While I admit to being obnoxious about this just for the sake of being obnoxious, my opinion still holds. In response to Sian, Dan Brown is a bad example. I am SIGNIFICANTLY more likely to buy a book I’ve heard nothing about but looks yummy if it’s not $25.00. Otherwise I’ll get it from the library. And who knows how this will all pan out, it’s still new. Maybe more people will end up buying more books because of this. Will the pennies add up? Probably not.

Bookavore, thank you thank you thank you for your wonderful response. Not only do I appreciate the feedback, but you’re 100% right. I will never argue that this sucks, the problem is that I’m effing bored of hearing about it. Seriously. Amazon is not going to feel bad and slash their prices. It is unfortunately up to us to fix this problem. And I can’t pretend to have the answers. What I am prepared for is the fact that things cannot (and will not, no matter how hard some people try) stay the same. So yeah, instead of “whining”, do something. It’s like all the other changes that happen in our world we can’t control. We could whine all day about Katrina or the recession or global warming – let’s do EVERYTHING in our power to change things, but complaining that it happened does no one any good. Like I mentioned before, negativity really irks me.

My “get over it” attitude is in response to many publishers/booksellers/whatever doing nothing in response!

As for libraries, whilst I complain, the predicament makes me sad. Library funding is one of those things I will never argue about.

@Marianlibrarian From the other side of the fence, part of the problem right now is that publishers publish a lot of books that don’t work. So successful books are priced to compensate for the books that flop. While I don’t recommend eliminating less successful books (since the “general public” doesn’t always have great taste) therefore eliminating variety, it creates a sort of catch-22.

That being said, there is a world of difference between books being cheaper and the price of books being reduced. Obviously I have a certain level of bias. But the fact is, the box stores aren’t making money on these massively reduced bestsellers (and only make pennies on their other heavily reduced books). Which is fine for them, because they’re using them as loss leaders. They’re selling them at a deep discount and (in the case of these ten bestsellers) losing tens of thousands of dollars because they know they’ll make it back on their 200% markup microwaves and 5-pound jars of peanut butter. And I can’t compete with places who sell barely above cost, much less AT cost. They’re also only selling a couple hundred titles at best that they are sure will sell, whereas we’re trying to keep in a diverse and interesting stock, some of which is us giving new authors and new presses a shot.

(As for the library systems, this is just a drop in the bucket, but part of the reason many branch libraries in NYC suck is for lack of funding. There are many reasons for this, fubared NYC politics being probably the primary, but I’d just like to point out that a big source of funding for public works like libraries are various taxes, many of which my small bookstore and employees do pay, thus contributing to the state and city economies in a very small way, and Amazon does not. I think that they may now collect sales tax, but that was only after being forced to by both the legislature and the courts.)

Why should this matter to people who care about books? After all, as you suggest, more people reading is a good thing, and capitalism is capitalism.

Well, I guess it depends on what you read. If you are happy reading new John Grisham novels until the end of time, I guess it doesn’t matter. But if you like new authors and being surprised by books and a healthy publishing industry, it does. Whether we like it or not, it costs more than $10 to make a good book, right now. You’ve gotta pay editors et al. and you’ve gotta pay me (and indie booksellers around the country, and for that matter a number of chain booksellers) a living wage, since I’m the one who actually reads at least a book a day so I can recommend and promote the shit out of the great ones. Even Grisham’s agent has gone on record as saying that when you can buy Grisham for $10, there’s not much of a chance for other authors. And he’s right and that could get boring very quickly.

This has gotten a bit long—I tend to get defensive when I’m accused of whining about my livelihood. Look, if I don’t have a job in five years because publishing as we know it has collapsed (which I think is unlikely, as an aside, but…) then okay. I’ll be sad, because I think I have the greatest job in the world, and I’ll be angry that one of the reasons it’s gone is because more people cared about the price of books than their quality, but then I’ll go get a new job. If I’m whining, or other booksellers are whining, a piece of it is because we genuinely care about books and how good they are and that the people who write them and make them are somewhat rewarded for it, and that will not happen if the current price wars are taken much further for much longer. Period.

I’m sympathetic to your financial predicament (as a 24-yo college grad with useless East Asian Studies degree living in Brooklyn and working in a bookstore, the worst-paid job in the book industry). I hope you can be sympathetic, at least a little, to our professional predicament. And, I would argue, our culture’s larger potential literary predicament.

ps: I invite you to come by WORD so we can talk about this further, if you’d like! I’ll bring donuts. :D