Bookstores can sell whatever they want

make up your own mind

Over the weekend, I shared this article about indie bookstores and what they sell.

It bothered me for several reasons, but the author seemed very intent on finding out if conservative books were being sold at bookstores or not, and making a point to GET TO THE BOTTOM OF IT.

This follows quickly on the problems a semi-conservative writer had about booking (ha!) events at a bookstore, despite having a good online following.

But as the writer of the first piece noted, bookstores don’t make sense:

Booksellers have bent the rules of the free market. For the first time in history, a significant chunk of the buying public are voluntarily paying almost double—and going out of their way—to buy exactly the same product they can get cheaper and often faster somewhere else. And it’s all due to that ABA message: “non-corporate, authentic, and socially responsible.”

And that’s just it.

Bookstores don’t make sense. Trying to make it make sense doesn’t really work either.

They’re a quirky bunch.

It doesn’t matter if you go to a bunch of bookstores and they don’t have conservative writers, but then have these other books, because they don’t have a lot of books.

Bookstores are annoying…

You can’t find all the anime and manga you want at most bookstores (I don’t read anime or manga).

You can’t find all the historical biographies you want at most bookstores

When I went to the Books-A-Million in suburban Nashville, I couldn’t even find a Don DeLillo novel (and that’s okay! He’s no David Baldacci or Emily Henry, I know that much).

So yeah, bookstores are annoying that way.

And they’re annoying for the same reasons the writer mentioned: they do what they want, no matter if it makes sense or not.

About 6 weeks ago, I was in a Barnes & Noble in Athens, Georgia while in town for a funeral.

They had a book by a Christian pastor I had never heard of who is in Manhattan. And I live in Manhattan.

I didn’t check, but my local Manhattan bookstore probably didn’t have it or at least not as prominently displayed.

Practically, this doesn’t make sense.

There’s a different type of audience in that part of Athens, GA than in the rest of the country (even if the author is from Manhattan), and even in that part of Athens, GA.

The bookstore and the audience are agreeing to be flexible with each other. And sometimes there’s a premium paid for your viewpoint to be justified.

The author of the piece even notes this conundrum:

“What no one says is that the bargain works both ways. If book buyers must behave virtuously and tithe an additional $11 a book, then booksellers must uphold the community’s doctrines. They’re locked in the moral contract, too.”

Yeah, and if people don’t want to shop there, they don’t have to.

That’s the tradeoff. And if the bookstores adjust, they adjust.

Libraries…

I’m not as worried about “censorship” at bookstores as at libraries.

Ideally, you want as many voices across the spectrum represented, because I also have an outdated belief as outdated as bookstores.

Here’s my belief: “People should make up their own mind.”

That’s kinda crazy, I know, because people have a really hard time making up their own minds, especially when the TikYouTokTube scroll is the easiest thing to do.

But hey, people gonna people and they’re gonna pay too much at bookstores.

But libraries! Free! Information! You don’t pay (except through taxes and they are high here and even then there are library tax issues in NYC).

Libraries should have access to conservative and liberal bookstores and then those should all be available in the same way.

I should’ve taken a photo of it, but my own local (Manhattan) library had a book by another semi-conservative Substacker prominently displayed the other day.

I subscribe to Freddie’s Substack, but don’t plan on reading his book, because I’m not that interested in the subject (I prefer his pop culture commentary instead) and so I actually made up my own mind about the book when it was presented to me.

Libraries can take those “risks” more so than an independent bookstore can, to house something that won’t necessarily get circulated, even though eventually it may come out of circulation if it’s not popular enough. But hopefully it would be somewhere accessible.

Call me crazy, but overall I’m in favor of books…

So please have liberal books. And conservative books. And good memoirs. And bad memoirs. And then have all the books in between that are hard to classify, hard to pin down, and make you think.

And then you could have different types of bookstores. Big ones, small ones, medium-sized ones.

Online and offline ones.

Go read now.

Keep going-

-Josh Spilker