Closing the book on a dying business model

The casualties are nationwide. Coliseum Books and Murder Ink in Manhattan shut down in recent weeks. Micawber Books in Princeton, N.J., couldn’t make it. In Los Angeles, Dutton’s two-year-old outpost in Beverly Hills has closed, and the original Dutton’s in Brentwood will be forced to shrink or relocate if the landlord carries through with plans to redevelop the site.

Rising rents and competition from the chains have imperiled independents for years, but San Francisco used to think it was immune. Cody’s and other Bay Area stores helped spark the Beat movement, encouraged the counterculture, fueled the initial protests against the Vietnam War. In a region that sees itself as civilised, bookshops were things to be cherished.

No longer, apparently. The stores that are still in business feel compelled to underline that. “Rare but not extinct,” one proclaimed in a holiday ad. Another, announcing a sale, felt the need to emphasise, “We’re not going out of business.” What’s undermining the stores is a massive shift in buying habits brought about by the Internet. Ordering from Amazon.com, Frank said, has almost become the generic term for book buying.

“The bookstore as we know it is in dire straits,” said Lewis Buzbee, a novelist who spent many years working in the local shops. That sense of peril is doubtless one reason The Yellow-Lighted Bookshop, Buzbee’s loving memoir of his time as a clerk in the Bay Area interspersed with a history of the bookselling trade, has become a small but genuine hit.

A good bookstore, he notes, is unlike any other retail space. Where else can you linger, sample the merchandise and then casually reject it if not quite right? Your local pizzeria would frown on such behavior. In a culture that worships money, bookstores are one of the few commercial institutions where cost doesn’t trump all other considerations. Massive bestsellers share shelf space with the most obscure tomes.

“Not only could your world change, but the rest of the world could change,” he told an audience at the venerable City Lights bookstore in North Beach.

It was a message that Kim Webster, an apartment concierge, heard and found eloquent. Buzbee captured, she said, “the essence, the nirvana feeling, the power of the written word.”

But she didn’t buy his $17 volume that night. Maybe later, she said, maybe from her local chain superstore. And if she missed it there, the Internet is an emporium that never closes. The Internet has transformed American culture from a place where a few sold the same thing to many to one where the middleman or gatekeeper can be circumvented.