A Real-life Test of the Beef Against National Bookstores
By Eli Lehrer

A Real-life Test of the Beef Against National Bookstores

By Eli Lehrer

I still remember the black, white, and gold wrapping paper from Kroch and Brentano’s. Secured with string rather than tape, a book from Kroch’s seemed like a special present. Even if there was no occasion, my father would always have them wrap any book he bought for me. Kroch’s was a Chicago tradition: a hometown operation that had existed for more than 40 years.

But not everything about the store was perfect. Locations were often dirty and many clerks seemed rude and unhelpful. Although some of the stores were pretty big, few of them made a serious effort to carry books from university or small presses. And now Kroch’s is gone: its last Chicago-area location closed a few years back. The mega-bookstores—Borders, Barnes & Noble, Super Crown, and so forth—killed it off.

I no longer live in Chicago, but in upstate New York, where I’m finishing up a degree at Cornell. I’m a serious book consumer who reads everything from obscure fourteenth-century poems to Star Trek novels; so I spend a fair amount of time in book-selling establishments. There are ten of them in this college town, where interest in the printed word runs deep, and most do pretty well. But there are no chain superstores.

Whenever I return to Chicago to visit my parents, I stop by downtown Evanston (the Chicago suburb that’s home to Northwestern University) and head straight for Borders. Usually, I can’t resist walking away with at least two or three books. Evanston is also home to a Barnes & Noble and a Super Crown.

Recently, I’ve heard many complaints about how megastores are terrible for the book business. People I respect think the megastores are undesirable because they drive out "good" independent booksellers who actually care about the communities they serve. But I’ve noticed that the megastores have actually been good for Evanston. They’ve helped spark revitalization, drawing more business and foot traffic to a downtown that once seemed to have entered a slow downward slide.

Even for other booksellers, the mega-stores haven’t been all bad. Specialty and used bookstores have actually seen business improve since the big boys moved in. It’s true that general interest bookshops and smaller chain stores have disappeared in some areas. Nearly all of the stronger independents, however, have survived.

The megastores provide a level of service previously unknown in most of the locations they come to. They carry between 80,000 and 120,000 books each—more than a lot of public libraries, and about twice as many as the typical large independent or university bookstore. Some megastores also stock music and computer software. The megastores host regular book signings by authors, and children’s story hours. They also carry slow-moving academic books that most independents won’t touch, and heavily discount bestsellers and staff selections. Many independent mall-based "bookstores," meanwhile, now devote more space to greeting cards and calendars than they do to books.

The cafés at Borders and Barnes & Noble are pleasant gathering places. Pro-browsing policies turn the stores into locations where people can meet and relax without pressure to buy. I often see Northwestern students with their homework sprawled out in front of them at the Evanston megastores. Borders and Barnes & Noble maintain late hours and have encouraged some of downtown Evanston’s other stores to do the same.

None of this impresses anti-megastore activists. After I wrote a column about the virtues of megastores in my New York daily newspaper, the owner of a local used bookstore wrote a response objecting that the megastores have become so influential they now dictate which books get published. There’s no particular evidence, though, that the big stores have overall selling patterns much different from those of independent booksellers. Several publishers I talked to said they rarely see large differences between independents and megastores in book sales. To the extent there are divergences, they may be accounted for by the fact that Barnes & Noble and Borders both take pride in their willingness to open outlets in places that have never had serious bookstores before. Is it surprising that the latest study of Shakespeare’s sonnets doesn’t sell well in a Midwestern factory town?

Moreover, the megastores have actually created a much larger market for certain kinds of academic books. A number of academics have become rich in recent years writing for megabookstore customers. One of Cornell’s better known professors admitted to me that he was writing a new book for "the Barnes & Noble crowd," and explained that "if I’m lucky, I’m going to pay off my summer house. Ten years ago, I would have sold 1,000 copies to libraries. Now, I might sell 10,000. I’m writing for the general public now and not for academics. I’ve actually had to learn to write." Hardly a negative trend.

Novelist Stephen King, who toured the country in 1994 promoting independent bookstores (and his latest bestseller), cited two alleged failings of the superstores: they don’t stock enough books on subjects of local interest, and they fail to do enough to promote new authors. From my exposure to numerous Borders, Barnes & Noble, and SuperCrown stores, the first statement seems quite dubious. The Chicago-area superstores, for instance, all have well-stocked local-interest sections in the front. All have dozens of books about the history and culture of the city and its suburbs. At some locations, Barnes & Noble even segregates locally written fiction.

To test the friendliness of superstores to local-interest books, I recently decided to visit the Chicago-area megas looking for an obscure academic study of Irish community identity in turn-of-the-century Chicago. I knew the University of Kentucky Press had published the book late in 1996, and that it probably had a press run of under 1,000 copies. If the megastores would fail to stock any local-interest book, this would be it. Guess what? All the megastores had it in stock.

King’s complaint about new authors doesn’t stand up to testing either. Many Barnes & Noble stores actually have a special section for first and second novels. Borders has a "new fiction" section in the front of most of its stores that is full of works from recently debuted authors. Super Crown doesn’t do quite as well on this front, but it does exceed my Cornell-area independent bookstores, where two out of three "new fiction" sections were almost entirely stocked with quick-moving books from established authors.

Critics often suggest the megastores are just profit machines where the sellers take little real interest in the printed word. Although one clerk at Super Crown seemed a bit slow on the uptake, all the other megastore clerks I spoke with in my recent test seemed to have a real interest in books. When asked for recommendations, most of the clerks came up with books from truly obscure authors. "This guy is really the very best Slovakian novelist," one clerk told me, his eyes gleaming. Another engaged me in a well-informed discussion of a rather obscure medieval poem.

A cartoon hanging in my favorite Cornell-area independent bookstore captures another criticism sometimes leveled at the megastores: It is said the nationals stock books based on ideology, and tend to keep out left-wing authors. It is difficult to check such an accusation but I tried.

First, I compiled a list of 20 important left-wing books: Noam Chomsky, Karl Marx, and Howard Zinn all made the list more than once. I also threw in many of the books from a left-leaning cultural studies class I had taken at Cornell. No store had everything (one book on my list is out of print). But two out of three megastores I visited had more of the left-wing books than found in all of the independent bookstores I checked. An employee at Borders had even put two of the books on my list on the "staff selection" discount table.

Then I made a companion search for right-wing books, based on a list that featured Edmund Burke, Charles Murray, and F. A. Hayek. This had even more interesting results. The megastores had about the same batting average as with the left-wing texts: stocking around 15 of the 20 books each. Meanwhile, the independent bookstores I visited nearly struck out—one didn’t have anything from the list, another had three books out of 20, and a third had four. (These independents sit in a liberal college town, but then so do the megas I visited in Evanston.) So much for the idea of broad-minded indies and censorious megas.

On the whole, the mega-stores vastly improve the market for books wherever they arrive. Personally, I can’t wait until one comes to my hometown. I’ll be out in front of the welcome wagon.

Eli Lehrer is completing a degree in English/medieval studies at Cornell.

THE AMERICAN ENTERPRISE, MAY/JUNE 1998