Photo by L. Carper |
Donald Lamm Interview: Conversations with History; Institute of International Studies, UC Berkeley
Photo by L. Carper |
Page 8 of 10
Now what about the fate of small, independent bookstores which traditionally would have been compatible with the mission of a firm like Norton in the sense that word of mouth, the care and nurturing of customers by salespeople in independent bookstores, has been a real asset in selling the kinds of books that you publish. Are you fearful that the internet, where a person who reads The New York Times can order immediately from Barnes & Noble on the internet, and also the emergence of these mega-stores, are a threat to the independent bookstore?
My answer would be that some of my best friends have owned independent bookstores that have gone out of business. You can't have a superstore set up next to or near a smallish independent store, or even a larger independent store, without an impact. Because books, after all, are not like frozen yogurt. Maybe you can't have too many frozen yogurt stands or pizza parlors in Berkeley, but you sure can have too many bookstores. Now the smartest of the independents -- it probably isn't even fair to say "smartest", perhaps the luckiest of the independents -- were already deeply rooted in their communities and therefore had a community following that enabled them, so far at least, to survive. The disappearance of what, sometimes scornfully, has been called the mom and pop shops is saddening to me personally because those shop were often great expressions of personal taste. But in pure, bold, and unkind economic terms, it hasn't hurt us very much. They really never had very big inventories. A typical mom and pop shop might carry two or three thousand titles. A typical superstore carries a hundred to a hundred and fifty thousand titles. Where are we better off?
But isn't it the case that sometimes an excellent book will catch on in these kinds of stores? One reads that Cold Mountain, for example, developed a following by word of mouth through the independent bookstores. Is that a true statement?
Yes. It is easier to find real readers in these independents. Think about here in the Bay Area: A Clean Well Lighted Place, Cody's, Black Oak; there are a number of very fine independent stores and yes, books can get their first burst of sales in those stores. But sooner or later, to be a bestseller, those books have to travel in the superstores. And there is a velocity of sale that takes place in the superstores that cannot be equaled in the independents.
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