Bookstore No Cure for What Ails Croton

OP ED

Why are would-be planners with no grasp of reality or commerce so quick to prescribe ways to get Harmon’s business district to pull up its socks when all retail areas in Croton are facing problems? Among other suggestions to remedy Croton’s deep-seated woes, we are told, “What this village needs is a bookstore in Harmon.” Perhaps the members of the Harmon Committee will chip in the half-million to a million dollars and the business acumen such a venture would require.

Independent booksellers are a dying breed whose numbers continue to diminish. It is impossible for independent booksellers to match the buying power and low prices of the megachain bookstores, discounters like Walmart or Sam’s Club, and Amazon.com. A comparatively small number of independents have survived by adding extra services. These include gift items, used books, magazines, comfortable tub chairs, piped-in music, wi-fi access, and an adjunct café selling food, latte or wine and beer. A few newcomers have gained a foothold by specializing in narrow fields, such as crime and mystery.

Every successful bookstore needs employees who are readers and who know and love the product they are selling. Today the bookstore is not only a place to buy books. It has become a place to relax and talk about them. Allow me to deflate the bookstore myth once and for all with facts and statistics:

A recent survey revealed that 27 percent of American adults admitted they had not read a single book for pleasure in the past year. Although it represented a 3.2% decline, an astronomical 275,232 individual new titles were published in 2008. That’s 5,293 new titles every week. Imagine being a bookseller and trying to keep up with that flood of books.

The average new book has a shelf life somewhere between milk and yogurt. Unlike any other article of commerce, books are sold to booksellers with generous return privileges. After a fixed period, booksellers can return unsold books for full credit.

About 40 percent of new books—largely unsold bestsellers—are returned to publishers. Eventually, many of these are shredded and shipped to China on empty container ships. Not to worry. They will come back as recycled cardboard packaging for products formerly made by American workers.

Instituted during the Great Depression to encourage dealers to stock books, the indefensible practice of printing excessive quantities and then accepting returns is sheer madness, making book publishing one of the biggest wasters of energy and resources. Except for smaller press runs of books printed for libraries and academic use, the future of books seems destined to lie with electronic books and “print-on-demand” versions.

For some, myself included, books are almost like air, water and food—essential to life. But I am neither overly sanguine nor foolish enough to think that Croton, now a backwater community bypassed by the limited-access Expressway and offering a narrow customer base of less than 8,000 souls, is an appropriate location for an independent bookstore. A village in crisis can hardly take seriously such desperate clutching at straws.