Well, there goes my go to war cry. On a more serious note, I wonder how difficult it would be to start a book collective, kind of like IGA, but with books instead of groceries. I tend to think those organizations sound really reasonable and I'm kind of surprised they're not more common (or maybe they are and I just don't notice them).It’s all well and good to say “Support indie stores!” but there are huge swaths of America where there aren’t any.
To what end? Here's the basic problem: the reason to support the sale of books is to support authors. You want to incentivize the creation of information, opinion, fantasy, all the ideas that don't exist unless you can convince a creative individual to spend his time making that instead of everything else. There are a few ways you can get that content in front of someone who wants to consume it. - You can kill trees, put them in boxes, and ship them everywhere. If they don't sell, it's dead trees that get recycled. If they get resold, the authors get nothing out of that. - You can send them to libraries. An author gets paid for one book per library. - You can sell files. Now they're either gonna get copied all around or locked into a proprietary DRM. On-demand publishing is something individual authors can do. Amazon is the biggest player there. An eBook collective could be done... but the Kindle ecosystem is dominant. Audiobooks? Audible has become kleenex and it's an Amazon company. So from an individual standpoint if you want to reach customers, you're going to Amazon. From a large company standpoint, you're going to Amazon. You can want Vimeo to win but that doesn't change the fact that you haven't even browsed there in months. Youtube? You've probably seen a dozen videos today.
To create and protect jobs from writers to printers to retailers, I guess. But then again, my opinion on the issue is probably pretty slanted. I really like books.To what end?
In the 10 or so counties that I routinely drive through there are ZERO bookstores. No indies, no bog box, NONE. Each county has at least one WalMart, and there are magazine racks and paperbacks in the grocery stores, but zero book stores. Amazon did not kill the bookstore, nor did B&N. An apathetic non-reading public killed the bookstore. They can only exist in major cities where people like us, who read, live.
https://www.publishersweekly.com/images/data/ARTICLE_PHOTO/photo/000/040/40670-1.JPG People haven't stopped reading. If anything, unit sales are up. We're not tracking a change in behavior, we're tracking a change in merchandising.
Kentucky has a fucked up County structure rooted in the far depths of time where everyone traveled on horseback. The state has more counties that all but Texas and Virginia. Some of the counties that I drive through daily are smaller than LA suburbs; I'm talking 200 square miles. Remember, Los Angeles County, CA has twice as many people as the whole state of Kentucky.
I give you a unicorn There are seven independent new book stores in Kansas. They can only exist in major cities where people like us, who read, live.