A couple of months ago, The New Yorker had a cover I couldn’t stop staring at: a bookstore owner is unlocking his door to start the workday, but he’s glancing over at the woman who lives in the apartment building next door who at that very moment is receiving a UPS package with a recognizable Amazon logo on the side. The woman looks embarrassed — she’s been caught.
I have to tread carefully here. As a book writer, I don’t want to alienate anyone who’s willing to sell my books. And I kind of love Amazon: I visit their site several times a day, although not necessarily to buy books. It’s a great reference source for a writer: I type potential titles into Amazon’s search engine and can find out instantly if someone’s already used the title and, if so, when and how successfully. I can also use keywords to find out if a similar book already exists. I’ve learned that if you can’t find it on Amazon’s impressive database, you don’t have to worry.
I buy kids’ toys on Amazon and a lot of birthday gifts for my husband (mostly tools and electronic equipment). They gave us a trial Prime membership (that’s when you don’t have to pay shipping costs on certain items) and we ended up extending that into a paying Prime membership. Not paying extra for shipping each time means I can buy almost anything for cheaper than I can get it around here–and without having to get in my car and drive (I hate driving).
So Amazon is many amazing things. But what it isn’t is a little local, independent bookstore. And I love bookstores like that. If I — if WE — buy all our books from Amazon, because it’s easy, it’s fast, it’s cheap, it’s the American way, then we run the very real risk of losing our independent bookstores forever.
Amazon isn’t a place you can visit. You can’t run in there to grab a desperation birthday present for your eight-year-old’s friend on the way to his party. You can’t escape from your visiting in-laws by ducking in there for an hour or so. You can’t make friends with the owner or her employees and get to know which ones share your taste in books. You can’t go to booksignings where you get to meet authors face to face and finally get to ask them why they made that awful choice of killing off your favorite character. You can’t dance your fingers over a row of bookspines and suddenly decide to tug one toward you. You can’t pull your kid on your lap and discover a book together there and later monitor his maturing reading ability by which section of the store he’s drawn to. And these aren’t things we should give up.
We need our local bookstores and the only way we’re going to keep them around is by buying books from them. It may require a little more effort than clicking a mouse button and it may even cost a little more than it would online. But the loss of letting them fade out is too huge to ignore. Let’s not let that happen. Buying books is what we like to do — let’s make sure we do it from the people who’ll benefit the most from our patronage. Go out and buy a book at a local independent bookstore today.
Buy one for me, too. I’ll put it on the pile
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