Culture may close the book on shops

Contra Costa Times ^ | 6/22/6 | John Simerman

[SmithL]

Andy Ross couldn't quite swallow it.

The computer system at Cody's Books on Telegraph Avenue, a few blocks from the UC Berkeley campus, told him to ship back Emmanuel Kant's "Critique of Pure Reason."

The thing had sat too long on the shelf.

"When one of the greatest works of Western philosophy, if not the greatest, wasn't selling at Cody's, there's something wrong," said Ross, who announced last month that the store, a legendary locus for Berkeley's free-speech spirit, would close July 10 after a half-century.

"I haven't figured out all the implications. If I do, I'll probably get more depressed than I already am."

Ross and many other independent booksellers in the Bay Area share a common lament over a grim or nonexistent future for some of the most cherished havens for book lovers and strongest venues for visiting authors.

Many cite Amazon.com and the proliferation of big chain bookstores. But there are other factors, they say, that have piled straw on the backs of businesses that face thin profit margins and stiff competition from discounters. They range from the dot-com blowup to bad city planning, to a societal turn toward laptop literacy.

"It's no one thing," said Neal Sofman, who announced last week that he and the other owners of A Clean Well-Lighted Place for Books would pull the plug on their acclaimed store at Opera Plaza in San Francisco as soon as it liquidates its inventory.

"It's too easy to be simplistic. We're talking about a cultural shift."

In Menlo Park, 50-year-old Kepler's Books shut down last year, then was saved by a group of investors who could not bear the loss of a cultural and literary hub with a long history of progressive thought. Several other bleeding indies are shrinking, closing stores or looking to sell.

"One thing that a lot of people overlook is the competition from places like Wal-Mart, Costco and Safeway," said Carl Hammarskjold, a manager at Black Oak Books, which this month closed its store in San Francisco's North Beach neighborhood.

"I was in the Safeway in Sonoma, and they had Noam Chomsky for sale. When you start seeing that, you know some of the edge the independent bookstore had is fast fading."

The impact extends around the region, say booksellers.

For decades, both Cody's and A Clean Well-Lighted Place for Books drew a wealth of talent, famous and newly discovered, along with celebrity authors. Fewer major independents could mean publishers send authors to the Bay Area less often, or for less time.

"They are major event venues, and major destinations for visiting authors," said Michael Barnard, owner of Rakestraw Books in Danville, which has hosted the likes of Calvin Trillin, Sebastian Junger and Salman Rushdie.

"Their presence ... helped keep visiting authors in the Bay Area for several days and contributed to the viability of local book selling, local book culture."

Independent booksellers tout their personalized service, support for local authors and a willingness to stock their shelves to the tastes of the communities they serve.

The losses could have further implications on literary discovery, booksellers say. Indies have helped launch the writing careers of mystery suspense writer Scott Turow, John Grisham and Charles Frazier, author of "Cold Mountain," to name just a few.

Local stores often become community hubs, places to meet, talk and linger. Some, such as Book Passage in Corte Madera, have helped propel writing careers through conferences and salons.

Linda Watanabe McFerrin, an Oakland fiction and travel writer, credits conferences there with helping her meet talented writers and push her career. She credits Barnes & Noble and Borders with bringing books to places without them, but she also said the independents offer something else.

"A bookseller like Cody's or Book Passage doesn't just participate in the scene. They help create it," she said. "They are actually generating the literary culture. They're not just serving it, and that's very, very different."

Elaine Petrocelli, owner of Book Passage, said the loss of Cody's and A Clean Well-Lighted Place for Books "breaks my heart."

"It's an ominous situation, because it says to me the public has not been shopping at those stores in the way (the stores) need to continue to be viable," she said. "When Kepler's closed, the people on the Peninsula said, 'We can't let this happen.' But they had let it happen."

Book Passage faces a planned 28,000-square-foot Barnes & Noble within a block. Those plans have prompted a community outcry in Corte Madera. The store has turned to a member-friend program, similar to those run by museums and other nonprofit groups, for financial support.

Geography was partly to blame for the demise of Cody's on Telegraph and A Clean Well-Lighted Place for Books, the owners said.

In Berkeley, Ross counted a deteriorating Telegraph Avenue among the key reasons why Cody's suffered there, losing $1 million in the past five years. Ross also suspects that college students, his bread-and-butter market, are reading fewer scholarly books. Two other Cody's stores, on Fourth Street in Berkeley and a new one in San Francisco, remain in business, and he hopes to shift author readings and other events there.

Sofman hearkened to a dot-com boom that drove out a chunk of San Francisco's art community, then the bust that sapped the city's commercial occupancy; an increase in city parking ticket fees that scared off customers around the Civic Center; and a nettlesome homeless problem there.

He also cited "the 18- to 35-year-olds who live and dwell on the Web."

Hut Landon, executive director of the Northern California Independent Booksellers Association, painted a less grim picture of the climate for indies, saying those two stores had unique problems.

Nearly a decade ago, the rise in online book sales and chains took out many struggling local stores, but the indies have adapted and their numbers have remained fairly steady over the past few years, he said. The American Booksellers Association counts about 1,700 members, down from about 3,500 in 1990, he said. His group has stayed at 235 to 250 members for a few years.

The indies that succeed now tend to be smaller, neighborhood shops with smaller staffs and lower overhead, he said.

"I don't want to say we're not losing anything, but I do not see this as the beginning of the end," said Landon. "The phrase we use is 'Flat is the new high.' If you can maintain, then you're fine."

But Hammarskjold of Black Oak Books sees more trouble coming.

"Like Google's plan to digitize the world's copyright-free books," he said. "It may be in the not-too-distant future that there is no such thing as an out-of-print book. If nothing's out of print and nothing's hard to find, all books will be $6."

That may bode well for Internet-savvy readers, he said, but could spell doom for the local bookstore.

[MineralMan]

What you said makes a lot of sense. I do not see how an indie bookstore that is new books only can survive today. Obviously they can only stock a limited number of titles, so the oddball book you're looking for probably isn't in stock. But, it's always available for purchase online.

I used to enjoy getting a B&N gift certificate, then going to the store to search for books I didn't know I needed. These days, I rarely find them there, and use their website to search for books.

Used bookstores, on the other hand, seem to thrive in some places, generally near a university. I love used bookstores, and can always find a book I didn't know I needed in any decent one.

A more alarming trend, to me, is the one that has public libraries reducing the number of books available in the stacks. If you visit the main branch in Minneapolis, for example...a brand new library, you'll feel like you're in Barnes & Noble. Don't look for anything published over a few years ago, unless it's a classic. If you know what you want, you can order just about anything, but the pleasure of browsing stacks for the old book you really must read, but had never heard of, are gone.

University libraries seem to be going down the same road. I'm saddened by this.

[RightWingAtheist]

The hippies weren't buying it because Kant isn't commie stuff.

[SmithL]

You're my new best friend.
; )

[radiohead]

University libraries seem to be going down the same road.

Oh, I don't think so. I'm finishing up my PhD and frequently cruise the stacks. There are tons of books that "I didn't know I needed" (love that!) that look like they haven't been taken out in years, but the library still keeps them.

I'm at a major research univ w/a huge library system (separate engin, health, art, etc. libraries). Perhaps some of what you're seeing is at smaller schools without numerous doctoral programs - those are the folks who really read the weird and or classic stuff. Your basic undergrad doesn't care.

[js1138]

I love bookstores, but I have never understood how they stay in business. What other business maintains an expensive inventory, most of which will never sell?

I suspect the future is digital, and printed books will eventually be one-offs, custom printed to order. This has already been tried, and I think it will eventually work.

Digital paper is already in the realm of possibility. We are within 50 years of a revolution in printing.

[GovernmentShrinker]

I'm a big buyer of obscure out-of-print books, and while I enjoy browsing used bookstores when I have a lot of time on my hands, it's a lot faster to get specific books I want, and to find out what specific books I want, via the Internet. As for a store that is selling new copies of "classics", that's just plain silly. If anybody wants a copy of "Critique of Pure Reason", used.addall.com will connect them with it, starting at $2.50 for a used paperback, and $.00 for a used hardcover or new paperback. Even with shipping cost added, no bricks-and-mortar bookstore can turn a profit selling new books at that price. There's a colossal inventory of that sort of titles floating around, since so many college kids have been required to buy copies for decades. Nobody needs to be printing and selling new copies.

Stores which make a profit selling new books are not in the business of expanding minds, they're in the business of pushing sales of money-making junk, with a bit of worthwhile stuff tucked away in the corners as an afterthought. Used book dealers -- both the "save money by buying used" type, and the purveyors of expensive rare tomes -- are increasingly closing down their stores and staying home to do business from there via the Internet. It's more profitable to dump the overhead, and more enjoyable to work from home for many of them. A friend of mine works for a dealer of the expensive rare tomes type, who closed his shop a couple of years ago. He now works from his home where the inventory is now located, and my friend works mostly from her own home, just going to the business owner's home once or twice a week. Their business is as strong as ever.

[GovernmentShrinker]

It's getting easier to publish via the print-to-order businesses, some of which can even produce hardcover editions. In the long run, that avenue will develop a lot more, and result in publication of a lot of books that would never have gotten published before as they have a very small target audience.

[GovernmentShrinker]

While I do enjoy browsing used book stores, I rarely have time, and am increasingly finding that I CAN discover the books I didn't know existed and simply have to have. When you're reading something online about a topic that interests you, you often run across mentions of books related to the topic, and then you can Google the title of the book and also the author's name, and often find a great deal written about it (sometimes even better than "thumbing through"), and that information often includes references to yet more books or authors that you've never heard of. Then you can hit used.addall.com or www.bookfinder.com and get the book(s) you've discovered within a few days, no matter how long they've been out of print or how obscure/specialized they are. My personal library includes a number of books that I discovered this way, which have been out of print since the mid-1800s, and which I would likely never have discovered by browsing around used bookstores or borrowing libraries.

[GovernmentShrinker]

There are lots of print-to-order businesses, most producing only paperbacks, but a few producing hardcover editions as well. They carry both new self-published material, and long out-of-print material. My great grandfather was a popular novelist in the late 1800s/early 1900s, and at least one of his books is now available as print-to-order, in either paperback or hardcover.

[CobaltBlue]

What on earth made you decide that the people in the article are liberals?

[theFIRMbss]

>It's getting easier to publish via the print-to-order businesses...that avenue will develop a lot more, and result in publication of a lot of books that would never have gotten published before...

But it's not the same. People may not believe it, I mean young people, but there was a time when editors looked for books that were well-written. Not propaganda for this-or-that point of view. Not pay-offs to folks who did favors for the publisher. Good writing. In today's culture "editors" are gone. At least in the sense of folks who worry about creating good books as opposed to business-folk mining a market. It's the blogosphere model of reality-- Everybody does whatever they want and whatever chance combined with sub rosa deals brings to the surface, is "it" for fifteen minutes. It's an entirely different world that makes for entirely different minds. It's a new new world.

[GovernmentShrinker]

Bibliopath

Finally! An actual diagnosis for my condition!

I suppose I ought to be on your ping list.

[GovernmentShrinker]

used.addall.com will connect you with the inventories of a significantly longer list of dealers, and significantly more old out-of-print titles than Amazon. It's like a huge candy store for people with eclectic reading needs :-)

[Physicist]

Consider yourself added.

[RadioAstronomer]

We are within 50 years of a revolution in printing.

I would say closer to 15.

[ahayes]

I've read a lot of public domain works online, but if I really like a book I buy a hard copy. Somehow curling up with a cup of tea and a laptop just isn't the same as curling up with a cup of tea and a good book.

[js1138]

I think you are right, but books are holding on better than film. I do believe that custom book printing and binding machines will be in supermarkets within ten years. Unless digital paper replaces pulp publishing sooner.

[RedStateRocker]

Honor Harrington rules, maybe the most interesting military speculative fiction of the last quarter century.

[Calvin Locke]

Internet? I checked. It's available at http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/4280

[rattrap]

Same thing happened to me.

Me: "Read it, read it, boobs" (reads further down the post)
Brain: "Hey buddy, did you miss something back there?"
*click*