Crime pays but not quite as much as it used to

Saturday afternoon, after lunch, wandering around the Village before wandering over to the theater to catch the play, we wandered into Partners & Crime Mystery Booksellers and wandered out again, the blonde clutching a bag containing Robert Wilson’s A Small Death in Lisbon.

But while we were inside we got to talking to one of the owners who responded to the blonde’s expressed admiration for her store with pride and gratitude and, as you might expect of any small business owner these days, a touch of anxiety about the economy.  Partners & Crime is holding its own, she said, but she was worried they were starting to feel the pinch.

From ebooks.

The store’s weathered the rise of Amazon and outlasted Borders.  From the sidewalk out front you can look down Greenwich Avenue and see a Barnes and Noble.

But now come kindles, now come nooks.

The owner doesn’t get the attraction.  She’s one of those readers, like me, like the blonde, like she’d hoped all her customers, for whom the love of reading is inseparable from a love of books, the printed on paper kind.  To her there is nothing like a book, and nooks and kindles are nothing like a book.

They’re missing the feel of books.  The blonde and I know what she means and we start trading things we like about books besides the words on the page.  The weight and shape of a book in hand.  The sound it makes as you open and shut it, the sound as it slides from a shelf or when you set it on the nightstand.  The tickle of the page on your fingertip as you turn it.  The smells, of paper, of glue, of ink, of dust.  All the little sensual pleasures that most of us take for granted until we’re asked to defend our attachment to these old-fashioned and cumbersome blocks of wood pulp and which I suspect sound to kindle and nook owners like defenses of manure and flies by horse lovers talking to the first automobile owners, as far as the three of us are concerned, they’re as much a part of reading as the decoding of the ink splotches on the page. 

The owner’s antipathy for ebooks isn’t simply due to aesthetics and sensory deprivation.  Staring into computer screens isn’t her idea of fun and relaxation.

It’s work.

All day she’s staring into screens, ringing customers up, researching books and authors, placing and filling orders---you can shop Partners & Crime online---paying bills, dealing with email. 

But her main objection is practical.  Ebooks represent the enemy.  A downloaded book is a book not bought in a store, her store.  This is why she calls buying a nook or a kindle going over to the Dark Side.

The owners of Partners & Crime take pride in knowing the books in their store and in being able to make excellent recommendations.  That means a lot of reading ahead, so to speak.  Publishers and publicists help out by sending them advance copies and galleys of new books before they’re published.  Lately, they’ve been getting “offers” of digital advance copies.  “Just let us know what platform you prefer,” those doing the offering add brightly.

This amuses and exasperates the owner.

“Can you imagine what our customers would think,” she says, “If they came in here and saw us glued to a kindle?”

Comments

[CaseyOR]

Love books. For all the reasons you list. Also, if I drop a book I can pick it up and resume reading, no harm done. If I drop a kindle or a nook or an iPad, well, the chance of damage is much greater than it is with an old-fashioned book.

Robert Wilson-- I love his novels. Has the blonde read Wilson's Inspector Javier Falcon series? I recommend them.

[GregN]

If I can't read it on my iPad or iPhone I'll take a pass. Been that way for a few years now.
To each his own!

[actor212]

I'm not entirely in agreement with Greg, but I'm leaning in that direction. I've been trying to port my magazine subscriptions over to my iPad, and the last three of four books I've read have been electronic.

Bookdealers across America might try an idea: discounted e-books.

The list price in the iBook Store is almost always the same as the print list price (and most bricks and mortars stores deeply discount those)

So why not present Apple a proposal: since a bookstore presents an opportunity for a reader to browse titles quickly, let the book dealer offer a WiFi connection where the iBook store (or Kindle...Nook, I presume would be just for B&N shops) can identify the IP and cut the e-book price 30%, no questions asked.

Imagine taking your iPad into the local shop, buying that new Stephen King thriller, then perusing the covers and titles neatly laid out and deciding, hmmmm, I like that Marques reprint.

You can buy either the print edition OR the e-book edition, same price, and the shop owner gets his cut either way.

[Mark]

I understand the appeal of the physical presence of a book, but the fact is that since I got my Kindle, I have read lots more than I did before. When I find a book I want, if it's not available for the Kindle, I get mad, but I don't get the book. Tell the bookstore owner I'm sorry, but life is a moving train.

[Bergamot5]

There are two central benefits for me to Kindle and Nook (I own both).

(1) The reading page is flat. Reading glasses have a small focus range, and the curved pages of books, especially paperbacks, force me to constantly shift the position of the book to keep the words sharp and clear. Nook solves this problem by presenting each page at a single distance.

(2) The font is adjustable. Under bright lights at home or outdoors, I can read using a fairly small font. In public spaces, such as waiting rooms or airplanes, a large font is more comfortable, and sometimes essential.

It would be nice to buy ebooks from a local independent bookseller, but that choice is not available.

[Ken Muldrew]

"These are not books, lumps of lifeless paper, but minds alive on the shelves"
Gilbert Highet.

"I have always imagined that Paradise will be a kind of library."
Jorge Luis Borges

Given the choice between 1000 titles of my choice in ebook form vs 100 titles of real books, I guess I would take the thousand, but I wouldn't go much lower. Similarly, I don't like paying high prices for antiquarian books, but there are many that I would rather read for a reasonable price than own for a fortune. Books are worth more to me than a digital image of the words, but how much more depends on the book.

[minstrel hussain boy]

i own, and appreciate my nook. when i'm traveling, which is simply a fact of a working musician's life, it limits the space in my luggage that used to be taken up by books.

still, there are differences. one thing i've noticed is that i haven't done one of those "i couldn't put it down" sessions with the nook. it hasn't happened with either the serge storms series or discworld on the nook, but both of them have happened to me with real books.

i'm not sure what it is about the nook that limits my sessions. . .still. when packing for a road trip, the nook goes in, books stay home.

[Lance Mannion]

minstral, if I traveled regularly I'd own a nook, for sure.

CaseyOR, I passed your recommendation onto the blonde. She says thank you. Wilson was a happy find at Partners & Crime. She hadn't heard of him before. She has 2 of the Falcons on reserve at the library now.

Btw, folks, you can buy kindle editions through independents that have online presences. For example, you can buy the kindle editions of the Wilson books Casey's recommending through Partners & Crimes Amazon shop, you just need to click through a few pages to get to them. If you do, though, P & C gets credit for the sale. Needs to be easier though. I think it would be good if independents made it possible to buy and download ebook editions right there in the store. There are good things about digital books---Bergamot mentions an important one---but still one of the best things about buying books is spending time in a good bookstore, and P & C is a good bookstore. If you're in the neighborhood, make sure you stop by.

[Rob]

I own a Nook Color, and as a commuter to Boston on a wretched city bus, I love having hundreds of books available on a device I can leave in the backpack until the next day's ride. And I love having a bookstore in my hands,.. although from a spending standpoint, it's as dangerous as having a liquor store in my kitchen.

That said, tonight I had to stop reading the new Stephen King - 45 pages from the end - because my book ran out of juice.

Second - part of why I bought the Nook was because I already have eight bookcases, and I am OUT OF ROOM.

But... I am an inveterate comic book junkie. And I would no more choose a digital comic book over a print copy than I would choose a battery powered latex device over actual human contact.

Part of that is tactile - there is no digital way to read comics that is better than an actual comic book. But part of it is ritual - there is no part of my week I like better than hitting my local comic store, picking my books, and shooting the breeze with other comic nerds. You ain't gonna get that with an iPad app.

So I see, and live, both sides of the argument. All I can say is: sometimes need is stronger than want. But not always. Not if you feel strongly about it. And the people catering toward "want" can survive, if they understand who they're catering toward. My local comic store owner isn't worried about digital comics, because he, and his customers who know each other, aren't shopping there on Wednesdays.

[Rana]

My position is that I want both. I want the paper books for reading at home, for pleasure, for writing in the margins, and for hoarding up on my shelves. I want the ebooks for traveling, for one-time reads, for the latest best-sellers I'm unlikely to keep, and so on. In other words, I want my ebooks to act like library books, not bookstore books - cheap/free and disposable, with little commitment if I end up not liking them. (And if they're good, then I'll buy them in paper.)

One thing that will be interesting to watch is when the ebook folks start shifting more from fiction to nonfiction. I'm a member of an indexers' organization which is tracking this issue, and so far most ebooks are lagging quite badly behind print when it comes to the quality (heck, even the existence!) of their indexes. Note, for example, that neither the Kindle nor the Nook has an "index" button to take you straight to it. If they want to take over the nonfiction market as they're doing the market for genre fiction, they'll need to solve that problem, and soon.