You should be reading Scott Esposito's blog
Conversational Reading. He's been on fire pointing out great authors and stories about the literary world. But right now I'd like to direct you to
Chad Post's defense of the bookstore against a recent
Slate article by Farhad Manjoo that, as Chad writes, “has seemingly pissed off everyone I know.”
Manjoo essentially believes that brick-and-mortar stores are inefficient and, therefore, not worth the effort of saving. I disagree. You're undoubtedly shocked to hear that. It's more than just the unquantifiably important element of culture-building. The benefit of Amazon's discount pricing is also not at all clear. I don't think Amazon saves most consumers any money. Let's use an example to compare.
I'd like to buy Nobel Prize–winner Tomas Transtromer's
The Great Enigma (New Directions)
. The list price, the price I would pay in most bookstores, is $17.95. Amazon offers a discount of 32%, listing the book at $12.21. Now I have to pay shipping. Part and parcel of online shopping. I want the book as soon as I can get it (we're talking efficiency here). The earliest I can receive this book from Amazon is two days, a wait of two days longer than walking into my local bookstore.
Surely, you'll say,
the savings are still worth the wait. (Don't call me Shirley.) For the privilege of waiting those two extra days, I pay $17.98 in shipping, which brings the total to $30.19 at Amazon.
At The Harvard Bookstore, alternately, the book just costs $17.95 if I go pick it up today. Shipping is optional. But let's look at delivery options, to be fair. The Harvard Bookstore will deliver any book that's in stock to my house the very same day for $5.00, or send it by mail (1-2 days) for $3.50. If the book isn't in stock, the store will order it to arrive the next day for free. That brings my total to $22.95 at most, with shipping, at the “inefficient” brick-and-mortar store.
So I get the book more quickly and more cheaply from my local bookstore than from Amazon. Where is all that much-touted efficiency? Real-live community, literary events, in-person recommendations, and
the bookstore saved me $7.24 plus 1-2 days of waiting. Manjoo's argument gets a whammy.
 |
| Sorry Farhad! |
5 comments:
I dislike Amazon as much as you do, but I still have to question your logic - for most people, their local bookstore isn't the Harvard Bookstore, if they even have a store at all. My hometown (with a population of over 100,000) has just one bookstore - a poorly-stocked Barnes & Noble - with the nearest quality independent being more than 20 miles away. And that's a better situation than most Americans outside of major urban areas have - for them, Amazon is the best alternative for access to a wide range of books. You can fault Amazon's business practices all you want (and I certainly do) but the one thing you can't argue with is that you can get pretty much any book you want from them - I'd be surprised if even 5% of bookstores in the entire country is carrying Transtromer's book, even after the Nobel win.
Hey Pete,
I don't intend to give the impression — which, looking back, I clearly have — that I hate Amazon. As with you, I have problems with a number of their business practices, but I think they've made books available to an unparalleled degree and that is a good thing. No question. I think most indy bookstores will now stock Transtromer, but you're probably right that most superstores still will not (5% may be quite low without Borders tho).
Manjoo's argument, however, is not that we need to "save" Amazon or that people should stop bashing Amazon mindlessly. If it were, I'd probably agree to some extent. Rather, he argues that we shouldn't try to save independents because they are inefficient, and that is simply incorrect. Having a reasonably good local independent always saves book-buyers time and often saves money as well.
If you sign up for Amazon Prime, which I think costs about $50 a year, two-day shipping is free. I use Amazon a lot, so it's worth it for me.
Prime is a smart program for people who buy a lot of books through Amazon. Particularly if you buy more than, say, 15 books a year. At that level one gets free shipping and still benefits from the Amazon discount pricing.
Manjoo is just so frustratingly offhand in his declaration of inefficiency, I think because he assumes a web-based retailer must be more efficient. It's not grounded in fact, particularly for the majority of infrequent book-buyers out there. A good local bookstore is worth supporting because they can also be better, economically, for the consumer.
Like all mail order, online book trading is fraught with problems.
Amazon doesn't own most of the material it "sells." The used books sold are owned and marketed by independent sellers. There are thousands and thousands of them. There's no way to organize this mass into a consistent marketing process.
Buying anything used online is a crapshoot. Going into a real bookstore and buying a book allows one to verify the quality of the merchandise in real-time. There's no risk.
What's driven brick and mortar bookstores out of business is mostly the unreasonable rents charged by commercial real estate owners. The tax laws make vacancy a viable option, so the theory is that no one lowers their lease rates, and lets property lay vacant, sometimes for years at a time, because it's actually cheaper--so the thinking goes--to have a vacant property waiting for the economy to bounce back, so tenants can afford the high rates again, than it is to lock in "artificially low" leases.
Amazon initially took the margin away from new book selling, but the old independents had gotten cocky. They needed some impetus.
But used bookselling's a different matter. Amazon created a marketplace where the downward pressure on items fed off of the universal availability.
But all that's soon to become irrelevant. The electronic readers will make new bookselling a thing of the past. The quickly shrinking market for material texts will make old-fashioned bookselling an antique mall phenomenon.
The ground has shifted again.
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