Bookstores have become places of regret and shame. We once enjoyed shopping in them or simply looking in their windows, back in the days when they were ordinary retail establishments. They were like stores that sold shoes or hats, but with more appealing merchandise. Now they’ve taken on moral significance. Buying a book and choosing the place to do so involve delicate and complicated considerations. You may fail to do the right thing.
I want to buy a book—perhaps it’s a specific book, identified in a review or mentioned by a friend, or perhaps simple intellectual restlessness has put me in the mood to browse a bookstore shelf and find something new. As I descend to the streets of the city where I live, I recall that many fine unread books remain on my overstocked shelves at home. I’m aware of them every hour of the day, even when I look up from the book I’m currently reading. They remind me of promises made to read them when they were bought; some of these promises are now decades old. My shelves also hold certain already-read volumes that deserve a careful, more mature rereading. I should turn back.
I don’t turn back. The day is too fair and the streets are thronged. A vigorous walk will further heighten my appetite for quiet reading, I think.
I’m unsure of my destination. Only a few of the city’s bookstores remain in business and they each need my patronage desperately. They sell mostly identical items, for mostly the same price. A familiar calculation has to be made. The calculation is primarily ethical: where would my purchase do the most good? With literary culture under threat from several directions, every opportunity to come to its relief should be seized.
In recent times, our affluent society has enshrined as principle the notion that ethically considered purchases of goods and services will produce wide-ranging social benefits. We have a responsibility to think about where our money will go, and what it will do when it gets there, before we reach for our wallets, an obligation that I usually perform—yea to the locally grown produce, nay to garments from Third World sweatshops—and sometimes privately resent. Sometimes I prefer to make my purchases with no more than the product in mind. This is especially true when it comes to my favorite product, a book.
I feel I’ve already made a significant ethical choice by stepping away from my computer. I could have bought a new book online, which is, we all agree, the least socially valuable way to buy one. Online bookstores dwell within a moral abyss, cold, unseeing, and uncaring. Their stock lies in remote warehouses where mechanical factory implements fulfill our purchases, the workers harried to keep up with the machines. The online stores’ low overheads allow deep discounts, threatening the existence of small, local bookstores that maintain a physical presence and strengthen the urban fabric.
I have to admit ignobility, then, for the pleasure I take in browsing the online stores’ electronic catalogues, nearly as capacious as any Borgesian library. I appreciate the felicitous recommendations based on my purchasing history. I like being greeted, “Hello, Ken.” I like the perfect illusion of personality without the need to reciprocate, without the intrusive intimacy of a real-life bookstore clerk who knows my name and private tastes. When the box arrives several days later, when I’ve already forgotten that I’ve placed the order, it comes with the unexpectedness and neat, deliberate packaging of a gift. Through some expert digital manipulation, the online book-buying experience improves on the gratifications we once obtained from our traditional bookseller.
In an entirely different moral realm lies the electronic book, with which I once pursued a brief, clandestine affair, knowing that it threatened my marriage to the traditional book and what is left of the traditional bookstore. I go back to her from time to time, furtively, our lovemaking entirely mechanical. E-books subvert every romantic idea I ever had about the physical qualities of the book, like its heft, the texture of its cover, and its nearly subliminal odor. E-books depart from millennia of literary history, to which, as a reader, I dearly wish to be connected. But the truth is that reading a book on an electronic device can be a rewarding literary activity, if the book is good. Best of all, e-books take up no room in my house next to my lamentably unread physical books.
With these competing, not-encouraging thoughts in mind, I reach the downtown area, where an outpost of the nation’s single major remaining retail chain is located, situated in an ethical space above the online bookstore, but only just above it. The chain’s well-stocked outlets are each attractive in the same way, in accordance with the company’s corporate design: impersonal, without sincere literary feeling. Although they offer an immense variety of titles—a variety that the serious reader will never exhaust in a lifetime of reading—we suspect that certain stranger, more adventurous, less commercial books don’t reach their shelves. Most of the charm of the chain’s shops resides in their comfortable, wireless-equipped cafés. Sometimes I buy an espresso. Sometimes I just use the men’s room, fleeing from the store in a cloud of self-reproach. The chain has been in grave economic distress for some time.
It would be unfortunate—a catastrophe for literature, in fact—if the chain went out of business. In many parts of the nation it offers the only significant bookstore from one county to the next. It maintains a deep inventory that keeps the publishing industry afloat. Its stores are the only places where you can find a rich selection of consumer magazines and literary journals. In its children’s departments, books are purchased that may lead to a lifetime of reading.
But, really, I shouldn’t fret about the chain bookstores, which have joined with the online retailer to drive nearly all of the city’s independent bookstores out of business. Book-lovers consider the independent bookstore the true altar at which to express our devotion to literature. We believe the independent store offers more idiosyncratic selections, employs more knowledgeable and more personable staff, and maintains a more intimate relationship with the local community. Some independent shops are said to keep their doors open without profit, only because their proprietors love literature. This makes me sorry for the books I’ve purchased from every other bookseller.
My remorse enfeebles me. I recognize that I’m no longer thinking about the essence of the reading experience or the book I want to buy, which in the depths of my moral rumination has been turned into simply another form of consumption, and not even that, but rather the aspiration to consume. It takes me about a week and a half to read the typical book. I don’t know how many ten-day spans I have left. Eventually the unread books on my shelves will have to be abandoned, or they will join me on the pyre. The book I’m about to purchase may be among them. We all buy books we won’t live to read. These surplus, unexperienced books represent a sizable part of the literary profit margin, such as it is. Writers, publishers, and bookstores depend on them.
I turn a corner onto a shady street of small shops, where the independent bookstore is located, halfway down the block. Anxious, distracted, with the titles of the books I left at home still in mind, I try to remember why I read. It isn’t for the bookstore, nor for the consumption of the book. I think it has something to do with the presence of the permanent book in my perishable head. Outside the store I gaze at the window display, where a dozen titles offer a dozen alternate reading futures. I remain in place, waiting for the impulse that will propel me inside, painfully aware that the survival of literature depends on it.
