white printouts, by giving them to all my troops. The kids asked, what are these numbers on the side?
Books are now considered "luxury items."
Ahem. That's an experience that's hard to replicate online. But there's one used bookstore in town that I might as well sign my paycheck over to. It has coffee, yes. And Guiness on tap. I'm doomed.
Macho Shakespeare...
My daughter (age 11) is starting on the most recent Harry Potter book. She has read them all and hundreds of others. Most of here class mates are avid readers also.
However she goes to a private (Catholic) school and reading is number one on the list of priorities. Most of my friends are avid readers as well as most of my wife's friends. I think it just depends on the home life.
Our new apartment has enough book shelves in it to hold the fiction section of our local library (no I am not kidding) we already have enough books in boxes to fill those.
I loved the Wizard of Oz books!!! I tore through them around the same age. I would sit in the library and read read read, then leave reading, read on the way home and read read read at home. It was hard to get enough books for a week. Gosh we used to spend a lot of time in the library. I loved it!
We have books all. over. the house. now. When we move, we need some built-ins. We read to our kids every night, except the oldest (10), who reads by himself now. LOL. For 10.5 years I've been reading outloud almost every night!
Anyway, thanks for the memory of the Baum books. I think I'll get those next. The boys'll like 'em.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.