Review: Rebel Bookseller
Subtitle: How to Improvise your own Indie Store and Beat Back the Chains
Overview
The title (and especially the subtitle) of this book begs any independent-minded bookseller to read it. I just wish that the book lived up to its promise. This was probably the most disappointing read of the last year. The author, Andrew Laties, has given us a memoir of his experience creating/expanding The Children's Bookstore (and other related businesses), and the constant struggle he experienced fighting the onslaught of the chain bookstores. Conceptually, it's right in line with what most small booksellers are facing. However, there is an overriding tone of defeatism that really disturbed me.
This is going to be a short review, because people that like this book are going to hate what I have to say, and people that don't like it will have very specific hates about it. If a measure of a books success is the emotions it raises, I'm sure this can be considered a successfully published tome.
Frankly, the book is totally oriented on techniques to support (or bury) a physical presence - Andrew goes so far as to dismiss the online bookselling market as an opportunity for low-wage bookstore employees to sell their stolen books (a point that he clarifies in conveniently buried notes). He is especially angry about Amazon, which he considers to have used many of his ideas to develop their marketplace. All-in-all, I found it to be an interesting, but uncompelling book describing the difficulties in maintaining an edge in a competative business environment.
(Note: Please read the comments to this entry - Andy Laties has replied with a blazin' response. I leave my comments to stand, but he provides some interesting commentary on his position, and the issues he wishes to shine some light upon. I may not have liked this book - although I was intrigued by some of the history - but I do appreciate his militancy and strong desire for change.)
Rating: 2 out of 10
Overview
The title (and especially the subtitle) of this book begs any independent-minded bookseller to read it. I just wish that the book lived up to its promise. This was probably the most disappointing read of the last year. The author, Andrew Laties, has given us a memoir of his experience creating/expanding The Children's Bookstore (and other related businesses), and the constant struggle he experienced fighting the onslaught of the chain bookstores. Conceptually, it's right in line with what most small booksellers are facing. However, there is an overriding tone of defeatism that really disturbed me.
This is going to be a short review, because people that like this book are going to hate what I have to say, and people that don't like it will have very specific hates about it. If a measure of a books success is the emotions it raises, I'm sure this can be considered a successfully published tome.
Frankly, the book is totally oriented on techniques to support (or bury) a physical presence - Andrew goes so far as to dismiss the online bookselling market as an opportunity for low-wage bookstore employees to sell their stolen books (a point that he clarifies in conveniently buried notes). He is especially angry about Amazon, which he considers to have used many of his ideas to develop their marketplace. All-in-all, I found it to be an interesting, but uncompelling book describing the difficulties in maintaining an edge in a competative business environment.
(Note: Please read the comments to this entry - Andy Laties has replied with a blazin' response. I leave my comments to stand, but he provides some interesting commentary on his position, and the issues he wishes to shine some light upon. I may not have liked this book - although I was intrigued by some of the history - but I do appreciate his militancy and strong desire for change.)
Rating: 2 out of 10
posted by The Well Read Blogger at 11:45 AM
10 Comments:
Thanks for reading and reviewing my book! As I say in it, I hope people will find it useful even if they don't like it. I hope that you enjoyed the historical material at the very least.
A couple of points. I don't think Amazon is only useful as a place for chain bookstore employees to sell stolen books. I do understand that of course you were reading that section defensively, from the perspective of actually being an online bookseller! So you felt that I was accusing you and your colleagues of wrongdoing.
But in fact, in that section, I am calling on chain bookstore employees to steal from their bosses and then sell the books online so as to damage their chainstore bosses. I'm calling for illegal activity, for civil disobedience.
I'm not insane. I know from experience and theory that the inside-theft level in the bookstore business runs at about 2% of the total gross, nationally. Since national gross storefront bookstore sales hover at around $12 billion per year, in other words, about $240 million in books at WHOLESALE COST are stolen annually from bookstores by these stores' own employees.
These books are substantially being sold online, nowadays. (They used to be sold to storefront used bookstores.)
I am staking out the bizarre territory of encouraging chainstore employees to step up this inside-theft activity. I want these booksellers to actively utilize Amazon to destroy Barnes & Noble.
A good friend of mine who does a roaring business online was VERY angry with me for writing and publishing that passage -- he thought exactly what you think: that I was accusing the majority of online booksellers of being resellers of stolen books. I guess that he couldn't believe I was actually calling on chain bookstore employees to engage in illegal sabotage.
But I really do think that it would be a good thing to destroy the chain bookstores by any means necessary.
I would certainly call on you to accept the truth of the reselling of stolen merchandise online. You don't do it, your friends don't do it: but a lot of stolen books ARE being sold online. It has always been true in the book business that there's a lot of reselling of stolen merch.
I'm quite politicized! 28 years in the storefront book business, mind you! Far from being a defeatest, I currently am active in running two storefronts: Eric Carle Musem store, in Amherst, and Vox Pop, in Brooklyn.
My museum's store does a lot of online business (www.picturebookart.org/shop). I'm not opposed to online bookselling. "Rebel Bookseller" is selling about 50 copies per month on Amazon, and I maintain a blog on my Amazon website.
However I have hundreds of friends who've lost their storefront bookstores to chainstore competition, and I know for sure that the chainstores have engaged in a wide variety of illegal and immoral methods of doing business. I am angry at chainstores. I endorse illegal direct actions that aim to reduce the viability of chainstore bookselling.
I'm certainly not promoting independent storefront retailing as a safe or easy proposition. What you see in my book as defeatism is really a very intense cautionary insistence that prospective booksellers face up to the dangerous facts. I think there's something self-sacrificial about being a storefront bookseller and I think people have to face up to it! I've stayed in the business all these years by launching store after store after store.
Wow. Thanks for your comments, Andy. If nothing else, I have to commend you on your strong conviction, "get off your ass" commitment and deep industry knowledge. Amazing numbers...
Well I have to commend you on approaching the new industry literature with a critical mind.
Unfortunately our field remains TERRIBLY documented. It's just a joke, how few books there are on the subject of bookselling. And how impossible it is to study the activity from a formal perspective. We're all self-taught.
I am finishing my B.A.! Yesterday was my final class of my final course in the University Without Walls program at University of Massachusetts. I will graduate on May 26, at age 47. (Both of my kids are heading off to college this fall, and I've been telling them: Dad took 30 years to finish, so, No Pressure.)
As part of my presentation, in yesterday's class (Visual Anthropology seminar), I showed "The Art Of Selling Children's Books": the film I made for the American Booksellers Association 16 years ago. I won't bore you with the context, for that particular class. But what is always strange when I discuss with nonbooksellers that film and its origin, is having to explain how there is no place to get a fullscale, formal education in bookselling, so it is basically people who currently own bookstores who do as much or as little as they feel like in terms of introducing newcomers to the biz (if the newcomers ask for advice).
Back in the 80s and early 90s, there were sixty bookstore owners running twelve 4-day seminars each year: the ABA Booksellers Schools. That was a mediocre educational opportunity for the general public, but it looks like a LOT when compared to today's anemic offerings: educational presentations which take place mostly at the national and regional conventions. Even in the context of the ABA-School period, my film was one of the more audacious things the education committee did! Imagine -- a 17-minute educational film was considered controversial, expensive, risky... And then, it was the last educational film the ABA made (our first was a ten-minute effort called "Computerizing Your Retail Bookstore"!!).
Then in 1997 ABA disbanded the whole school program and handed it off to a consulting firm that runs only two or three per year. (Donna Paz does a terrific job, I'm only complaining that she's not running a LOT of schools, and, all over the country, and that the program isn't run by current, full-time booksellers.)
I like being self-taught, of course. I have a hard time in formal educational settings. But I would definitely have benefitted early on from a 6-week intensive course in bookselling, and the entire book industry would benefit if this kind of certificate program were being offered at numerous places nationwide. I suspect that this kind of curriculum is the sort of thing you were hoping to find in my book. What you needed was an information-packed, highly specific instructional manual.
I could write such a thing: absolutely. I puzzled over that. But frankly I was afraid people would simple go out and use it like an operating manual.
Since I published Rebel Bookseller, people have been asking me when I'm going to write another book. The obvious thing at this point is to simply write a big textbook called "How To Open And Run Your Own Bookstore". (Or, "How To Open And Run Your Own Children's Bookstore" -- which I think would actually be significantly more valuable, since children's bookstores represent a specialty that can be quite predictably profitable, which require real-world presence since kids need to BE in such settings -- and since there's a baby boom starting right now...)
Should I write that textbook??? (The online continuing education people at University of Massachusetts have suggested that I propose to teach an online continuing ed course next Spring. To do that, I would think I'd have to write the equivalent of a highly specific workbook.)
Let me ask you: What's your perspective on highly specific business instruction?? As you know, I feel really ambivalent about simply coming out and stating First You Should Do This, Then You Should Do This. Do you think that's a good way for interested people to develop their own activity in the world?? I hate to be the one who bosses people into acting in a set manner. After all the most interesting things in the world are done by people who break what rules they find, and really innovate. If I'm striving to live like such a person, how can I justify standing on a platform and telling people Put Your Right Foot In Put Your Right Foot Out, etc.
First off, congrats on the BA! I, too, am a late-life graduate (getting my BSBM at age 45); despite spending many years as a business consultant, I wanted to pick up some academics to go with that experience. It was good, and gave me an even greater appreciation for "the numbers". Now, I'm working on a second degree (in arts this time...).
I agree that this is a largely undocumented business. Frankly, most auto body repair shops have far more business information than booksellers. Personally, I think there are a few reasons for this:
1. Bookselling doesn't have a strong, seller-focused industry group that can help bookstore startups. You've documented (both here and in your book) the failures of the ABA. This means that there is no clearinghouse for useful business knowledge. There are organizations that try to fill this role, but they are either under-supported or overtly navel-gazing within a single (normally antiquarian) subset of the industry.
2. Serious booksellers often tend toward extreme independence. Ask most people to describe a typical bookseller, and they will provide an image of either a) a crusty old cuss with limited social skills and even worse hygiene, or b) an etherial dreamer with her head in the clouds. The fact that booksellers often live up (or down) to these images means that they are independent to a fault, and aren't all that interested in other people's opinions. Thus, much of the bookselling documentation reads more like motivational literature than practical information.
3. I don't think that many booksellers are interested in business details. This would explain why books about "How To Make a Pile of Cash Selling Books" are popular, but discussions of the basics of inventory control, marketing, risk management and accounting are not. New booksellers love buying books, put up with selling books, and aren't really thinking of the business aspects of the job. It doesn't help that many people's first experience with bookselling is buying a book at a yard sale for a dollar and selling it on Amazon for $15. This sets the focus on "high profitability" without any consideration of the other expenses involved.
You've questioned whether I wanted a "How To Do It" manual out of your book - the answer is "not really", although I would have appreciated more business-oriented information. To me, the most compelling parts of the book were your discussions about planned expansion, moves into alternative venues (like the museum store) and your difficulties dealing with partnerships. As it stands, I think the book is an interesting memoir of the brick-and-morter era of bookselling; my greatest disappointment was that it didn't deliver on the subtitle (it doesn't help me find a way to Beat Back The Chains, at least in my reading). On the other hand, in retrospect (and further understanding your motivations), I can see that you didn't want to make a checklist that people follow to whup B&N's butt.
The problem with the "How To Open And Run Your Own Bookstore" is that it will, almost by definition, be dated in its information. The bookselling industry is in the middle of tremendous changes, and techniques of today may not hold up next week, let along two years from now. Perhaps a better book would be "Applying Standard Business Techniques to Bookselling". I'm sure that would sell at least 5 copies!
Again, I appreciate your unwillingness to build a cookie-cutter model for the business, and interest in shocking people into thinking creatively about selling books. You want to know what I would want you to do? I would love to see you combine your innovative vision, industry contacts and personal experience to produce a quarterly "Anarchist Bookseller" monograph. Wouldn't have to be big, but it could always be timely, and would certainly be thought-provoking. If you do this, you have a subscriber for life...
I'm in the process of applying to Southern New Hampshire University to do a Masters or Doctorate in the field of Community Economic Development. After writing you asking what kind of book you were looking for, I was thinking about this issue of how these days, the way indie booksellers (storefront operators that is) always find ourselves explaining our significance is by referring to our roles in strengthening local community life. Bookstore as Community Center.
And I often tell people who are puzzled about how to raise the money to launch a store that cash isn't important. What's needed is a critical mass of people who want or need a bookstore in their midst. Then you can evoke collective financial relationships that capitalize on this felt absence in this community.
You're right: it's very much an anarchist approach. It doesn't lead to Sole Proprietorship by the bookstore's founder, but if the founder isn't risking capital, why should it?
Since this is the most frequent kind of conversation into which prospective booksellers lead me (the "I have no start-up capital" conversation) and since I see the community-generated bookstore as such an important answer, then, therefore, I think that there's something called Bookselling For Community Economic Development. And that's the next book (or monograph) I should tackle. It would try speak to community leaders, real estate developers, politicians, educators, religious leaders, neighborhood organizers. It would try teach them how to evoke indie bookstores from among their constituencies, or rather, to evoke OPPORTUNITIES for prospective bookstore operators who are in search of a place to settle, practice and thrive.
Thanks for having this conversation with me. It's quite difficult to get a fullscale discussion on this subject with anyone. Lots of people are convinced that the indie bookstore is dead, and, more broadly, that the book itself is doomed. I simply don't understand how this can be so since indie bookstores still control 17% of a $12 billion annual market -- that is, we're doing $2 billion per year in storefront sales and thus are evidently NOT dead.
A quarterly monograph. That would be a good discipline. More disciplined that writing in to the blog of some unfortunate bookseller who dared to make my book's title appear in a narcissistic Google search by a curious author.
By the way, the answer to the question of how my book shows "How To Beat Back The Chains" is that in the 80s, through collectively opening thousands of bookstores, indie booksellers destroyed the financial viability of Dalton, Walden and Crown, and COLLECTIVELY a new round of indie bookstore openings WILL destroy Borders and Barnes & Noble. I don't think there is any way for most bookstore owners to INDIVIDUALLY beat back the chains. I think that if a few thousand of the 100,000 people currently employed by bookstores did open new bookstores relatively simultaneously (if we got back up to a couple hundred new stores per year, even) that this would make Borders collapse, and, afterward, B&N would be taken over by Wal-Mart and substantially downsized.
I think this is now happening. There were 100 new stores that opened last year, and 100 that opened the year before and attendance at the various bookseller educational programs is rising sharply. We are now beating back the chains. No one person could do it. Together (but, of course, in the process, we'll argue constantly about what the hell we're doing.) we are doing it.
Andy Laties:
Well I haven't read your book, but comments like this: "But in fact, in that section, I am calling on chain bookstore employees to steal from their bosses and then sell the books online so as to damage their chainstore bosses. I'm calling for illegal activity, for civil disobedience", unfortunately puts your credibility with me on the same level as neo-natzis, and other whacked out groups. It is one thing to call for civil disobedience when your government refuses you the right to freedom of worship, but to call for people to steal to help YOUR business succeed is crazy!
Yes, it would be very nice if there was some good way to train others to sell books and have their own well-functioning bookstores whether on line or B&M. However with the increasing changes in bookselling, classes or books would need frequent upgrading. This is why good quality forums like www.BookThink.com are essential ingredients of the learning process.
Hi Gail,
That's fine with me if you don't agree with what I'm saying. As I say in my book, I'm striving to find ways to provoke my readers to engage creatively with the world. Because I know that when I worked at B.Dalton in the late 70s and early 80s they had a huge internal employee theft problem, and that it was this intractible problem that ultimately led their corporate owner, Dayton-Hudson Corporation to sell them in a no-cash junk-bond deal just to get rid of this useless bookstore chain, therefore I'm confident that this internal employee-sabotage mechanism can work to disable Barnes & Noble too.
I'm not trying to damage Barnes & Noble so as to assist MY company. I am operator and part-owner, variously, in two quite small bookstores and have no interest in owning a gigantic company of the kind that would benefit by the collapse of B&N! The stores I'm involved with right now are doing fine. I just think that Barnes & Noble is a huge problem when it comes to freedom of speech and thought and action in this country.
However, you are of course free to disagree with me! I'm only trying to encourage discussion and action. Sadly, many prospective booksellers feel VERY discouraged these days when it comes to chains versus indie bookstores and whether any given possible indie bookstore will survive. I believe the chains are doomed, and I want prospective booksellers to understand HOW they will be destroyed. In part, it will be the actions of their own employees that will destroy them. These employees in fact need no encouragement from me!
Andy Laties is playing out the role of victim, blaming others for his apparent anger and frustration. This is an unhealthy viewpoint and based on illusion. And then he encourages others to steal. It is very twisted. We should pray for him. The karmic repercussions he will reap, either in this lifetime or another, I wouldn't wish upon anyone.
And for any of you who might be persuaded to engage in theivery based on Mr. Laties' reasoning, I would urge you to reconsider. Mr. Laties' approach is a dead end. Blaming others to justify immoral behavior is a losing proposition.
Mr. Laties says what he is advocating is "civil disobedience". That is a hard point to argue against, but if it is truly civil disobedience in the classic sense as advocated by Thoreau, then Laties and any others who follow his lead, should be more than willing to accept the legal punishments associated with the position. In other words, anyone who steals books from chain stores as a means of "civil disobedience", should step forward and allow themselves to be prosecuted for the thefts as part of the act of protest. Otherwise the claim of "civil disobedience" is hypocrisy and a lame excuse for selfishly inflicting harm on others.
And we might ask Mr. Laties: "How many books have YOU stolen from Barnes and Noble"? If he hasn't stolen any books from Barnes and Noble, or if he has and is not willing to publicly admit it, then his whole civil disobedience position collapses and it becomes apparent that he is simply acting out, dealing with his own personal demons by lashing out at others and not taking resposibility for his lot in life, and that he is not as sane as his ego tells him (and us).
Mr. Laties, we all make mistakes in reasoning at various points in our lives. I would encourage you to reassess your position and advocacy of criminal behavior. I believe there is a good chance you are infected with a strong dose of poor reasoning and out-of-control, destructive egotism, and are doing your best to infect others as your ego's way of justifying your position.
You are a very vigorous debater, so I imagine you will energetically reply to my criticism. So be it. I will leave you with the last word if you wish. I just hope your infection does not spread too far.
David,
Hey, good points! You're right, I've never stolen from Barnes & Noble -- nor have I shoplifted from any bookstore (any store!). And you're right that civil disobedience involves going to prison. I stand corrected.
Still, I think there's some territory here that you're missing -- and maybe I don't have the right language for it.
When thousands of independent small businesspeople have been displaced by a few gigantic corporations, and these huge companies employ thousands of part-time wage-paid workers -- and if I believe, as I do, that this is a kind of economic and cultural attack on freedom of individual thought and action -- then what is the language that would correctly describe a worker driven revolt? A strike? A slowdown?
I think I used the word sabotage, in this blog (not in the book, and I didn't use "civil disobedience" in the book either). Industrial sabotage: now isn't "sabotage" that a French word referring to an appropriately analagous act of local insider economic resistance? I think it was "sabots" or -- shoes? -- that were thrown into the gears of a big machine to break the machine?
Far from being emotionally out of control, I'd say I consider myself struggling with a kind of intellectual challenge. I've wanted to answer the question: What are the choke-points in this situation? Where does the little guy get leverage when battling a huge corporation? A bunch of little guys?
I personally can of course do nothing except try point out or theorize these big companies' vulnerabilities, so as to open the minds of others to the chance that their own efforts to open indie bookstores will succeed. (That's what my book is actually devoted to convincing people to do: open their own indie bookstores.)
Frankly, I would be rather surprised if those two rather edgy paragraphs in my book in which I laughingly encourage bookstore workers to steal from their bosses and sell the books on the internet actually convince many chainstore workers to do that. I wouldn't mind if I succeeded -- but more likely, the effect will be that some readers will put two and two together and say, "Oh yeah! That must be happening! Some of those books you buy on the internet must be stolen!" Which is a huge fact that everyone should be thinking about as far as the "miracle" of the internet goes. (If you want to read the page, I've posted the entire book, for free, on books.google.com. It's page 96 of Rebel Bookseller I think.)
I don't know if people reading this blog are all internet booksellers. But I would like to point out that there are a million Amazon affiliates, and you've all been made into pieceworkers for a gigantic corporation called Amazon. I think you should be in storefronts, serving your neighbors. This has been made impossible by the internet. The number of storefront used bookstores that have been destroyed by Amazon is horrifying, and American social life has been damaged as a result. The advantage that people can now obtain any book easily by shopping on Amazon has to be weighed against this loss in public life. So: I feel no obligation to keep people from staring at the facts of internet commerce which include that there's lots of stolen stuff circulating on the web. I'm absolutely trying to encourage people to be critical of the "givens" in their lives. The "wonderful" new things about the internet are balanced by a dark underside. Look at both. Don't cry about it. But don't ignore anything. Maybe the darkness of the underground economy can be turned to some benefit -- maybe it will be a good thing as far as destroying the big corporate grasp on power in storefront new-bookselling. Who can say? Why not think about all possibilities?
Thanks for your incisive assessment of my earlier writing in to this blog. I love this kind of give and take.
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