The Local Book Store is Dead!

That title is kind of an overstatement, but still....  I realised today that an institution I have been very fond of is no longer what it used to be and I'm sad.  This has been coming for a long time and I should have realized.  Today was just the day it hit me. 

To put today in context, I need to explain something and it's special enough to put in fancy letters:

Our daughter wrote a novel and today is the official publication date!!!

 David and I are just a wee, tiny bit proud....  😊

In case anyone is reading this and doesn't know our family, I will protect our daughter's privacy by referring to her by her pseudonym, which is Ada Hoffmann.   Her book is called "The Outside". I read an advanced copy of the first couple of chapters and it was about interesting characters in an interesting Sci Fi world and crazy things were happening and I can't wait to find out what will happen next!

So this afternoon we drove over to our local version of a big book chain. 

This store happens to be a new one, part of a renovated section of a local mall.  We used to patronize their old store, which was huge, and there were lots of helpful people in there who wanted to help us find things and get ideas.  I have never forgotten a year when our youngest child was in Grade 8 and we wanted to find him some new books for his birthday.  I wandered into the old store and started browsing the "young adult" section and an employee immediately saw me and asked if she could help me find something.  I told her I was browsing for ideas and she asked a couple of questions about our son and what he'd been reading and she said "oh, if he likes those I bet he'll like...." and started pulling books off the shelves.  I chose several of them and it was a very successful birthday.  That's what book stores are supposed to be like -- a place where you can browse and get suggestions and generally share the love of books.

This new store is less than half of the size of the old one and a great deal of its space was devoted to knick-knacks and cutesy stuff, some of it relating to books and some having nothing to do with books.  It was almost like the bookshelves were afterthoughts.  We ran to the rather small Science Fiction section and looked for the H's.  Not a single copy of this novel or her previous book of short stories.  (It would have been really cool too, because she would have come right after Heinlein!!!)  I thought maybe books didn't always arrive in the stores by the official dates, or maybe we weren't looking in the right place, so we talked to a very bored clerk.  She said basically "oh yeah, I don't know if we're going to stock that".  We said "she's a local author" and she said "we usually don't stock local authors unless they reach out to us".  It was almost like she was stifling a yawn while waiting to go back to selling t-shirts.  She directed us to the little computer where we could order our copies -- just like we could have done from home. 

I'm probably being a little ridiculous about this.  We'll get our copies pretty soon and it will be exciting to read them, and that's what really matters.  I understand that Internet shopping is changing everything and it is a great convenience.  To be perfectly honest, this new book store has been open for months and I'd never been in there before.  Usually we hear about books online or from friends and order them online.  I haven't been supporting local book stores, so I'm part of the problem.  Why should I have expected that that wonderful sort of big book store I remembered would be there waiting for me when I decided to go back?  And maybe with the Internet we don't actually need that kind of great big book store anymore.  Still, I wasn't ready to walk into that store and find something so different from what I had expected.

I guess you can't have your cake and eat it too.  The online "bookstores" make it so much easier to order books by new authors that not every store might carry.  

There is still a little independent book store downtown, run by people who love to read books and help people find good books to read.  We're going to patronize it more in the future and consider ordering books through them instead of from the big names if they get a cut.  Even if their books cost a little more than books from the big box store we would like to do business with a place that offers real service and gives back to the community.

And the good news is that you can still get a copy of Ada's book no matter where you live.  You might have to go online, but it's available everywhere.