Here are two surprising holiday shopping season success stories. They're even more surprising because they seem to directly contradict each other.
First, Amazon, which has historically kept its sales figures for Kindle e-readers tightly under wraps, announced that it's sold more than a million Kindle devices each week for the past three weeks. Priced between $79 for the new entry-level Kindle and $199 for the Kindle Fire tablet, that's hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue every week for the Kindle division, not counting books, videos and apps.
Second, brick-and-mortar bookstores, many of whom expected to take a steep hit from the boom in e-readers, are instead reporting substantial year-over-year gains this holiday season -- big chains like Barnes & Noble and indie booksellers alike. (Major factors here include the demise of Borders as well as the success of tentpole titles like Walter Isaacson's Steve Jobs.)
Yet if you only paid attention to debate on the internet, you would think that Amazon and local bookstores were locked in a zero-sum fight to the death. Battle lines have been drawn, with writers at The New York Times leading one side and Slate the other. It's knives out from here to Christmas.
I want to show how this entire argument pitting local book stores against online-bookselling juggernaut Amazon is based on profoundly flawed premises. It misses the significance of Amazon's transformation of retail -- not just books -- as well as the transformation of literary culture that's been wrought by the web. And not just Amazon.
These arguments, reducible as they are to the back of a 3-by-5 card, are almost always actually symptoms of something much more complicated that's harder to wrap our heads around. It's like being given an advanced calculus problem and not knowing where to begin -- so you treat every letter "x" as if it were a multiplication symbol instead of a variable, because that's a problem you know how to solve.
Instead of really grappling with these transformations, we're fighting an over-simplified version of the last war: local versus global, real versus fake, the future versus the past, and the savvy versus the sentimental. We're falling into these traps because we don't know what else to do.
Slate Pitches
There's a fun wordplay game on Twitter, particularly popular among journalists, called #SlatePitches. The premise is that you come up with the wildest, most counterintuitive headline for a fictional article, one so willfully contrarian that it could only run in Slate. Occasional contributor Malcolm Gladwell cut his signature "we all think this, but it turns out that..." teeth there. And its writers and editors have consistently been willing to swing for those fences ever since.
So it wasn't especially surprising to see Slate technology writer Farhad Manjoo write a blistering essay titled "Don’t Support Your Local Bookseller," arguing that independent bookstores are "the least efficient, least user-friendly, and most mistakenly mythologized local establishments you can find," and that we should thank Amazon's Jeff Bezos "for crushing that precious indie on the corner." Local bookstores' loss is actually offset by a gain in economic efficiency, and translates to a net advantage for writers, readers and other local businesses. Forget arguing that widely reviled quasi-Christian sludge-rock band Creed is actually criminally underrated -- Manjoo's ode to Amazon was the true #SlatePitch come to life.
Now, Manjoo's attack on local bookstores was actually a response to an correspondingly windy, yet weary op-ed in The New York Times from novelist Richard Russo. Russo and other authors, including Stephen King, Dennis Lehane, Anita Shreve, and Ann Patchett, as well as Authors Guild president Scott Turow, took exception to a promotion Amazon ran on Dec. 10. Customers using Amazon's Price Check smartphone app -- which allows comparison shopping between retail stores and Amazon.com by scanning a bar code, snapping a picture, or entering text -- would get an extra 5 percent off their purchases if they completed the sale through Amazon.com.
"My writer pals and I took personally Amazon’s assault on the kinds of stores that hand-sold our books before anybody knew who we were, back before Amazon or the internet itself existed," writes Russo. "As Anita [Shreve] put it, losing independent bookstores would be 'akin to editing ... a critical part of our culture out of American life.'"
The argument that seems to have particularly upset Manjoo came from Ann Patchett: "There is no point in fighting them or explaining to them that we should be able to coexist civilly in the marketplace," Patchett said. “I don’t think they care. I do think it’s worthwhile explaining to customers that the lowest price point does not always represent the best deal. If you like going to a bookstore then it’s up to you to support it. If you like seeing the people in your community employed, if you think your city needs a tax base, if you want to buy books from a person who reads, don’t use Amazon."
While sincere and moving, this is an easy argument to knock down. So that's exactly what Manjoo does.
Tiny indie bookstores don't employ many people or pay much in the way of taxes; why shouldn't I be more worried about Amazon putting a massive store like Best Buy out of business? Likewise, I can get better, lengthier recommendations from my online friends or third-party reviewers at Amazon than I can from most bookstore employees -- and about books that I know are interesting to me, not them. And ultimately, it's not as if the bookstore has artisans in the back hand-sewing signatures to the spines of hardcovers -- no matter where or how you buy the book, you wind up with the same mass-produced object, born in a warehouse, delivered on a truck. It's no more a local product than is a bottle of Coca-Cola.
Nostalgia for the independent bookstore is nostalgia for an elite literary culture that never existed for the vast majority of people. Ultimately, for Manjoo, the most important part of developing a vibrant literary culture is "getting people to buy a whole heckload of books." And that's what Amazon has done exceedingly well.
Amazon's games beyond the game
Now, as entertaining as this argument is, we've actually jumped over something that's crucially important. Russo mentions it explicitly; Manjoo refers to it indirectly. But both of them acknowledge it only to ignore it.
Amazon's Dec. 10 Price Check promotion specifically excludes books.
That's right. You can use the price check app to shop for books, and maybe save some money, but the extra 5 percent off deal Amazon was offering was for electronics, toys, music, sporting goods and DVDs.
This is because Amazon simply doesn't care about independent bookstores. Little bookshops are not even on Jeff Bezos' radar anymore. He and Amazon are after bigger game: Best Buy (who have pulled bar codes off their products to defend against precisely this), Wal-Mart, Target, Toys"R"Us, Costco, and Macy's.
Amazon is a retail and technology company of a scope and potential that's simply unprecedented in our history. Books and digital reading devices -- even as they're selling by the millions of units for hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue every week -- are a Trojan horse.
Conservatives vs Futurists
Why, then, did the debate over Amazon's Price Check promotion find its flashpoint with indie bookstores, rather than big-box retail? It's simply because it's a debate we're used to having. Neither Russo nor Manjoo are actually contrarian at all, except to one another, in the same way that neither Republicans nor Democrats are likely to say anything far outside conventional political orthodoxy.
These positions are so well established, particularly when it comes to books, that I was able to name each of them more than two years ago in a series of posts that ended up as an essay in The Atlantic called A Bookfuturist Manifesto.
Manjoo (at least in this essay) is a classic technofuturist, characterized by an embrace of new technologies and delivery methods, irreverence toward traditional vehicles of culture, and an embrace of a spiritual Darwinism that says that institutions that can't adapt to the future should die and make room for the new. Only an extinction event can kill off the dinosaurs and allow the mammals of the future to thrive.
Russo and his allies, on the other hand, are what I call bookservatives. Bookservatives identify the essence of literary culture with a specific (and largely contingent) technological and social arrangement governing the production, distribution and consumption of literary material.
Now both the bookservative and technofuturist positions have some truth to them. There really are parts of our literary culture that do hinge on institutions like the local bookstore; a transformation in these conditions transforms the culture itself, in ways that hurt some actors and help others.
However, both positions need each other, as a rhetorical enemy. They're both also governed by a kind of historical myopia that locks out other kinds of arguments and analysis that would throw the whole debate into question.
Queequeg's coffin is Ishmael's lifeboat
This is the piece of the argument that The Toronto Standard's Navneet Alang finds missing:
To try to understand the transformation of the global publishing and retail market; to cope with the fact that our digital tools and the emerging culture associated with them don't just transform local commerce, but the very idea of a local community itself; to see the accelerating demise of the local bookshop as an institution as something that has happened not over five or 10 but 50 to a hundred years -- all that requires calculus, and all we have is arithmetic.
Amazon didn't happen to your local independent bookstore; America happened to your local bookstore, from television to Waldenbooks.
However, that doesn't mean that traditional literary culture has to go extinct; it needs to evolve. We can (and do) have co-operative stores owned and operated by their patrons; we can (and do) have specialty stores where specific communities can come together, grouped by literary taste or politics or sexuality or genre; we can (and do) have new models of self-publishing, both print and digital, flourishing outside the boundaries of Amazon or any of the other emerging giants of distribution.
In last week, Comedian Louis C.K. made over $500,000 in sales for an independently produced and distributed download-only comedy special from over 100,000 fans through his website. Meanwhile, not-so-famous graphic designer Frank Chimero raised over $100,000 from just over 2,000 fans for an independently produced and distributed book available in multiple formats, print and digital, The Shape of Design, through Kickstarter.
This is, and should be, a time for experimentation. Nothing is inevitable, so much is newly possible, and so very little is definitively finished.
Remember, it may be true that mammals, not dinosaurs, came to dominate Earth's land masses, at least for this tiny sliver of our planet's history. But even now, dinosaurs didn't vanish from the earth; they're still here. We call them birds.
