Shopping for Books and Reminiscing About the Old Way
Looking for books used to be fun, but there’s hardly any reason
to go to the bookstore anymore. Of course I read digital copies too. They can
be bought quickly and downloaded to a phone in seconds. But I like to hold the
book, see the ink on the page and scribble notes in the margins. Our eyes get
too much screen time as it is. I’m making an effort to buy more physical books
again.
A New Era
I went looking for a copy of A Moveable Feast the other day. Hoping for a discount paperback, I shuffled into Barnes and Noble. It’s been a long time since I’ve purchased anything there. Used to be they had a section for $5 dollar books in a bin. Most were just hardcover copies of whichever Danielle Steele novel was popular years before, a lot James Patterson too. I could always find classics for cheap and in hardcover. Not that I need a hardcover, but it’s nice if you can find it. The bins are gone though. Instead we get racks of calendars, pens, penlights, bookmarks, phone chargers and other reading adjacent knickknacks. Often it's tchotchkes with no relation to the printed word (see above pic). I’m sure the margins are better on booklights than cheap paperbacks.
I didn’t see any of those lap cushions with the flat wooden
top for couch reading but I’m sure they were around.
B&N has a music side too. I realize this isn’t new. I’ve poked my head in a few times in the last few years, but I didn’t imagine they got rid of so much of what made it great. Instead of a messy, bustling place full of families it’s become a minimalist version of itself. Neat shelves with sharp white font letters on dark green backgrounds advertise the genres while large posters of the classics (Ulysses, Homer, The Grapes of Wrath) populate the walls. You can still hear the café blender whirring on occasion. They’ve taken out half the tables so the sound of wooden chairs being slid into place isn’t as frequent either.
A Former Life
The grit is starting to set in the way it does with old stores.
The floor tile has gone from white to off-white and the carpets are threadbare
in well-tread spots.
They haven’t overhauled
the way Radio Shack did years ago. Radio Shack saw that consumer electronics
were going the way of waterbeds and cassette tapes, there was less interest
every day. They tried to stop the bleeding by reimagining their mall stores. They
managed a funny Super Bowl ad in 2014 about their 80’s image. In the end it
wasn’t enough. Borders, my favorite, went bankrupt in 2010 as well.
There wasn’t anything special about Borders but I like the location here in
Tulsa. I spent time doing homework a few nights per week in the café.
There was always a group of D&D (Dungeons and Dragons) gamers
occupying a corner of the same café. I wanted to complain about the noise but
how could I? It’s not let any of us were paying customers. I never bought
anything but tea either. Borders never sold much as far as I could tell. I’m
starting to see the problem.
Although closer geographically, it always felt like a ‘us too’
version of Barnes & Noble. They decided on Seattle’s Best coffee instead of
the superior Starbucks. No one picks Seattle’s Best over Starbucks unless
you can’t get Starbucks.
Once digital readers hit the market in 2007, Borders said enough. I’m not sure it was this reason alone but it was clear
by this point they couldn’t compete with yet another slap in the face from
Amazon. First they offered books for a fraction of the price, then they
digitized the experience. Although Books A Million (BAM!) never had one either
and they’re still around. Amazon’s Kindle captured the market and only B&N
created their own line of e-readers. I have one lying around somewhere. It wasn’t
the fancy color one that loaded the page correctly every time either. The black
letters were hard to see on the hazy yellow backdrop. The buttons weren’t responsive
either. I’d finish a page and hit the button to turn, nothing would happen. I
tried again, nothing. Then I mashed it hard and it jumped 20 pages ahead. This
happened frequently and I eventually gave up on it, tossing it in the drawer
next to my Borders café punch card.
An Unexpected Turn
It's no secret what happened to the book sellers across the
country. It’s the same thing that happened to Radio Shack, Circuit City and Toys R Us. Amazon took them out to the pasture like an old mare with a broken leg
and put a bullet in them. Online shopping is what we wanted and it’s what we
got. Besides, even B&N has an online option. It’s probably where all their
$5 books are if they still even exist. It feels like Barnes & Noble is on in
the twilight of its operation. I don’t pretend to know what their financials
are, but I can’t imagine they’re selling enough in the stores to stay viable. Maybe
they’re killing it online, enough to save the stores. If so, it doesn’t make
sense to keep the stores afloat. You’d think a handful of warehouses would work
better.
If you grew up in the 90’s you assumed the mega book stores
would grind the small sellers into the ground and ruin their business. Nothing typifies
this better than "You’ve Got Mail" with Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan. That movie pulled
a clever trick on us. It pretended to side with the ‘mom & pop’ seller (Ryan)
while actually softening the corporate view (Hanks). But the business dynamics
turned out to be something different. Big stores did put small ones out, but also
the internet and ecommerce happened. It opened the door for big stores to be
dragged out to the pasture in the same way the mom & pops were.
I’m partial to Barnes & Noble. I worked there one Christmas season for extra money. They bought a large space at the local mall and punched out a wall for access inside and out. We seemed to be marking down older titles constantly and filling every empty space with book displays. The busyness eventually waned when January came around, but it never needed a music section or a Pokémon rack.
Conclusion
But times change and companies do what they must. I’m reminded
of a quote from a character in Hemingway’s bull fighting classic The Sun
Also Rises.
“How’d you go bankrupt?”
“Two ways, gradually, then suddenly”
I imagine the “slowly” part of bankruptcy is what you see coming,
fewer customers and similar competitors. The “suddenly” part is what you don’t
see, eCommerce and e-readers. I hope people keep going to book stores but I wouldn’t
blame them if they didn’t. Will we miss them when they’re gone?
I did eventually find that copy of A Moveable Feast in
paperback. At nearly $20 bucks I thought better of it and walked away. I’m sure
Amazon has a copy for less.
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