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From: dm@BBN-VAX.ARPA
Newsgroups: net.sf-lovers
Subject: buying books from independents
Message-ID: <3893@topaz.RUTGERS.EDU>
Date: Thu, 3-Oct-85 13:16:17 EDT
Article-I.D.: topaz.3893
Posted: Thu Oct  3 13:16:17 1985
Date-Received: Sun, 6-Oct-85 05:31:18 EDT
Sender: daemon@topaz.RUTGERS.EDU
Organization: Rutgers Univ., New Brunswick, N.J.
Lines: 26

From: dm@BBN-VAX.ARPA


I'd like to echo David Levine's suggestion that you patronize the
independent booksellers.  When I travel it is incredibly depressing to
walk into a Waldenbooks or a B. Dalton's in a shopping center, and see
how few books there are, and how many of them are ``Garfield's Tofu Diet''
books, after the wealth of independents near where I live.

Something Mr. Levine didn't mention: recently publishers have begun to
say they will sell ONLY to the chains.  Avon books (considered a
high-brow publisher) recently announced they would not accept orders
for fewer than <n> copies of a single title, where <n> was a fairly
large number, so that now the only way independent bookstores can
order from Avon is to join cooperatives which pool the orders for
several independents.  This is kind of a curious policy for Avon, as
they publish a lot of books (e.g., their Latin-American series, with
Amado, Garcia-Marquez) which are the kind of books you go to an
independent to find.

This is just one more example of the shopping-mallification of our
society: every shopping mall in the country has a B Dalton's selling
exactly the same inventory of books, right next to the teeny-bopper
store with a cute name selling sleeveless sweatshirts with bright
pastel geometric shapes and the fancy chocolate shop and the record
store selling Aerosmith and Twisted Sister records ...


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