independent bookselling

[Sojourner]

At 11:26 PM 8/12/97 -0700, ray gonne wrote:

>chains serve wall
>street. barnes and noble and amazon do not make a profit, or they
>haven't in the past. when the independents are dead and everyone shops
>at the chains because there are no other options, there will be fewer
>books published and no more petty 10 or 20 percent discounts (they
>aren't offered for any reason other than to kill small independents who
>survive on 3 percent net profits, no shit, and who cannot possibly stay
>alive if they offer 10 percent discounts). i've heard many a
>presentation this season by publisher representatives (salespeople) who
>talk about how the company is publishing less titles this year (down by
>up to 1/3 of the total books published last year). ostensibly the reason
>is that they want to be able to direct more advertisement resources
>toward the titles they do publish, but the pattern seems all too
>clear--chains buy shitloads of bestsellers and stock just enough of the
>moderate sellers to pass as a decent place to find a couple good books,
>then they return shitloads of whatever doesn't sell, which drives up the
>prices, which the chains discount because short-term profit is not
>important to a company with endless (or nearly endless) capital, and the
>stakes are raised with no corresponding rise in quality of available
>output, and no one can afford to sell books but the chains. and there
>are less interesting books to sell and it's no longer worth the struggle
>for many independents, who end up surviving themselves on a few pieces
>of trash like <conversations with god> and <path to love> and <tenth
>insight> and countless other antidotes to (post-)modernity, while
>fucking mindblowing books like <mason & dixon> and <going native> and
><infinite jest> sell moderately if at all. so choose well, while the
>choices exist.
>ray
>

And so, we come full circle back to the Internet, where by definition every
"netizen" has to be literate, and where even a bum like me has two free
websites to host my ramblings.  I may not be able to publish a "book", but
by god I can get my writings out, and if a publisher seeking to 1) see my
material and 2) test its popularity analyzes this, they can make a "safer"
choice on what to bind up in hard print on dead trees.