More books, more choices: why America needs its indies

I spent years in the independent book business, and now I work at a major publishing house in Manhattan. On my worst days I can give you a better book recommendation than Amazon’s and so can any number of my former colleagues.

In almost all other industries, we value experts and their opinions, and often reward their experience monetarily; excellent lawyers demand and receive a much higher fee than incompetent ones. It is alarming that we don’t place that same value on professionals working in the book business.

There is no other industry in which consumers express outrage at being asked to pay list price.  Can you imagine going into a clothing store and thinking it unreasonable of the merchant to require you to pay the $45.00 price printed on the tag of a shirt?  How about going into a supermarket and refusing to pay the price listed for your box of cereal?  Sure, you can opt to purchase generic Kix, but books are unique: there is no generic edition of "The Time Traveler’s Wife."  Bookstores aren’t selling books at a markup; Amazon is selling them at a markdown.  And yes, whether you call a markdown at one retailer a markup at another, a $15.00 book less 50% is always $7.50.  Amazon makes its money by assuming you’ll still spend that same $15.00—you’re just going to buy two books.  And Manjoo is right in his assertion that that is a boon for an individual reader and for the book-reading culture as a whole, assuming that that same customer doesn’t in fact buy one book and one video game or simply pocket the other $7.50.  But what is the monetary value of a book that you discovered via bookstore display, bookseller suggestion, or recommendation from a friend who discovered it in a store—a book you never would have found without those influences? 

In 2010 a novel called "Tinkers," by Paul Harding, won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction.  The novel was published by Bellevue Literary Press, a tiny press associated with a literary journal called Bellevue Literary Review.  "Tinkers" was literally plucked from obscurity by a few independent booksellers who came across it, loved it, and were determined to get it national recognition. "Tinkers" went on to be named one of the hundred Best Novels of 2009 by Publishers Weekly and Amazon.com and one of the Best Books of 2009 by NPR and by Library Journal.  It was shortlisted for the Mercantile Library First Novel Award and, as previously mentioned, won a Pulitzer. 

In 2010 Amazon decided to stop selling Macmillan titles on its site because it didn’t want to capitulate to the terms of purchase Macmillan was asking for its e-books.  That was a crisis, and I don’t mean for Macmillan or Amazon – I mean for us, as readers.  Ultimately Amazon agreed to continue working with Macmillan, but there was a period of time, the last weekend in January, 2010, where virtually none of the thousands of books Macmillan published were for sale at Amazon (by February 4 some Macmillan titles still hadn’t had their buy buttons turned back on).  Now imagine if Amazon had been the only game in town. 

Farhad Manjoo took a look at some of the fringe benefits of shopping at independent bookstores – “unlimited magazine browsing, in-store coffee shops, the warm couches that you can curl into on a cold day”– and dismissed those perks as superfluous. And he’s right. They are. But he ignored primary and substantive benefits of independent bookstores and, in doing so, rendered his assessment irrelevant.

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