One of my old employers just started selling used books, in an apparent attempt to stave off bankruptcy.

Installing an ice machine on the Titanic? Not quite, but pretty close.

Back when I was working there, still laboring under the illusion that critical thinking about someone else's business model on your own time was not only permissable, but encouraged, I wrote up a little two-page proposal for getting into the used book business. The result? A lecture from my ex-boss about the impossibility of making any money selling used books and an exhortation to spend more time on "things that really matter" -- endless boring hours of zipping and unzipping spreadsheet files from an antiquated DOS-based point-of-sale system.

Gross sales fell every year. The decline was variously attributed to the arrival of a Chapters superstore around the corner; the bad movies playing across the street; the closing of a popular neighborhood nightclub, & etc.

Meanwhile, the store did no advertising (having achieved zero response from a terrible Yellow Pages display ad that simply consisted of the store's name and phone number typeset in an attractive font), was still relying on a out-of-date Books In Print CD-ROM for special orders (business ADSL and every web catalog in the universe being "too expensive" at $50/month), and was routinely out of stock of the books customers requested every single day -- Dune, Siddhartha, Jitterbug Perfume, 1984, etc. At one point, I ordered a bunch of Philip K. Dick and Stanislaw Lem trade paperbacks, which I later found shelved in the literature section, the guy in charge of science fiction ordering having decreed that neither author sold. It was then that I started thinking seriously about leaving.

I have no love whatsoever for either of Vancouver's chain bookstores. Heather Reisman's Indigo sits half-empty at the corner of Robson and Howe, its big display windows full of scented candles, pastel-colored pillows, Bill Clinton's autobiography, and remainder copies of bad Canadian first novels. Book Warehouse, while more physically attractive and better-merchandised, orders ultra-conservatively: lots of overpriced Penguin hurts, stacks of Sophie Kinsella and Dan Brown, not much else.

An independent bookstore unwilling or unable to compete with two of the most staid and boring bookstores on the planet is an embarrassment and a shame.

T.C. Boyle's terrifically funny novel, Drop City, which I found and read earlier this year, shed a surprising amount of light on my five-plus years at Vancouver's Favorite Independent Bookstore, and I recommend it to you.

- posted by cjb @ 8:45 AM