A Messy Love Triangle

James Patterson—bestselling author, savior of literature? Perhaps. Patterson leads Forbes Magazine’s list of the world’s top-earning authors and pledged this February to donate $1 million to the country’s independent bookstores. His words, as reported in the New York Times, were: “Our bookstores in America are at risk. Publishing and publishers as we’ve known them are at stake. To some extent the future of American literature is at stake.”

Patterson’s money supports about 50 booksellers nationwide; the profits from the sale of his books alone—51 New York Times Bestsellers among them—most likely dwarf his unprecedented gift. Adding the two figures, I’m sure that few, if any, other writers are as charitable to the vanishing breed of flesh-and-blood booksellers. And in turn, these booksellers are eager to tout the economic benefits of shopping at small and local businesses: IndieBound reminds consumers that of $100 spent locally, $68 remain circulating in the local economy, whereas the same sum spent at a chain store returns only $43 to the local economy. Customers of the Harvard Book Store will recognize this stat—it’s appended to and printed on each receipt.

Like most students at Harvard, I appreciate the value of a local bookstore, its artful display of tiles and eruditely curated inventory, the comforting smell of aging paper and the warmth I feel when stepping inside on a winter day. I have fond memories, too, from when I worked at Borders the summer before I came to Harvard. But now, Borders is closed—its URL redirects to its archrival Barnes & Noble—and my shelves are full of books I’ve purchased from Amazon.

What kind of traitor am I? I turned my own stomach a little bit after reading George Packer’s reportage-cum-bildungsroman of Amazon in The New Yorker. Suddenly all the deals I’d snagged and the money I’d saved seemed a bit dishonest. A steal!—a new copy of a two-volume Norton anthology for the price of one used volume at the COOP—well, now it did feel like a steal.

This is the downside of disruptive innovation. Amazon, an enterprise that was born digital, takes full advantage of what the Harvard Business Review calls the “Big Data Future.” Amazon offers the widest possible selection of books, goods, and services; the more I shop with them, the more they learn about me and what I want (even before I know that I want or need it). Local bookstores might learn my preferences after years of patronage, but their expertise remains book-centered. Chain bookstores seem to have the worst of it: inept utilization of data, impersonal scale, and a high cost of business maintaining hundreds or thousands of retail properties across the entire United States.

As a student and consumer, it’s my job to find the lowest price; as a resident of Cambridge, it’s also my job to support the local economy as best I can; and as a lover of literature, I feel a bond of loyalty to the publishers and authors that produce the books, the stories, the poems that have changed my life. That’s three conflicting directions pulling on me—the finale of a sappy reality show in which I must decide if I give a rose to Amazon, the suitor who suits my wallet, or to Harvard Book Store, the one I know best, or to Graywolf Press, the suave one who always says the right things?

It’s a choice between approaches, between enterprises that focus either on you or on books. Amazon, bless its heart, knows all about me but cares nothing about the contents of the books I buy. It won’t tell me that “Pnin” is better than “Lolita” or debate the merits and demerits of translators of Milosz, Szymborska, and Herbert. On the other hand, publishers can be distant—how can they know which book in their catalogue I’m dying to read? It seems, then, that the local bookseller is the middle path between extremes. And though they are declining, they are doing well enough—in 2011 Barnes & Noble held about 17 percent of the US book market while Amazon captured 23 percent of sales. Together, they account for only 40 percent of the market, which is significant but not monolithic—aspiring towards monopoly, yes, but not there yet.

Disruptive innovation has its upsides, maybe not for booksellers but certainly for authors. They can share their work widely, quickly, the auspices of fickle publishers, agents, and editors no longer required. (Though, truth be told, literary quality might suffer without that input.) There’s still space to be a thoughtful consumer and reader: Expenses of buying local can be balanced out with occasional one-click-shopping or a trip to the library. There’s cause for cautious optimism—with or without James Patterson.

Michael T. Feehly ’14 is a joint history and Scandinavian studies concentrator in Mather House. His column appears on alternate Thursdays.