RicDay on Publishing

The media has been buzzing this week with tales of terrible deeds by Amazon. Amazon is killing your local bookstore, pushing publishers to the brink, and maybe making unicorns extinct. Really?

It doesn't take much to get book people cursing and spitting when Amazon's name comes up. The heart of the passion seems to be how independent bookstores are being killed by Amazon. And maybe publishers are being killed, too.

But we made Amazon. Really, we did. A little history tells all.

Back in the 1950s, we mostly shopped in small neighbourhood stores. The butcher, the baker, and the bookseller. There were a few moderately large department stores in the city. Ones I remember include House of Fraser and Harrods in London, R.H. Macy in New York, Stuttaford's in Cape Town, Mitsukoshi in Tokyo, and Lane Crawford in Hong Kong. They were a little pricey, sold quality products, and had pleasant, helpful staff.

The small, neigborhood stores we could often walk to were friendly places. We and the staff knew each other by name and prediliction.

In the 1960s, things changed, especially in America. Inner city racial tensions were boiling over and those who could, were fleeing to the suburbs. Out West, the Vietnam war was creating booming economies which attracted huge numbers of migrants from the East.

The new suburbs were frequently walled or gated (or when I lived on Lido Island in California, an island with one bridge and no resident darker than a sunburned surfer). The roads between the cities and the 'burbs became littered with strip malls. Once the surburbs reached scale, developers erected massive shopping malls, "anchored" by large, chain department stores where staff were few and "personal service" didn't exist.

Mall World

By the 1970s, the butcher and the baker were definitely no longer neighborhood destinations. Nor was the bookseller, All these cautious folk had stayed in the crumbling cities. The new neighborhoods no longer contained shops (which could be fire-bombed or looted in a riot, so developers had segregated shops from homes). One now drove to the mall to shop.

Scale was important for mall shops. Luigi's deli couldn't afford the rents; nor could your neighborhood butcher. Food and grocery chains like Safeway offered huge selections of foods, chemically treated and packaged to stay sort of fresh longer, and their prices were really low. We didn't go back to Luigi's; we clipped flyer coupons and shopped Safeway and its ilk, wheeling carts around dreary rows of shelves, looking for deals.

K-Mart, Target, and others sought to sell us everything we needed, food and clothes and more, a bit like the massive supercenter Carrefour built in the 'burbs south of Paris (Sainte-Geneviève-des-Bois) in the mid-60s. We loved those inexpensive deals at those huge stores, even if service was self.

Riggio Kills Bookstores!

Len Riggio bought control of Barnes & Noble at the start of the 1970s, and had the good sense to place his stores in the suburbs and to advertise on TV. In 1975 Len became the first US bookseller to discount best-sellers (he offered NYT top sellers at 40% off). Unsurprisingly, conservative booksellers screamed that Len would kill the business. He ignored them. So did we. We bought those discounted books in the millions.

More change came in the 1980s. Costco emerged from Kirkland, Washington, with its concept of a warehouse club chain. These "big box" stores were on the scale of aircraft hangers, with less ambience. They were located in low rent areas, with lots of parking. Products and produce was sold in carton quantities from industrial racks on a concrete floor. The only staff were the forklift drivers and the checkout operators.

Costco was a frontal assault on the mall anchor stores and almost every store in between. Good products were available at maybe 10 to 15 percent over wholesale. We loved them, and we still do. Other retailers joined the bandwagon, but in a more specialized way, leading to Home Depot, Staples, and etceteras.

Amazon Arrives

The 1990s brought more change to the book business. Len Riggio began easing away from smaller Barnes & Noble stores, replacing them with much larger stores in shopping malls. Then he bought the 797-store B. Dalton chain and the Barnes & Noble empire was national.

Amazon launched as the first online book retail store in 1995, the same year Microsoft had its only "Apple moment" with people lining up overnight for Windows 95. Windows 95 looked pretty good; Amazon's initial site was seriously ugly, even by the standards of the time.

16 Years Later

Jump forward to today. Costco is among the ten biggest retailers in the world. Amazon is the world's largest online retailer. Barnes & Noble is trying desparately to reinvent itself as an online retailer of ebooks and is the only significant chain bookseller left in North America (Chapters-Indigo in Canada is cutting back book inventory at a blinding pace, calling itself a "cultural destination store" [ugh] and I expect to see store count reduced in 2012).

We have always publicly disparaged the big box, no service retail business. And we have always rushed there to shop, allowing the small, more social, retailers to die off like a flock of dodo birds.

We truly love our discounts. We line up overnight for "great deals" on Black Friday, Boxing Day, and whatever other day retailers can highjack as an excuse for mass shopping hysteria. Hell, we'll even mace people in the line if it gets us a better spot (as happened on Black Friday this year, at a Wal-Mart). Groupon has an insane IPO because millions of us love discounts.

Our passion for discounts has been with us for decades. "List" prices are the prices we want to avoid. They are a plague; a rip-off. We know that if we just wait and watch, we will find a better price.

Amazon is us, in the mirror. Jeff Bezos understands what motivates us, and he gives us what we want: cheap.

Books are Different?

In our dreams, maybe. In the real world, books are mass market commodities, manufactured and promoted and hyped like everything else. Very, very few have any significant literary merit.

Oxford dons used to decline to add a book to their "literature" reading list until 50 years had passed after publication. This had nothing to do with copyright; it was all about allowing the hype to fade away so the book's importance could be judged properly.

Today the media regularly declares books "masterpieces" and "great literature" based on Advance Reading Copies. And most of those will vanish from memory in a decade or less.

Bookish people rant endlessly about the way independent book stores are being forced out of business by Amazon, completely ignoring the fact that our flight to the suburbs started the decline, and everything in retail evolution since has contributed.

Now that some parts of some larger cities are "hip" again, a few small bookstores have become hangouts for the self-proclaimed literary set. When it appears one of those stores may fail, the Amazon flag is raised and the discussion becomes "Amazon is killing culture." If you are one of those people, tell me honestly that you only buy printed books and only shop at that store. Then I will ask if there are enough of you to keep it afloat.

The rest of us, consumers of pulp fiction and Harlequin romances, and whatever takes our fancy to while away a few hours in a good story, we will continue to look for deals. We really don't care much for your literary hangout; at least, not nearly enough to shop there and put up with the holier-than-thou looks when we depart clutching our latest Janet Evanovich number.

Everyone Discounts

Amazon is not the only place we can buy heavily discounted books: Wal-Mart, Costco, and many others discount deeply and sometimes use books as loss leaders, just as Amazon does. No one seems to notice publicly, but those chains sure sell a lot of books. And if you haven't noticed, your local Barnes & Noble and Chapters-Indigo love their discounts.

So let's get real. Amazon is the utterly logical extension of a retail trend which has been part of our lives for at least 50 years.

Books are where Amazon started, but today the ecommerce monster is closer to Target in its depth and breadth of products. I stopped shopping my local chain book store when they reduced the selection of books on offer to pitiful levels. I stopped shopping my chain local electronics store when I could no longer abide the apalling commission sales staff (I think they hired them away from used car lots). I buy my electronics from Apple and Amazon. I buy my books (digital only) from Amazon, O'Reilly, Apple, and occasionally Kobo.

As print fades away, I expect brick and mortar bookstores to do the same. I don't think I will miss them. I do hope that Amazon does not become the sole purveyor of ebooks, but that will depend on all of us and whether a handful of other ecommerce booksellers are able to achieve scale and be competitive.

Just don't blame all this on Amazon. Jeff Bezos and Amazon are our creation.