Earlier this week I had lunch with a friend at Europa, Spokane’s premiere place for pub atmosphere, fresh food, fun mojitos, and fantastic deserts. As I left the restaurant, the space across the hallway caught my eye. It had been an empty office when I last visited the restaurant, but was now filled with shelf after shelf of books. Of course I had to investigate.

Here’s what I want when I visit a bookstore:

-Affordable popular books that everyone has told me I should read, but I didn’t want to spend the money on, but then do once I find a cheap(er) used copy.

-Beautiful books that make me take them off the shelf just because I have to touch their cover and feel their weight in my hand.

-Rare books that I can’t purchase anywhere else and therefore invite me to browse and spend more time hunting for treasures.

-Unusual books that make me realize that although I didn’t know they existed, they are the kinds of books I always wanted to read.

These books should be presented in a warm inviting space, preferably in an older building with beautiful floors and interesting fixtures. The bookcases should allow enough room to squat down to investigate the lower shelves and placed such that I automatically meander through the store, discovering  exciting finds on my way to the register. I also prefer a comfortable chair in a corner or two so I can spend some time examining a book before I buy it, or revisit with an old familiar text that I’d forgotten I loved as a kid. If I can be really picky, I want a few tables scattered around the place so that I might come back to write or maybe play a game of checkers with a new friend. Read more »

To celebrate my recent state of employed-ness, I took a detour from shopping for work clothes today and found myself in the bookstore. Here in mid-Michigan we’ve got a great independent bookstore called Schuler Books and Music, and when I go to the mall, I always park my car by near this entrance so that I have an excuse to peruse—and maybe accidentally come home with a book or four. Today I bought The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian and The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake, and never mind that I already have a nice stack of books that I absolutely have been dying to read. I just love buying new books.

And that’s a big part of it there. I love buying new books. Not borrowing. Be it from the library or from a friend, I feel the need to own my own books. A few weeks ago I did borrow the next book in a series from my sister (who, unlike me at the time, had a job and could afford it), but as soon as I could, despite having already read the book, I purchased my own copy.

For years I told people this was because I liked to write in my books, and you just can’t (or shouldn’t) write in borrowed copies. And while it is true that I write in some books, I by no means write in all the books I read, or even in the majority. So then I had to think, and I think it has come down to two things.

First, I like to support the author. This is why I also buy all my books new rather than used, the sale of which doesn’t benefit the author at all. And second, I’m forced to confront a small measure of my own vanity: I really like the way all those books look lined up on my shelves, like I’m this great reader or something.

I’ve been looking at financial results for Barnes & Noble, Borders, and Amazon from years past. (Here’s some similar information and a pretty thorough breakdown: http://www.fonerbooks.com/booksale.htm)

Amazon’s sales keep going up, while BN and Borders sales are fluctuating a bit but generally trending downward. Most privately held companies (Auntie’s Books, Powell’s, etc.) don’t make their financial results so easily accessible, but it seems they are surviving a little better than the chains. (Note Auntie’s satellite store that just opened in downtown Spokane’s mall.) Interestingly, it’s BN’s and Borders’ smaller stores (the B. Dalton and Waldenbooks stores, respectively) that are really suffering. These are the ones in the mall that aren’t the cornerstone stores; they sit alongside Cinnabon and Lidz, and how they make any money at all is beyond me.

In light of this, I’m going to ask that annoying question again: Does the bookstore matter anymore?
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I used to work at a Borders, and the wrath I experienced at that time–at the blithering corporate idiocy that was slowly running their company into the ground–is the stuff of legends. None of the mind-numbingly stupid things I had to do (alphabetizing dictionaries, switching all of the inventory on one bookshelf to another three times in two days) compared to the soul-killing hours I spent in charge of the magazines.

Thus begins a snarky and pretty intelligent post about why magazine sales are suffering and how its the corporate Borders-type mentality that’s driving them down.

Read here.