A Band of Determined Eccentrics - Indie Booksellers

 01/31/2012 - Huffington Post -  William Petrocelli

In early January Frommer Guides arranged for a New Orleans literary group to lead a band of booksellers on a "Literary Pub Crawl" of the Big Easy. The guide's spiel got more and more colorful after each watering hole. When asked about local eccentrics, he responded thus:

There are different ways of looking at eccentrics. In New York, they ignore them. In Los Angeles, they arrest them. But in New Orleans, we encourage them.

In a way, that was a metaphor for the independent booksellers who were gathered that week in New Orleans for the annual Winter Institute of the American Booksellers Association. If "eccentricity" can be defined as having a vision that departs from the conventional wisdom, then independent booksellers have it in abundance. An unexpected optimism was in full bloom among the booksellers at that meeting.
But how could that be? Independent booksellers have been written off for years by experts who sit in their offices and watch Main Street America from a distance. And there are plenty of statistics that seemingly support the doomsayers. In the 1990s the growth of chain bookstores led to a doubling of the amount of bookselling space in America without any growth in the number of readers. That -- along with a rash of unfair pricing tactics -- left many independent booksellers fallen by the wayside. A few years later, the growth of online bookselling had an even greater impact. Once again, there was an increase in cut-throat competition -- again with no real increase in the number of book-reading customers. But this time the casualties included the giant book chain Borders, which came crashing to the ground in 2011. And all of that occurred before the full advent of e-books.
So, why the optimism? What accounts for an upsurge in confidence among independent booksellers?

Read William Petrocelli's full essay here.

Footnote:
William Petrocelli is an author, a bookseller, and a former attorney.
For the past thirty years or so he has been the co-owner with his wife Elaine of Book Passage, a retail bookstore in San Francisco and Corte Madera, California.

He is the author of Low Profile: How to Avoid the Privacy Invaders (McGraw Hill) and co-author of Sexual Harassment on the Job: What it is and How to Stop it (Nolo Press). He is also the author of the forthcoming novel Women For Peace.