Farhad Manjoo recently wrote a provocative article for Slate
in which he argued that we shouldn’t support our local independent
bookstores. According to Manjoo, “buying books on Amazon is better for
authors, better for the economy, and better for you.” Those are
fighting words!
You may have heard of Amazon’s recent promotion.
If you walked into a retail outlet and used Amazon’s app to buy that
product through Amazon, they would give you a 5 percent discount. That
was good for Amazon, but bad for everyone else—especially the
salesperson who used some of his time to tell you all about that
product. Not surprisingly, this promotion generated a lot of anger.
This caught Manjoo’s attention and got him thinking about local bookstores. He looks at a New York Times op-ed penned by Richard Russo and says this:
Rather than focus on the ways that Amazon’s promotion would harm businesses whose demise might actually be a cause for alarm (like a big-box electronics store that hires hundreds of local residents), Russo hangs his tirade on some of the least efficient, least user-friendly, and most mistakenly mythologized local establishments you can find: independent bookstores. Russo and his novelist friends take for granted that sustaining these cultish, moldering institutions is the only way to foster a “real-life literary culture,” as writer Tom Perrotta puts it. Russo claims that Amazon, unlike the bookstore down the street, “doesn’t care about the larger bookselling universe” and has no interest in fostering “literary culture.” Keep Reading >>>
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