by Adam Stern
In 2021, the pandemic-riddled Age of Online Shopping, with an Amazon delivery truck creeping down every street, lane and avenue in America, why do we need independent bookstores?
If price and speed are all that matter, Amazon is the most efficient way to get books. Though the websites of independent stores — such as the Seminary Co-op and 57th Street Books in Chicago’s Hyde Park neighborhood — are good, they cannot compete with a cutting-edge website and app funded by a billion-dollar corporation. Amazon maximizes this advantage by using books as a loss leader — losing money on their sales so that customers will be drawn into buying higher-margin items. That’s why many books on Amazon are cheaper than the same books at a bricks-and-mortar bookstore.
That is not new information, but let me repeat: Amazon is putting local bookstores out of business by taking losses on its book sales so that it can make more money selling other stuff.
Yes, you can get a product as quickly as possible for the lowest price, but there are hidden costs to this type of consumerism — unsafe working conditions for the men and women sorting, packing and shipping those innumerable boxes, among others.
The twin pillars of independent bookstores are browsing and community.
You do not get a browsing experience on Amazon; you get algorithmic recommendations based on your viewing history. That algorithmic experience has as much to do with browsing in a bookstore as a photo of a cheeseburger has to do with eating one just off the grill, the smells of char and beef and crispy onions wafting toward you, cheddar cheese oozing over the edge of a toasted brioche bun with a hint of tangy mustard.
Remember, before the pandemic, what it was like to browse a bookstore? There’s no hurry, no rush. It’s a pleasurable wandering, allowing room for the unexpected and intuitive. Book browsing is also communing with a space — unlike on Amazon, where you scroll. Your whole body and mind are engaged in browsing: You drift around the stacks, drawn on by the rhythmic spines; looking, circling, bending and reaching; picking up books, this one larger or smaller in the hand, that one unexpectedly heavy; noticing the colorful designs; creamy or stiff paper; the smell of ink; you encounter other human beings in that space, doing the same thing, a browsing collective of curious minds. You never know what you may find, what mind from the past or present you may meet, or what person you may encounter just on the other side of the bookcase; and isn’t finding the unlooked-for one of life’s pleasures?
Book shopping online builds no memories, no sense of the families, students, friends and quiet readers who create a bookstore’s unique texture.
A friend, a Chicago Public Schools reading specialist and bookstore colleague, used to browse with a promising young student at 57th Street Books, helping her develop a lifelong love of reading. This student is now her teaching assistant and takes her own kids to the store to wander in its unrivaled children’s room.
If you talk to people in Hyde Park, it seems everyone has a similar story. Community matters in this place.
Bookstores — places that nurture learning and discussion, champion diverse voices and ideas, celebrate language, treasure knowledge and connect the past with our chaotic present to show us how we might go forward — are more needed than ever. We must do everything we can to support them now, before it is too late, because they are hubs of building what Martin Luther King Jr. called the Beloved Community, centered on justice, equality and love.
Adam Stern is a bookseller at The Seminary Co-op in Chicago.
