Posted on 06/22/2006 7:40:40 AM PDT by 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.
Given the venue, it's not much of a leap. Like asking how you know a shopkeeper in Palermo is Italian. He might not be, but probably is.
That said, I've spent time in Berkley and have had discussions with business owners. They were nominally liberal to a person, but when it came to their own money and business they magically turned into free-market private property enthusiasts.
I think Dagney is way hotter than Pamela.
You can't grep a dead tree!
Mark
Hippies who read commie hate speach and islamofacist literature and smoke hand rolled cigarettes all day, have NO MONEY.
If they want to start making money, maybe they should set up an Ann Coulter display.
Mark
Don't discount audio books. Books that are mostly narrative and not overly technical lend themselves to this format. I always have one available when running, driving, or just tinkering around the house.
How ironic, a victim of capitalism.
TLB loaned me his ability to see the truth for the week. < /sarcasm>
It might work, but I doubt it considering that most of us would be WORKING, not sitting around in a shop adding 'culture'
I buy most of my books off amazon and my first wish list is something like 15 pages long.
I'd like to see that in technical textbooks. Some of my daughter's textx are obscenely costly, although I think much of the cost is professors lining their pockets
Stuff that needs to be updated frequently is a prime candidate for print-to-order
Not surprising. I've found that a liberal can be accurately defined as somebody who is generous with other people's money
ping
David Drake is one of my favorites in the military/SF category
It's boutique versus supermarket and there is room for both models as long as the boutique really does offer something unique. Smart businesspeople running independent bookstores know this and behave accordingly.
Now, cultural arm of this little problem is fairly evident here:
Kepler's Books...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.
As long as the "boutiqueness" of the bookstore revolves around politics it has to depend on only that portion of the population that is sympathetic to those politics and not the population at large. It may be wonderful for close-minded progressives to expect only books that agree with their politics to be displayed but they're going to have to pay for the privilege. A political monoculture is and ought to be an expensive luxury. And unfortunately this portion of the population has a decidedly anti-business sentiment and an expectation that such things as these bookstores ought to be provided to them just because by a society that ought to be grateful for their enlightened presence. That makes for lovely coffee-house rhetoric but it doesn't pay the light bill.
I see that also. I have a lot of fond memories of pulling all sorts of weird stuff of the shelves of the library growing up. Stuff from AI theory, to how to make stink bombs, to old forgotten history books, etc. Now, when I live in a much larger metro area, most of the libraries are half empty. Yet the cities keep building more, but just take books from the old.
Was it a good book?
I don't think so, either, unless the technology changes and you can print out a book for a reasonable cost, or some similar and yet-unimagined change in format. But, then, there was a time I never expected to get to read the Wash Times online.
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