Over the past several years, our academic lives have become increasingly digitized. Yet, even when something is posted online for a class, the majority of students prefer to print it out for reading. For most people, pixels on a screen remain an unsatisfactory alternative to the physical immediacy of paper and books.
There are so many ways to acquire books these days. You have your chain stores, like Barnes & Noble, and you can buy books online via sites like Amazon. For textbooks, our very own Columbia Bookstore is also a convenient destination. Yet quite a few professors, especially those in the humanities, seem to favor Book Culture, the independent alternative on 112th Street.
As if to comfort the students who just had to walk three extra blocks to get their required reading, the store has a poster at the exit saying: “Thanks for shopping at Book Culture. Here’s what you just did!” followed by a list of things for customers to feel good about.
First of all, they say buying local is good for the environment. I know that’s true for food, but it may not necessarily be true for books. Yes, buying them from the Internet involves higher transportation costs, but if you have both a Barnes & Noble and an indie in your neighborhood, how much of a difference does going to one or the other make to the environment? Book Culture is doing a service to the environment in one way, at least—its policy of buying back used books encourages reuse.
The store’s list continues by noting that Book Culture benefits the community by giving the neighborhood a distinct character in contrast to the monotony of chains. Over a period of time, the employees at the store also tend to know their customers more and are able to better suit their needs. It is not at all uncommon to see customers and employees discussing and suggesting new books to each other.
However, if it weren’t for the fact that ten is such a nice round number, I think they could do away with the other justifications altogether. These are the reasons that I agree with 100 percent—by supporting independent bookstores, we are supporting private enterprise and encouraging competition. In the long run, this will lower prices and, more importantly, widen the variety of ideas represented, which should be considered the eternal goal of the book-selling profession.
As large-scale dispensers of information to the public, bookstores are similar to TV stations, radio, newspapers etc. in that they have a considerable amount of power over which ideas get represented and which do not. For that reason, it would be a pretty bad idea to allow all that control to be concentrated in the hands of a few big companies. That’s not to say that independent bookstores don’t have their own biases and preferences also. Book Culture, after all, has a whole section dedicated to Marxism, and at the famous Strand Bookstore downtown, most books recommended by staff are ones that criticize American imperialism. But the reality of their precarious existence and need to remain competitive keep independent bookstores somewhat unbiased, requiring them to appeal to a wide range of tastes.
Throughout their history, independent booksellers have been an important force in the development of literature and counterculture, cultivating the works of independent authors and poets. For example, Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg largely owe their celebrity to independent booksellers. In the wake of the Iranian government’s fatwa against Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses, many major chains across the country withdrew the book from their shelves. An independent store in Berkeley, Calif. was firebombed for having Verses in its display window. After the damage was repaired, the employees unanimously decided to continue stocking the controversial book.
With the advent of new technologies and ways of disseminating information, it remains to be seen how both independent and chain bookstores will deal with the many challenges that they face. Book Culture has been fortunate enough to garner the support of a considerable portion of the Columbia faculty, but “buy local” rhetoric aside, Book Culture’s true value resides in its function as an alternative outlet for interesting and underrepresented ideas and not merely as a stockpile of books that Columbia professors want you to read.
The author is a Columbia College first-year.
