A Day Late, but Man, It's Hot

Yes, I'm a couple of days late, but I've spent the last couple of days grousing about the heat. I am NOT a warm-weather person. By virtue of the fact I've lived in a suburb where it routinely climbs into the high 90s and low 100s for most of the summmer, I have become immune to temps below 90 degrees. Above that I become a creature of discontent. Even, sigh, a malcontent. So, yeah, it's been hot. How hot, you say? It was 100 degrees in Berkeley today. IN BERKELEY!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! That's how hot it was.

Anyway, we are returning to our regularly scheduled program because I do have air-conditioning and, therefore, I am slightly less of a malcontent at this moment. Even though it is--checking the weather app on my phone--94 degrees at 6:45 pm.

What do we have today? Well, it was announced that some big mucky muck who runs Waterstone in the U.K. has bought Barnes and Noble. He has big plans to revamp it and bring it back to being, gasp, a bookstore. His formula of catering to the local markets has worked wonders with Waterstone, and he plans to implement the same strategy with Barnes and Noble in the U.S.

I’m so happy for this news. Unfortunately, you need a behemoth to fight a behemoth. It has been no secret that B&N has been hanging on by its fingernails for years. It probably got a bit of a bump when Borders went under (my chain of choice), but it hasn’t been able to sustain a working model that challenges Amazon. And at this point, it’s the ONLY entity that can challenge Amazon and their monopoly over publishing.

Sadly, the reality is that if this is not a go, and B&N does go under, authors might as well hang up their cletes. What will be available for sale will be limited to what sells big: Oprah picks, self-help books, and the odd mystery. Serial killer books seem to be selling well, so those will be published. You will have NO depth in the market because publishers need to sell books to survive. If the market shrinks by the demise of B&N, then the bookselling market will look a lot like what you can find in airports. The big sellers. Not the quirky, wonderful books that are increasingly hard to find.

Of course, always go to your independent bookstore and buy a few books. But I ask that you also purchase the odd book from B&N. In my opinion, they are the only game in town that can challenge Amazon and their ownership of the entire market. Amazon are already publishers. They own the self-publishing market. And they do it well. Full disclosure: I self-published a book through them and it was a seamless and professional process. They know what they are doing. That is part of the problem. Traditionally, publishing has been somewhat hidebound and resistant to change, and Amazon took advantage of this clutching of pearls and a smugness devotion to an outdated model, waltzed right in, and took over.

Amazon is now opening brick and mortar stores (where you don’t need employees because you can self check out books like a head of lettuce). If B&N goes under, you will see all the major publishers take a huge financial hit and few will survive. Irony doesn’t quite cover my championing of an entity that ten years ago I deplored because of their deep discounts and how that affected the indie bookseller. All of that was true at the time, but we need to pick our battles.

So I’m cheering this sale because the demise of B&N means Amazon will own the entire book selling market. The indies just don’t have the shelf space to challenge Amazon. We need a biggish store that has a decent selection so that you can browse the shelves. The indies thrive on hand-selling books, and that is wonderful and fills a niche, but it can’t compete with Amazon in terms of volume or “reach.” And given Amazon's past record of changing their algorithms so that it limits access to LGBT authors and anything that is remotely erotic, and especially if it involves participants of the same sex protagonists (remember when you couldn’t search for “gay” anything, which meant that your search would not bring up Annie Proulx’s Brokeback Mountain?), we should be horrified at the thought of B&N going under. This is why B&N has to stay in business. Because Amazon doesn’t sell books. It sells widgets that happen to look like books, smell like books, and sort of act like books. But if their widget masters tell them, oh, we can’t promote that because it will alienate the evangelicals who buy a lot of widgets, you better believe these books will be hidden and eventually will not be sold.

Widgets will rule.