Farhad Manjoo thinks corner bookstores are simply comfy and quaint. He couldn't be more wrong.
At the Booksmith, an independent bookstore owned by Christin Evans (r.) and Praveen Madan (l.), her husband, and located in San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury district, customer preferences are sometimes different from those of customers at another San Francisco indie just four miles away.
Tony Avelar/Christian Science Monitor
This week, the novelist Richard Russo wrote an op-ed column for The New York Times disparaging Amazon’s recent pricing promotion. The column went on to talk more broadly about Amazon and independent booksellers. In response, Slate published a piece entitled Don’t Support Your Local Bookstore by Farhad Manjoo. In his article Manjoo tells his readers “if you’re a novelist—not to mention a reader, a book publisher, or anyone else who cares about a vibrant book industry—you should thank him [Jeff Bezos, founder, president, and CEO of Amazon] for crushing that precious indie on the corner.”
At the heart of both authors' pieces is the question of what best promotes a literary or book-reading culture. Not surprisingly, both articles have received passionate responses from readers and inspired thousands of comments online.
Manjoo says that the “bread and butter” of local bookstores is the same “mass-manufactured goods whose intellectual property was produced by one of the major publishing houses in Manhattan. It doesn’t make a difference whether you buy Walter Isaacson’s Steve Jobs at City Lights, Powell’s, Politics & Prose, or Amazon—it’s the same book everywhere.”
It does make a difference, but not for the reasons Russo lauds or Manjoo disparages.
Part of the value of independent bookstores as a whole is that there is a multitude of people controlling what’s bought, what’s promoted, and what’s displayed. Of course Walter Isaacson’s "Steve Jobs" is the same book everywhere. What’s different is what’s sitting on the display table next to "Steve Jobs." It absolutely matters where you buy your copy, not because of the book itself but because of what you’re exposed to while you’re shopping.
Full piece here.
At the heart of both authors' pieces is the question of what best promotes a literary or book-reading culture. Not surprisingly, both articles have received passionate responses from readers and inspired thousands of comments online.
Manjoo says that the “bread and butter” of local bookstores is the same “mass-manufactured goods whose intellectual property was produced by one of the major publishing houses in Manhattan. It doesn’t make a difference whether you buy Walter Isaacson’s Steve Jobs at City Lights, Powell’s, Politics & Prose, or Amazon—it’s the same book everywhere.”
It does make a difference, but not for the reasons Russo lauds or Manjoo disparages.
Part of the value of independent bookstores as a whole is that there is a multitude of people controlling what’s bought, what’s promoted, and what’s displayed. Of course Walter Isaacson’s "Steve Jobs" is the same book everywhere. What’s different is what’s sitting on the display table next to "Steve Jobs." It absolutely matters where you buy your copy, not because of the book itself but because of what you’re exposed to while you’re shopping.
Full piece here.