THE DECLINE AND FALL OF THE INDEPENDENT BOOK STORE

Remember when a hallmark of big cities was the large numbers of distinctive, independent book stores? They were often cluttered, musty places run by tweedy eccentrics with an almost surrealistic knowledge of virtually every book ever published. Browsing through such stores used to be one of life's small pleasures, but it's a pleasure that is rapidly vanishing. In recent years, behemoth book chains have taken over the landscape and systematically targeted smaller independent stores and put them out of business. The larger chains are certainly impressive in many ways: they stock a huge number of titles, provide comfortable settings where you can sit and browse through volumes at your leisure, and often discount titles. The smaller shops simply couldn't compete. However, as writer Hugh McGuire of The Huffington Post points out, a tradeoff for the benefits of the big stores was that we've lost an important part of our heritage. The major chains are cookie-cutter carbon copies of each other and lack the intimacy that the small shops provided - not to mention knowledgeable staff. It's virtually impossible to imagine having a prolonged conversation about the title you are buying with some of the pimple-faced kids who run many of the giant book stores. More importantly, the book business is increasingly in the hands of a relatively few companies that exercise enormous clout with publishers. The stores shake down publishers for fees in order to ensure certain titles received prominent placement, and they issue draconian demands in terms of pricing and return policies. From a book store's standpoint, the business is risk free. Stores can stock up on as many copies of a book as they would like in the knowledge they can be returned to the publisher at any time without penalty. Meanwhile, the publishers bear the burden of the entire risk of publishing a book. With the increasing clout exercised on publishers by big chain stores, it can influence what types of books are published. If major chains say they are less-than-enthusiastic about stocking certain genres or authors, it leaves the publisher in a quandry about where to sell these books if the chain stores turn them down. Even worse, the large chain stores are now devoting more of their real estate to secondary types of products, squeezing out books at the expense of DVDS, electronics and giftware.