On Christmas Eve I was thinking not of sugarplum fairies and trimmings and trees but of a dipsomaniacal Pittsburgh Pirate pitcher who threw a no-hitter while on an acid trip (if you’re wondering, he walked eight batters in the process) and once attempted to hit every batter in the Cincinnati Reds lineup (he made it through the first three guys before Tony Perez ducked his way out to a base on balls and he tossed one at the head of Johnny Bench and the umpire ejected him). Dock Ellis, he who wore his hair in curlers so the perspiration dripping down would make his spitball easier to, um, actualize, had died the weekend before, and I wanted to get my hands on the memoir he wrote with a future poet laureate, Donald Hall. Maybe I’d write something quickly about this crazy collaboration. Heck, I’d buy two or three copies and give them as late stocking stuffers to a couple of buddies who could appreciate the goofiness of the pairing.
I was on 14th Street buying shrimp and bubbly anyway, so I headed for the big Barnes and Noble at Union Square. They didn’t stock it — it was print on demand. I knew it was a waste of time to stop by the nearest indie bookstore, the redoubtable St. Mark’s Books. Did the nice used bookstore on Fourth Avenue that stocked all those great poetry titles have it? No luck. How about the Strand? Too crowded to even attempt to find it, though I imagine it was there, somewhere. I gave up and when I got home I did the hunter’s equivalent of shooting a moose from a helicopter — I went on ABEbooks and snagged three first editions. They weren’t expensive.
Did I do something unethical? I suspect a lot of people who read David Streitfeld’s essay in the New York Times Week in Review section yesterday (“Bargain Hunting for Books, and Feeling Sheepish About It”) would say so. I should have bought it from B&N, or stuck out the search, and not succumbed to the wiles of a faceless transaction with a warehouse somewhere in the virtual world. If I’d done the former, the publishing house, and Donald Hall, and the Union Square mega-bookstore would have deservedly got their share of the profits. When I clicked the buy button instead, the local bookstore didn’t make a sale, the house that published the book didn’t get its cut, the author got nothing. That’s very bad news for publishers who depend on backlist sales, which means, well, almost all publishers. At least if I’d at least kept looking, I would have supported a local bookstore, which is about as archaic a thing as a Pirates pitcher with the arm to toss a no-hitter. In effect, I had bypassed everything that made all these social goods possible by greedily falling for the crack cocaine of book buying — the online peddler of used books.
All fall, the book industry’s fiery plunge has turned every Tom, Jane, and Harry into an armchair expert on publishing’s flaws — big discount chains, highly leveraged corporate takeovers, obscenely inflated advances, and built-in defects of inefficiency and redundancy — that fed the flames, and when it comes to crappy publishing news, we seemingly can’t get enough. But the fact that his article sat (as of this morning) at the top of the most-e-mailed articles from this weekend’s Week in Review section testifies not only to the voraciousness of the public appetite for finger-pointing at the industry. It’s also a tribute to the interesting angle he explores. Streitfeld argues that on-line used book buying will continue to undermine not just the price structure of books but also the feasibility of “traditional” bookselling — and that includes online behemoths like Amazon. (One bookstore owner he talked to accused him of taking the author’s work while depriving her of an income, and warned him that he would regret the effects of his “selfish actions” when all brick-and-mortar stores disappeared.)
The self-flagellation is all well and good … but the question reappears: What kind of industry can’t adapt to the changing habits of its customers? (Quick answer: a doomed industry.) It’s hard to argue that publishers and booksellers in tandem should be the final arbiters setting the ultimate price — the value — of the product they sell. And if you tell me that I have an ethical obligation to buy retail, shouldn’t you same the same thing to anyone buying a used car rather than priming the auto industry? Is it an act of shortsighted selfishness to advertise my used trombone on Craig’s List rather than supporting the blighted newspaper industry by phoning the classified desk at my local paper? Or, for that matter, by reading Streitfeld’s piece for nothing online rather than walking to a neighborhood kiosk and paying for the inky print version of the same?
The smallish town I grew up in had a rinky-dink bookstore, and no matter how helpful the proprietor was (and she was exceedingly helpful), she couldn’t have done much better than the local library at stocking the books I would later find so compelling. Blessings could be counted in the fact that there was plenty of Faulkner and Welty around and readily available (this was Mississippi, after all), but that was the exception to the rule. The rosy Main Street USA view of an idyllic past when local bookstores put quality books in impressionable hands while effecting an enlightened republic of imaginatively engaged readers is a happy and sustaining one for anyone. But I would have killed to have had access to the bookstands open at all hours on the Web when I was younger.
I’m not arguing that it’s not a matter of critical importance that consumers of any product be aware of how the thing gets made, who benefits along the way, and how our spending affects our world. The old quip about those who love sausage shouldn’t watch it get made is probably aesthetically correct, but ethically, it’s pretty suspect. Still, I’m not willing to take the blame on the book-buying score, and especially not by an appeal based on feelings of guilt. I don’t blame a big bookstore for failing me when it couldn’t stock a crazy relic about an extravagant hurler from four decades ago and his unlikely collaboration with a great poet, and I can’t blame a publishing house for keeping it constantly available. Why should they blame me when I turn to an online source?
