Bookplanet: the joys of independent bookstores (where the staff actually read books)

Read Between the Lines – by Tony Long (rom Wired)

Is there a more agreeable way of passing a few idle hours than roaming through the haphazard stacks of a slightly musty, idiosyncratically stocked, independent bookstore?

Apparently there is, because they're dying all over the country. Even in those citadels of intellectual enlightenment, New York and San Francisco, the independents are taking a beating. Manhattan is about to lose venerable Coliseum Books for the second time in five years -- this time, apparently, for good. The City by the Bay, meanwhile, has lost several of its neighborhood stores in just a few short months. Across the bay in Berkeley, Cody's, one of the most famous independents in the country, closed its Telegraph Avenue store in July.

It's the same song elsewhere on both coasts and across the interior, too. The reason is not surprising. Chain bookstores, big-box stores like Wal-Mart that stock best sellers alongside disposable diapers and, of course, various online competitors are all conspiring to kill off the little guy.

The following things are more or less true: Chain bookstores have larger inventories -- albeit safer and more predictable (and therefore more commercially viable) ones -- than many independents. Books aren't necessarily all you'll find there, either. Most of them sell music and DVDs, too, and if you're looking for a 2007 "I Love My Cat" wall calendar, Barnes & Noble is definitely the place to go.

Buying a book from Amazon.com or some other online dealer is (sometimes) cheaper than buying it from an independent bookseller. (I say sometimes, because when you factor in shipping and handling, your actual savings is often negligible.)

I can think of no reason why anyone within 10 miles of an actual bookstore would buy a book at Costco or Wal-Mart. Ever.

The point is, the corporations and the internet have changed the commercial landscape in this country, and for the worse. Independent booksellers are but one victim of this disturbing trend. Entertainment technology threatens the single-screen movie house and the local music store with extinction. Likewise, your local video rental store is also an endangered species. The corporatization of coffee annihilates small cafes, leaving us with the uniform blandness of Starbucks. The big losers are small merchants of almost every type, and those of us who see mom-and-pop businesses as the backbone of a healthy, vibrant community.

OK, maybe it's more convenient and a little bit cheaper to do your book shopping at Amazon. But at what cost to your quality of life? We're at our best, and probably our happiest, when social intercourse takes place outside, in town and city alike. You know your local merchant, you see your neighbors on the street. Is saving five bucks off the latest best seller by buying it online really worth another boarded-up storefront on your local commercial thoroughfare?

One of the singular pleasures of wandering into an eclectic independent is the joy of discovering the unexpected. (It's called "browsing." That's real browsing, by the way, not the word as it's been hijacked to put a smiley face on the soulless practice of online shopping.) You go into the shop intending to find the latest novel by your favorite author and you emerge, perhaps an hour later, with two or three other titles under your arm, by authors you hadn't even heard of before breakfast.

And you probably found those authors because the people who staff independent bookstores know their stuff. That, along with more interesting and challenging inventories, is what separates the independent from the chain. It underpins the argument for small over large, for active over passive, for brick and mortar over online.

The only justification I can think of for buying a book online is if you can't get it from your local bookseller and in my experience, that's rare. Otherwise, don't do it. You're feeding the corporate beast at the expense of the little guy. And you know what? You're probably a little guy, too, even if you think you're a big guy.

Most of us in this world are little guys. And consumer technology is making us smaller all the time.

(Tony Long is the copy chief at Wired News.)