Independent Bookstore Quotes

Acknowledgements With grateful thanks to the three least-appreciated and hardest-working proselytizers of the written word: independent bookstores, librarians, and teachers.

Don't patronize the chain bookstores. Every time I see some author scheduled to read and sign his books at a chain bookstore, I feel like telling him he's stabbing the independent bookstores in the back.

When the web started, I used to get really grumpy with people because they put my poems up. They put my stories up. They put my stuff up on the web. I had this belief, which was completely erroneous, that if people put your stuff up on the web and you didn’t tell them to take it down, you would lose your copyright, which actually, is simply not true. And I also got very grumpy because I felt like they were pirating my stuff, that it was bad. And then I started to notice that two things seemed much more significant. One of which was… places where I was being pirated, particularly Russia where people were translating my stuff into Russian and spreading around into the world, I was selling more and more books. People were discovering me through being pirated. Then they were going out and buying the real books, and when a new book would come out in Russia, it would sell more and more copies. I thought this was fascinating, and I tried a few experiments. Some of them are quite hard, you know, persuading my publisher for example to take one of my books and put it out for free. We took “American Gods,” a book that was still selling and selling very well, and for a month they put it up completely free on their website. You could read it and you could download it. What happened was sales of my books, through independent bookstores, because that’s all we were measuring it through, went up the following month three hundred percent. I started to realize that actually, you’re not losing books. You’re not losing sales by having stuff out there. When I give a big talk now on these kinds of subjects and people say, “Well, what about the sales that I’m losing through having stuff copied, through having stuff floating out there?” I started asking audiences to just raise their hands for one question. Which is, I’d say, “Okay, do you have a favorite author?” They’d say, “Yes.” and I’d say, “Good. What I want is for everybody who discovered their favorite author by being lent a book, put up your hands.” And then, “Anybody who discovered your favorite author by walking into a bookstore and buying a book raise your hands.” And it’s probably about five, ten percent of the people who actually discovered an author who’s their favorite author, who is the person who they buy everything of. They buy the hardbacks and they treasure the fact that they got this author. Very few of them bought the book. They were lent it. They were given it. They did not pay for it, and that’s how they found their favorite author. And I thought, “You know, that’s really all this is. It’s people lending books. And you can’t look on that as a loss of sale. It’s not a lost sale, nobody who would have bought your book is not buying it because they can find it for free.” What you’re actually doing is advertising. You’re reaching more people, you’re raising awareness. Understanding that gave me a whole new idea of the shape of copyright and of what the web was doing. Because the biggest thing the web is doing is allowing people to hear things. Allowing people to read things. Allowing people to see things that they would never have otherwise seen. And I think, basically, that’s an incredibly good thing.

The course of urban development in America is pushing the individual toward that line seperating proud independence from pitiable isolation.

We are readers. Books are an essential part of our lives and of our life stories. For us, reading isn’t just a hobby or a pastime; it’s a lifestyle. We’re the kind of people who understand the heartbreak of not having your library reserves come in before you leave town for vacation and the exhilaration of stumbling upon the new Louise Penny at your local independent bookstore three whole days before the official publication date. We know the pain of investing hours of reading time in a book we enjoyed right up until the final chapter’s truly terrible resolution, and we know the pleasure of stumbling upon exactly the right book at exactly the right time.

He talked about the book industry as if it were a dragon that was chained in the basement, and would tear us limb from limb at any moment.

He’s a genius with my Prius,” says the co-owner of Left Bank Books, the town’s independent bookstore. The

You may have heard the news that the independent bookstore is dead, that books are dead, that maybe even reading is dead—to which I say, Pull up a chair, friend. I have a story to tell.

So Lydia grew up with a mother who emphasized the importance of being independent and saving for the future. A mother who had loaned her the money to open her bookstore. Though Lydia had been grateful, she’d never imagined that her mother’s eccentricity might one day save her life.

Independent bookstore are a valuable asset to any city, town or village. They offer us the latest literary releases, a meeting point where authors share their work and meet new readers and fans. They offer us a rich ‘bookish’ environment in which to browse before we buy. I love to sip coffee and leaf through my new purchase. I can be sure that independent booksellers know their stock, they suggest new authors and broaden my reading. Along with public libraries they are key to our communities.

Let me be candid. If I had to rank book-acquisition experiences in order of comfort, ease, and satisfaction, the list would go like this: 1. The perfect independent bookstore, like Pygmalion in Berkeley. 2. A big, bright Barnes & Noble. I know they’re corporate, but let’s face it—those stores are nice. Especially the ones with big couches. 3. The book aisle at Walmart. (It’s next to the potting soil.) 4. The lending library aboard the U.S.S. West Virginia, a nuclear submarine deep beneath the surface of the Pacific. 5. Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore.

Sublime Books The Known World, by Edward P. Jones The Buried Giant, by Kazuo Ishiguro A Thousand Trails Home, by Seth Kantner House Made of Dawn, by N. Scott Momaday Faithful and Virtuous Night, by Louise Glück The Left Hand of Darkness, by Ursula K. Le Guin My Sentence Was a Thousand Years of Joy, by Robert Bly The World Without Us, by Alan Weisman Unfortunately, It Was Paradise, by Mahmoud Darwish Collected Fictions, by Jorge Luis Borges, trans. Andrew Hurley The Xenogenesis Trilogy, by Octavia E. Butler Map: Collected and Last Poems, by Wisława Szymborska In the Lateness of the World, by Carolyn Forché Angels, by Denis Johnson Postcolonial Love Poem, by Natalie Diaz Hope Against Hope, by Nadezhda Mandelstam Exhalation, by Ted Chaing Strange Empire, by Joseph Kinsey Howard Tookie’s Pandemic Reading Deep Survival, by Laurence Gonzales The Lost City of the Monkey God, by Douglas Preston The House of Broken Angels, by Luis Alberto Urrea The Heartsong of Charging Elk, by James Welch Selected Stories of Anton Chekhov, trans. Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky The Sound of a Wild Snail Eating, by Elisabeth Tova Bailey Let’s Take the Long Way Home, by Gail Caldwell The Aubrey/Maturin Novels, by Patrick O’Brian The Ibis Trilogy, by Amitav Ghosh The Golden Wolf Saga, by Linnea Hartsuyker Children of Time, by Adrian Tchaikovsky Coyote Warrior, by Paul VanDevelder Incarceration Felon, by Reginald Dwayne Betts Against the Loveless World, by Susan Abulhawa Waiting for an Echo, by Christine Montross, M.D. The Mars Room, by Rachel Kushner The New Jim Crow, by Michelle Alexander This Is Where, by Louise K. Waakaa’igan I Will Never See the World Again, by Ahmet Altan Sorrow Mountain, by Ani Pachen and Adelaide Donnelley American Prison, by Shane Bauer Solitary, by Albert Woodfox Are Prisons Obsolete?, by Angela Y. Davis 1000 Years of Joys and Sorrows, by Ai Weiwei Books contain everything worth knowing except what ultimately matters. —Tookie * * * If you are interested in the books on these lists, please seek them out at your local independent bookstore. Miigwech! Acknowledgments

Memorize only this page inside your local independent bookstore while sitting on the floor. Put it back in the sports section and buy Shoe Dog by Phil Knight instead. Then, quickly trade Shoe Dog for the trashed Gideon Bible in the Little Free Library right outside of the bookstore. Next, toss God’s Word in your backyard compost heap. Remember how much you like podcasts.

It’s a scientific fact that there are only a handful of jobs you’re allowed to have if you’re one of the leads in a romantic comedy: dog walker, architect, kindergarten teacher, cupcake chef, florist, special needs veterinarian, suspiciously well-paid magazine writer, and independent bookstore owner. So it stands to reason that the likelihood of meeting your soul mate in one is high.

And then she reverses direction and heads straight for Willesden Bookshop, an independent shop that rents space from the council and provides--no matter what Brent Council may claim--an essential local service. It is run by Helen. Helen is an essential local person. I would characterize her essentialness in the following way: 'Giving the people what they didn't know they wanted.' Important category.

And so many of the indies have partnered with Google to sell ebooks right from their own websites. These stores are embracing the “new technology” instead of hiding from it, because they realize it’s about the story, not the ink on paper. If you want ebooks, your local indie can sell you ebooks. If your local independent is hanging up posters saying that ebooks will kill everything, you should tag that bookstore as a favorite in your GPS doohickey. You’ll get great deals, because that store will have a going-out-of-business sale soon. Yes, even though you try to save it with a letter-writing campaign.

We -- editors, writers, teachers, publishers -- need to do whatever we can to enliven readers, to help create communities for them if we want to continue to have readers at all. Our independent bookstores are the front lines, and many booksellers are fighting the good fight. Here, books stimulate conversation. Conversation stimulates a sense of community. Listening happens. Thinking. The exchange of thoughts.

All he had ever wanted was to tell—in the best possible words, arranged in the best possible order—the stories inside him. He had been more than willing to do the apprenticeship and the work. He had been humble with his teachers and respectful of his peers. He had acceded to the editorial notes of his agent (when he’d had one) and bowed to the red pencil of his editor (when he’d had one) without complaint. He had supported the other writers he’d known and admired (even the ones he hadn’t particularly admired) by attending their readings and actually purchasing their books (in hardcover! at independent bookstores!) and he had acquitted himself as the best teacher, mentor, cheerleader, and editor that he’d known how to be, despite the (to be frank) utter hopelessness of most of the writing he was given to work with. And where had he arrived, for all of that? He was a deck attendant on the Titanic, moving the chairs around with fifteen ungifted prose writers while somehow persuading them that additional work would help them improve.

Jeffrey Makala, the friendly and astute rare-books and special collections librarian who will be my guide, confirms my opinion that librarians, along with independent-bookstore owners and dedicated middle- and high-school teachers, are the most selfless guardians of literature on earth.

maybe it’s working because I’m an author, and maybe it’s working because Karen works like life depends on this bookstore, or because we have a particularly brilliant staff, or because Nashville is a city that is particularly sympathetic to all things independent. Maybe we just got lucky. But my luck has made me believe that changing the course of the corporate world is possible. Amazon doesn’t get to make all the decisions; the people can make them by how and where they spend their money. If what a bookstore offers matters to you, then shop at a bookstore. If you feel that the experience of reading a book is valuable, then read the book. This is how we change the world: we grab hold of it. We change ourselves.

Just down the street from his apartment, Allen discovered the perfect independent bookstore. It was the first in the country to sell nothing but paperbacks. Until that time, cheap paperback books were not sold in “real” bookstores, but instead were relegated to spinning racks in drugstores and bus stations. They were usually stocked without any regard for the quality of the literature, and finding a good book was hit or miss. This particular bookstore had been founded in 1953 by Peter Martin, the publisher of a little magazine christened City Lights in honor of the Charlie Chaplin film of the same name. Martin had decided to open a store to subsidize the magazine, and while he was putting the sign over the door, a thirty-four-year-old man passed by and struck up a conversation.

The replacement of independent bookstores by firms such as Barnes & Noble, Waterstones or Borders superficially provided a wide range of reading, but their policies further limited choice.

Neil Gaiman originally took a strong stance against piracy. However, he noticed that in the countries where he was being pirated the most, such as Russia, sales were increasing, rather than decreasing. With some difficulty, he convinced his publisher to make American Gods a free download from their site for a month. Sales of that title through independent bookstores, which was the only data they could get, increased by 300%.

we found a room in a motel close to the hospital, the Mermaid Inn, a pink stucco affliction squeezed between a Starbucks and an independent bookstore.

about to commit an unspeakable betrayal. Noise inside the cabin indicated someone moving about. Instinctively, Tracy reached across her body and gripped the butt of her gun. Orr didn’t wait for the door to open. She pushed it in and called out, “Andrea?” Andrea Strickland had been smiling when Orr opened the door. That smile fell quickly, and her expression changed from bewilderment to the purest expression of pain and resignation. “I’m sorry,” Penny Orr said. So was Tracy. She now understood what Orr had been alluding to, why Andrea Strickland had been so desperate to get away. The inside of the small cabin looked like an independent bookstore that had outgrown its space. Stacks

The effect of Amazon’s monopsony in the book business is to constantly force authors and publishers to work for less money. In Bork’s view, as long as the customer gets lower prices, society should not care that writers cannot make a living, that independent bookstores go out of business, and that publishers die.

Between the passage of the ITFA and 2015, Amazon essentially managed to wipe out the local bookstore and, to some extent, the local record store from the American landscape. During those years, 2,300 independent bookstores (as well as the Borders chain) and 3,100 record stores closed their doors.

The cultural critic Leon Wieseltier angrily noted, “The streets of American cities are haunted by the ghosts of bookstores and record stores, which have been destroyed by the greatest thugs in the history of the culture industry.” The bitter irony is that Amazon noticed that a few independent bookstores in big cities were still thriving, so it decided to go into the bookstore business itself.

The demise of traditional print books has been a bit overblown," Jim Milliot, coeditorial director for Publishers Weekly magazine, told the Monitor in 2013. Now, it appears the same could be said of independent bookstores.

From a search of the sacred text itself, using a computerized King James Bible, available in Christian bookstores, we discover that the following words do not appear in the Bible: cooperate; cooperation; moral; traditional values; rational; rights; morals; independence; congress; compromise; progress; republic; republican; democrat; democracy; insight; morality; jury; vote; test; due process; consequences; coincidence; parliament; majority; minority; constitution; achievement; aspire; human; invention; explore; discovery; humanity; humanism; university; universe; homosexual; fairness; harmony; treaty; logic; sexuality; abort; abortion; fetus; poet; poetry; artist; creativity. [Editor’s note: As a matter of fact, the word ‘brain’ also is not to be found there either!] If the Bible is the foundation of morality and our way of life, we are in serious trouble indeed. If the ARCW is lost, we will have no need for those omitted words.

We’re not done yet,” he says, leading me next door to Book Smart, which is, in my opinion, the best independent book shop in the state. “We’re going to the bookstore?” I ask in a hushed whisper. “If that’s okay?” Oh, it’s more than okay.

First edition, too.I thought of you immediately.” “This is perfect, Gerry. Thank you.Nugget, why don’t you try to find something you would like as a treat while I talk to Gerry?” Luka smiled and wandered over to the children’s section.Gerry’s bookstore was a small, independent place with oiled wood shelving and books that weren’t just from the New York Times Bestseller List.Maia and Luka could spend hours in the store, and Gerry was solaid back, he never minded.With thestore so small, he and Maia could chat while keeping an eye on Luka. Maia paid for the Lem book and Luka’s treat, and they waved goodbye to Gerry, wishing him a happy holiday.They held hands, swinging them gently as they walked to the different stores.After an hour of strolling, Maia took Luka to a coffee shop and bought her some hot chocolate. Her phone rang as she was served with her tea, and Maia smiled gratefully at the waitress. “Hello?” “Hello darling, it’s me.” Maia smothered a grin.Who else? “Hey honey.” “I just wanted to remind you about the party tonight.” “I

And he could profit so much more easily off the land than doing the work to run an independent bookstore.

The return of the Independent Bookstore is the answer to the stack 'em high, sell 'em cheap megastores.