BookFinder.com Journal

WSJ on community bookstore rescues

The Wall Street Journal ran an interesting story on the phenomenon of communities “rescuing” local independent bookstores in trouble, via membership programs, loans, or selling shares to the public. Per the Journal, the rescues make for a dramatic story, but some are more effective than others.

Posted by Anirvan

Bookish in Berkeley

San Francisco may be the center of Northern California book culture, but we seem to make do in Berkeley, here on the other side of the bay:

• The University of California Press recently held one of their excellent sidewalk sales, offering damaged and overstock paperback titles for just $5 each. Charlie and I ended up walking the two two blocks back to the office lugging almost two dozen UC Press books between the two of us; he goes for history, I go for sociology. (Wendy held out—she’s been trying to avoid temptation as she valiantly struggles to hold down the size of her bookshelves.)

• Last night, I saw Turkish novelist Orhan Pamuk read from a collection of essays, newly translated into English. I first discovered Pamuk after seeing local Berkeley booksellers handselling his works; I’d been meaning to ask friends if they wanted to go to the reading, but forgot to ask. I was pleasantly surprised to see old and new friends at the event, part of the community of avid local readers—perhaps one of the pleasures of living in a somewhat smaller city.

• Our neighborhood keeps getting more bookish. The Other Change of Hobbit, an excellent science fiction and fantasy bookstore that lists on AbeBooks, is located right across the street from our office; they just celebrated their 30th anniversary. Eastwind Books of Berkeley, an Asian-American bookstore that lists on Biblio.com, opened up in our neighborhood back in 1996. The central branch of the Berkeley Public Library reopened in 2002, just three blocks away from us, and we had a nicely-designed Half Price Books open up across the street last year. I just heard that the Berkeley Repertory Theatre, also a block away, launched its own Berkeley Rep book club.

I’m disappointed about the closure of Cody’s Books on Telegraph Avenue, but Berkeley’s still book country.

[Now Reading: Bearing Right: How Conservatives Won the Abortion War by William Saletan]

Posted by Anirvan

Behind the scenes at Diesel

The San Francisco Chronicle recently ran a business story about Diesel, an small independent bookstore in Oakland, California that Charlie, Wendy, and I all frequent.

It’s interesting seeing a neighborhood bookstore story go bit beyond the feelgood cliches, and focus on things like inventory selection, staffing issues, expenses, etc. Booksellers aren’t in business to lose money, and it’s nice to see some examples of local success in the post-chain-store era.

[Now reading: The Printed Bengali Character and its Evolution by Fiona G.E. Ross]

Posted by Anirvan

Kepler's in Inc.

At BookFinder.com, we spend half our time talking to book people, the other half with techies. It’s always interesting seeing the meeting of the two cultures explored.

Kepler’s Books & Magazines in Menlo Park, California, had one of the highest-profile bookstore closings in 2005. Or it would have, if it hadn’t been for a group of Silicon Valley investors who stepped in to save their favorite local bookstore.

Bo Burlingham, the author of Small Giants: Companies That Choose To Be Great Instead of Big, has been writing an interesting series in Inc. magazine about what happened to Kepler’s, and the subsequent turnaround. The story’s nowhere near as feelgood as one might expect.

The first part, “Rewriting the Ending,” ran in the April 2006 issue of Inc. It describes Kepler’s slow descent, and the community campaign to save it.

Part 2’s on page 124 of the March 2007 issue of Inc., now on newsstands. (It should show up for free online in about a month or so.) In this latest episode, we learn that the mere addition of dot.com investors doesn’t work magic: the store still needs to deal with marketing, product mix, and low margins, and change doesn’t seem to come easily.

Update: The latest part of Burlingham’s series, “The Plot Thickens,” is now online and freely readable.

[Now reading Pretend We’re Dead: Capitalist Monsters in American Pop Culture by Annalee Newitz]

Posted by Anirvan

The state of Bay Area indies

The Los Angeles Times recently ran an article on the state of independent booksellers in the San Francisco Bay Area, “Bookshops’ latest sad plot twist”. The dispiriting story hits on all the high-profile low points: the closure of Cody’s Berkeley, A Clean Well-Lighted Place for Books, and Wessex Books, and the financial pressures on Black Oak Books (another local fave of mine). Reading “Save The Bookstore, Save The Community” at Booksquare left me further depressed.

I was at the AbeBooks Seller Summit on Monday, where I met Alan Beatts, founder of Borderlands Books, one of the trio of local San Francisco Bay Area science fiction bookstores. (Myself, I pledge allegiance to The Other Change of Hobbit, right across the street from BookFinder.com’s office.) Alan’s on the board of the Northern California Independent Booksellers Association; as we talked about the local bookselling scene, he kept mentioning details that surprised me. For example, reading the LA Times article on high profile local closures, I wouldn’t have expected that the NCIBA would be seeing new bookstores opening faster than those closing, for a net increase in independent Bay Area bookstores over the past year. I wouldn’t call Alan an optimist (check out the dire predictions he made in an interview last year), but it’s interesting seeing a more measured take in the midst of all the doom and gloom.

I don’t follow the independent brick and mortar bookstore market very closely (except as a customer). Anecdotes aside, what’s really going on out there?

Posted by Anirvan

Indies, remainders in the news

Three articles of interest:

• “The used car lot of the book world” (Chicago Sun-Times), on the US remainder market
• “We’re not in it for the money” (Christian Science Monitor), on new independent booksellers in the US
• “Price wars come at a cost” (Guardian), on how discounting affects independent new booksellers in the UK

Posted by Anirvan

Powell's, the beauty and the behemoth

My wife and I spent our 4th of July weekend in Portland, Oregon. She's a landscape architect, designing parks, school playgrounds, and other public projects; she wanted to check out Portland's public art and green spaces. I'm a book junkie; all I wanted to see was Powell's.

I've been dreaming about visiting Powell's Books for years, ever since I started hearing stories about the massive downtown "Powell's City of Books" location, an entire city block in size, and the largest independent bookstore in America.

My friends weren't kidding. Powell's is amazing not just for its size, but for its quality: great categorization, a complete intermixing of new and used books on the shelves, and smart subject-specific booksellers who offered thoughtful recommendations in answer to all my queries.

Having been raised on mall bookstores, I remember how stunned I was to find a huge muckraking section when I first visited City Lights Books as a teenager. My wife had the same reaction when she discovered shelves full of new and used architecture and public planning books at Powell's—more than she'd ever seen outside of a library. After a day of exploration, we ended up hauling home a quadruple-packed grocery bag full of books.

But not everyone's quite so excited. Powell's, the gloriously pure indie that could, needs a constant supply of books to sell, and Portland's just not big enough anymore. They first hit Seattle in a big way in 2004, and I just read a recent story in the San Francisco Chronicle reporting on how Powell's has been systematically buying up the inventories of failing independent Bay Area bookstores, sometimes at substantial discounts. The booksellers quoted don't always seem resentful, but it's a delicate balance, one that director Emily Powell acknowledges: "We certainly make it harder for others...We're part of why this is an increasingly challenging business." There can be too much of a good thing.

I'm still mourning the loss of Cody's Books in Berkeley. As the San Francisco Bay Area continues to debate the causes for its closing, I'm reminded of how I, like many of my fellow Cody's fans, would also make an active effort to support smaller local subject-specific bookstores living in its shadow. Size can be a factor, at any scale.

We've spent a lot of time at BookFinder.com debating the ethics of buying, selling, and collecting books, trying to make sense of a fast-changing world. New or used, reading or collecting, content or presentation, owning or borrowing, online or offline, indie or corporate, open or proprietary, individual or professional, mediated or direct? We usually come to the conclusion that there's no one right answer for everyone, and that our interactions with print culture are too big to generalize about. We live with the gray areas, frustrating as they are; I'm still eagerly looking forward to visiting Powell's again the next time I'm in Portland.

[Now Reading: The Elegant Universe by Brian Greene]

Posted by Anirvan

Cody's in Berkeley closing

I’m shocked. A good friend who works at Cody’s Books just called to give me the bad news that the flagship store on Berkeley’s Telegraph Avenue will be closing. Cody’s is one of the best-known independent bookstores in America, and an amazing home away from home for those of us lucky enough to call it our local bookstore.

Cody’s Books has been an important part of my life for the past twelve years. I’ve bought at least two hundred books, attended at least fifty author readings, purchased dozens of magazine titles I couldn’t find elsewhere, and had my mind expanded in more ways than I can count inside that store.

I remember:

• elbowing my way through a packed crowd to hear Kurt Vonnegut speak

• sneaking furtive glances inside the pages of 2600

• the excitement of finding the perfect travel novel to give my grandmother the day before a trip to India (An African in Greenland by Tt-Michel Kpomassie; she liked it)

• buying myself a copy of the NYRB reissue of A Handbook on Hanging while walking home after a complicated date

• getting my new Salman Rushdie novels signed

• the rush of meeting favorite comic book artists (Jason Lutes, Adrian Tomine) at sometimes-confusing (but always interesting) comic “readings”

• walking up to the information desk time and time again to ask questions, get help with half-remembered authors and titles, pick up special orders, or sometimes just to say hello

• buying much of the big stack of O’Reilly books in the BookFinder.com office from the surprisingly large (and very well-organized) computer section

• the relief of knowing that there was a clean bathroom on Telegraph Avenue I could use in a jam

• over the years, subscribing to nine different magazines that I first discovered at Cody’s

• buying my first two Saramago novels from a special display, the week after he won the Nobel prize

• the fun of gawking at the books on art, product design, and typography — which I never bought, but it was nice knowing that they were there

• the often-succumbed-to temptation of Cody’s front tables, which feature handpicked paperback fiction and non-fiction; there’s always something there worth buying

• reading Cody’s Books: The Life and Times of a Berkeley Bookstore, 1956-1977 by Pat and Fred Cody, and wondering what books doused in tear gas smelled like

• stopping into the store with visiting friends and relatives, and seeing the quick stopover always turn into an hourlong session of browing and buying

• buying Programming Perl back in 1994, when I wanted to start programming for the web

• falling sick while in line at a Chitra Divakaruni reading, and getting to know her as a friend years later (she didn’t remember all the hubbub at the end of the signing line)

• the discovery of disability studies as a field of human knowledge (I later joined a disability studies reading group)

• laughing along with Dave Eggers, as he hawked his new novel

• buying Nolo Press’ How to Buy a House in California when my girlfriend and I were thinking of getting engaged and buying a home

• buying and reading Edward Tufte’s excellent books on visual design (I later learned he’s a BookFinder.com user)

• being thrilled to finally meet Paulina Borsook, years after I started reading her stuff

• finding (and buying) a spiral-bound book of translated Tagore poems self-published by a friend; Cody’s was one of the few local bookstores willing to stock a few copies

• meeting up with friends at 7:30pm readings, and getting together for dinner afterwards

• running into friends and acquaintances at those readings, some of whom I mostly saw at bookstores

• discovering the world of zines and small press magazines (I remember picking up issues of Bunnyhop, In/Formation, Factsheet 5, Adbusters, Bitch, the Baffler, etc.)

• carefully perusing the list of upcoming readings every month, online or in the monthly mailings

• posing with Charlie in the science fiction aisle, for a profile of BookFinder.com published in a local newspaper

• buying my favorite map of Berkeley from the front counter (the map’s well laid out and laminated; I often carry it in my bag)

• seeing two close friends join the store’s staff, joining the ranks of the always-smart, always-helpful crew of Cody’s bestsellers

• dreading walking by the financially deadly combination of Cody’s on one side of the street and Amoeba Music on the other

• dreading the even deadlier combination of Cody’s at one end of the block, and Moe’s Books (4 stories of used books) at the other

Posted by Anirvan

Lots of readings

This is BookFinder.com. Ergo, we read.

I've been hitting lots of local author readings in the past month or so.

I saw Monica Ali read from her new novel Brick Lane in San Francisco a few weeks back. It's an excellent first book, with some very strong characters.

I also saw Jhumpa Lahiri in Berkeley, reading from her first novel, The Namesake; I liked the book, but I'm finding it difficult to distance myself from the text, given how strongly I identify with the characters and plot points.

Neal Stephenson was in town recently, reading from Quicksilver in Berkeley. The event was terribly crowded -- fans had apparently started showing up three hours in advance -- so I ended up not being able to see him read. I'm slowly working my way through the 900+ pages of geeky historical fiction.

Also on the almost-but-not-quite front, I was meaning to catch a Jonathan Lethem reading in Berkeley last weekend, but ended up not making it. He's promoting a new book called The Fortress of Solitude. I loved his novel Motherless Brooklyn. He also edited The Vintage Book of Amnesia, which I gave Wendy for her birthday.

Weblogger and science fiction writer Cory Doctorow is reading in Berkeley tonight. I enjoyed his first novel, Down and out in the Magic Kingdom, which deals with some of the interesting ideas of the day -- flash mobs, reputatation economies, etc.

Posted by Anirvan

More Harry Potter in Berkeley

Our community paper, the Berkeley Daily Planet, covers the local launch of Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix.

[Now Reading: Fierce Pajamas: An Anthology of Humor Writing from the New Yorker by David Remnick and Henry Finder (eds.)]

Posted by Anirvan