The Forgiveness of Sins

Socrates' old boy, and first of the Cynics, Antisthenes, enjoined us to observe our enemies, for they first find out our faults. Been thinking about just who our enemies might be, in the book business, and about our faults. For months now, nothing has been so much discussed among the Independents as the long anticipated bankruptcy-filing of Borders. The language employed in the official organs of the trade has been dispassionate, even respectful, if not of current management, then certainly of the company that operates more than five hundred bookstores and employs hundreds, if not thousands of booksellers. Had this restructuring happened a decade ago, there would not have been anything like this restraint. Then, Borders and Barnes & Noble were widely seen as the ruin of the business; corporate bullies who had forced Independents out of our traditional markets by means of expensive, and targeted marketing, deep, if often temporary customer-discounts, and inventory and labor management practices that valued appearance over content and friendly service over experience. The model of constant expansion, into ever shrinking markets, had undermined traditional competition. As giant "superstores" became ubiquitous, even local institutions, to say nothing of small time operators, had no draw on loyalty that could compensate the customer for convenience, speed, and accessibility. These oversized new national players also compromised the integrity of even the most venerable American publishers, with sweetheart bulk-discounts and preferential delivery-dates that ruined the relationships, carefully cultivated for decades, between the publishers and booksellers. From the publishers' perspective, at least among the biggest players, whatever the short-term economic benefits of all those huge initial orders, in the long term, the control by these retail behemoths of the backlist that had traditionally sustained the book business -- control exercised by nationally coordinated returns, centralized buying and a new emphasis on turnover, ultimately determining which backlist titles would live or die -- helped to transform what had been the publishers' primary resource into a liability. More than any internal development in publishing, we owe the triumph of the bestseller over the backlist to the corporate sellers. So, twenty years ago, even ten, there would not have been a bookseller, an editor, or small publisher at least, in the United States, who would not have publicly, or at least privately, expressed some relief to see such a tyrant falter and fall.

That's what they did. What we did, those of us still working in independent bookstores, was react -- when we finally did -- largely just as the strategic planners at the big chains probably had predicted we would: insisting that our customers didn't care how expensive books might be so long as we did everything else so much better: things like customer service, special orders, community relations and stocking and selling the backlist. Well, our customers did and do care about the outrageous cost of books in America, and clearly, we didn't do everything, or even most things, any better than we ever had, which wasn't very well, and we certainly didn't do enough, or do it soon enough, to keep up with all the changes in a technologically advancing marketplace. Turns out, they were better at addressing most of that than we were. The list of our sins, both of omission and commission, would probably be at least as long as that of the big chains, and in the end, no more forgivable, if the goal was staying in business, anyway. Not to rehearse the whole sorry history, but it might be important, just here, to at least acknowledge our own culpability in supporting an increasingly corrupt system of publishing that overproduced indifferently made and or inferior books, sold them at inflated prices, and in inflated numbers to retailers, without any immediate consequences for us, as we just returned all the junk that didn't sell, and then ordered more junk to replace it. We insisted, right up almost to the end, that our experience and taste, our professionalism and our loyalty to the literary heritage would save us. It hasn't, and it was perhaps less true than we still like to tell ourselves. The proof? Well, when we still had the power to influence things like the price of a paperback classic and to protest the millions wasted on the promotion of inferior goods, we either didn't do much of anything or at least not enough to support fair prices and better standards and we actively participated in profiting from the decline of quality in what we sold even as we insisted we were only doing it so as to keep Austen on the shelf.

(Worth noting just how few writers, at least initially, shared in this industry distrust of the new corporate model. Most that I knew were thrilled to find themselves on the shelves in a national chain, to be invited to read in such handsomely appointed settings, to not have to deal directly with the prejudices and eccentricities of individual bookstores. More than one writer of my acquaintance, finding a new Borders or Barnes & Noble opening in their home-town, was glad to extol the virtues of better lighting, better coffee, and softer chairs, then only found in these new palaces of books. Must have been thrilling. Even as the independents who might have hand-sold a writer's first efforts, folded all around them, couldn't really blame most writers for being glad of the opportunity to be featured nationally. It seems to me that other than a few radicals with established cult followings, the contented local writers writing exclusively for local audiences, and Stephen King, there were no real critics of the new system among the professional writers, until, that is, they saw their own backlist disappearing onto the remainder tables. Must have been, I'm sure, but I don't remember them. Likewise now, I would be hard pressed to find a serious novelist or established genre writer who hasn't eagerly embraced the new technology of ebooks and the rapidly expanding model of direct deals with online retailers. Can't blame them. Must seem a perfect solution to the taxing hassle of selling books to agents, editors and publishers for only a small percentage of the profits, if any, realized by even established writers from most books published in the United States. Remains to be seen, I suppose, just how this new way of publishing will ultimately serve to sustain an individual writer's readership if and when a reputation might be made only in the wider democracy online, without editors, booksellers, publishers' reps, local newspaper and national reviewers, and all the other "middlemen" who's business it has traditionally been to support our best writers. Just imagine, having nothing but the amateur Amazon recommendation, social media and a blog or two, no bigger than this, from which to cobble together a writer's character. Sounds like very hard work. )

At first, that note of reserve in the almost daily updates on Borders' financial crisis in the books press struck me as hypocritical. Like some aging grand dame, well past her best days, but by no means willing to abandon her place at the ball entirely to the inexplicable popularity of these boisterous and flashy "new people," one sensed that watching one of the dominant parvenus slip into embarrassment, while deeply satisfying, was almost, but not quite, beneath the dignity of any notice at all beyond a plain and withering recitation of the bare facts. No further comment really required, dear, saw it coming for years now. There was also the distinct possibility that it wouldn't do to gloat, because first, one now had so few contemporaries left to appreciate the delicious irony, and then the unhappy fact of being none too confident in one's own ability still to get up even the energy required to dance on a grave.

All of which makes the actual response among the booksellers I know to the news of Borders' failure all the more interesting. Privately, I have not heard a single coworker who still remembers, as I do, days gone by, say anything on this subject that mightn't be said, if not in the actual presence of the Board of Directors, or whoever is still nominally in charge of Borders, then certainly before their unhappy employees. Without actually having much sympathy for the investors in Borders, I'd have to say that the response of most independent booksellers to the failure of the company has been surprisingly decent, under the circumstances. The truth of the matter is, I suspect, that while none of us would be prepared to see anything but justice in the closing of no less then two hundred Borders stores -- presumably in just the sorts of places where Borders drove the Independents out a decade or more ago -- none of us now looks for anything much in the way of bookstores, independent or otherwise, to replace them. True, there have been one or two stories recently of independent operators setting up shop in the abandoned mall stores that used to be Walden Books, but the trend would seem to be all together otherwise; when the chains go from most places, so go books. In a time and an atmosphere when our public libraries are often the first casualties of the economic pressures to reduce any opportunities for poor people to access anything other than popular, corporately produced entertainment and news, and when the influence of so called cultural elites -- meaning an educated and politically sophisticated, meaning liberal, middle class -- is under relentless attack from the shills of the Right in this country, those of us still peddling books might do well to not crow too loudly when the entertainment divisions of international corporate conglomerates decide to largely walk away from the book business all but all together. So, we haven't, much.

Besides, just how grateful ought we to be to regain some measure of the ground we lost, when that property has been so thoroughly exhausted by irresponsible husbandry, absentee landlords and locals alike?

And then of course there is the irrelevance of nearly all of this industry tumult and soap opera in the face of the new technology and the online retailers whose business it would seem to be to do away with the selling of physical books all together. Makes everyone a little skittish about being smug, that does.

Nevertheless, when, in the next week or so, Borders finally goes to court to file for protection from its creditors, however sympathetic I might be personally to the employees who stand to lose their jobs, and however the collapse of one of the biggest national retailers of books might presage further unhappy news for booksellers in general, I think it safe to say I will not be among the mourners, but I won't feel much like dancing either. We'd better see to our own doorsteps.

What, after all, did the big chains do, for the most part, but do what we did better, faster, and more profitably, for awhile anyway? We would do well to mind our business, and profit from the example of what they, and we, did wrong, as well as what they did right. We still in the book business, at every level from corporate giants to small presses, from major retailers to mom & pop operations, from professional writers to weekend online reviewers, might do well to meditate, at least for a day or two, on the sin of hubris. There but for the grace...

Besides, as Oscar said, "Always forgive your enemies; nothing annoys them so much."