Supporting Indie Bookstores

[padaviya]

I've worked at the little witchy shop for nearly a year now, and I do much of the ordering, so I thought I'd share some of my background knowledge about how independent bookstores work, and why you should support them by ordering books through them instead of online

Comments

[pfloide]

In my experience, supporting your local independent bookshop is something that only makes sense in cities of more than a couple of million people.

I would usually prefer to support local bookshops, back when I had the option (not so much now, if I want books in English), but I would often use Amazon anyway, because three weeks doesn't match their delivery time for books that are common enough to be stocked by Amazon but happen not to be in the shop (which is a big middle ground). In London, ON, they would usually deliver two days after I placed the order, or if it was placed in the morning, the next day. Even the big-box stores couldn't match that.

Plus, of course, in London, there is only one independent new-book seller I know of, which was small enough they almost never had the book I wanted. Sometimes I would support them by going in and browsing and picking up something that looked interesting, but I seldom even bothered to look if I wanted something specific.

[padaviya]

Needing to be in a city of a few million is stretching it, but fair enough that you do need to be in a place large enough that you actually have bookshops that stock the regular stuff.

[pfloide]

Well, I had a friend in SoCal who operated an independent new-and-used bookstore. His view was that the only way to compete with the online stores was to specialize in a few subjects (in his case, foreign language books, Libertarian stuff, and books about Asia) as well as having a more normal-sized collection of other stuff. That way people who are interested in the specialty will find stuff they didn't know they wanted, will want to go in to be able to talk to the staff, etc. etc. You need to be somewhere pretty large for that to work. Your witchy shop would be a good example. In Canada, I've only seen decent independent shops in Montreal and Toronto. There are probably some in Vancouver, too - I just haven't spent much time there. London, at half a million, seems to be too small.

[pfloide]

Though London, Kitchener, Ottawa, and Calgary all have some decent USED bookstores...