Amazon Mistake Demonstrates Necessity of Independent Bookstores

#amazonfail

While I was celebrating Easter on Sunday and working on my Internet connectivity on Monday, a storm was brewing about Amazon’s inexplicable deranking of several books, many in the gay and lesbian genre.  This made the books harder to find and buy.  For example, the NYT reported today that the effected books included “James Baldwin’s “Giovanni’s Room,” the gay romance novel “Transgressions” and “Unfriendly Fire,” a recently published book about the government’s policies on gays in the military.”  After an avalanche of protest via Twitter and calls for a boycott of Amazon, it responded yesterday by saying that “an embarrassing and ham-fisted cataloging error” caused over 57,000 books to lose their sales ranking, many of the books on health and reproductive medicine.

Independent Bookstores Give Voice and Variety

How and why this mistake occurred is still unknown.  “Ham-fisted” doesn’t explain what happened, it just describes it as bumbling which is news to no one.  One implication is clear to  me, this fiasco demonstrates the importance of independent bookstores.  When a giant megaphone dominates the marketplace, some voices can be excluded and effectively silenced. Almost always those voices are outside the mainstream.  Independent bookstores are the holders of small megaphones looking for the different opinions that society needs to hear. 

Powell’s response to #amazonfail:  in the spirit of our freedom to buy any book, Powell’s is offering a 20% discount on all internet orders over $20, just enter code #powellswin by 11:59 (PST) on April 16, 2009

We don’t need independent bookstores to tell us about James Patterson’s new book (although they need us to buy them for those easy sales), what is a necessity for a healthy society is a place for unknown authors, quirky books and controversial topics to thrive.  Otherwise, our world becomes very vanilla and knowledge of the world we live in diminishes.

This time it was the gay and lesbian genre.  Honestly, not a genre I’m particularly interested in and I’m not their target audience.  I did read a memoir years ago (I’m so sorry I can’t remember the title, it was huge and written by the “gay Nobel Laureate”) for a book group.  From the descriptions of the author’s youth, I could tell that the mother was trying very hard to provide a lovely childhood, yet the author described being miserable because he was gay in a straight society.  I asked a couple of homosexual friends if they had the same experience.  One answer struck me, a friend said it wasn’t so much the issue that he was gay, but the fact that he didn’t want to be a doctor.   I have carried the lesson of the mother working so hard to create life for her son out of love, but that she ultimately failed because it was a childhood full expectations that didn’t fit her son.  For me, it was a parenting example about unconscious expectations that ultimately has nothing to do with homosexuality, but one that I wouldn’t have learned if the door to this genre was closed.

 Which minority opinion this happened to isn’t as important as the fact that something happened at Amazon that made these books harder to find and buy.  There are still bookstores like Giovanni’s Room in Philadelphia that cater to this audience, but two of the greats, A Different Light and Oscar Wilde Bookstore, are gone.  If you don’t want to be effected the shenanigans at Amazon, support your local bookstore and know that outside-the-box books in mainstream and minority genres will be nurtured.