The Last Bookstore

[Heradel]

Not really that surprising with the way things are going, but this is still pretty sad.

LAREDO, Texas – The final chapter has been written for the lone bookstore on the streets of Laredo.
With a population of nearly a quarter-million people, this city could soon be the largest in the nation without a single bookseller.
The situation is so grim that schoolchildren have pleaded for a reprieve from next month's planned shutdown of the B. Dalton bookstore. After that, the nearest store will be 150 miles away in San Antonio.
The B. Dalton store was never a community destination with comfy couches and an espresso bar, but its closing will create a literary void in a city with a high illiteracy rate. Industry analysts and book associations could not name a larger American city without a single bookseller.

I was lucky to grow up in a place with a really, really good library system (and am going to college in a place with a world-class one), but there's something very sad about only being able to buy books online or at in that little slice of aisle in some supermarkets. I'm sure we all have stories about happing on a book on a shelf (Hitchhiker's and 2001 for me), so I hope the library system there is a good one. There's something random-access about Libraries and Newspapers we haven't been able to replicate online yet, to our detriment.

[Glacier Gruff]

Not really surprising, but sad nonetheless.

A friend that is an even more voracious reader than myself, if such a thing is possible, is taking a literature class at the moment.  The professor is a fan of sci-fi and fantasy, and the final piece of reading for the class will be Neil Gaiman's "American Gods."

The professor asked the class which of them read, or were readers.  Less than half of the class responded in the affirmative.  When asked to name their favorite short stories, a portion of students named television shows or movies.  One named Cinderella but was speaking of the Disney animated movie, not the story which involved impromptu foot surgery in someone's attempt to make a shoe fit.  That story was apparently unknown to them.

The city I live in is not large by Lower '48 standards, but we do have several options for books.  We have a large Barnes & Noble which was built in the last several years and is rather nice.  We also have a combination used/new book store named Gulliver's Books which handles special orders in prompt fashion if you cannot find what you're looking for on the shelves.  Despite initial moanings about how the big chain book store would crush them, I think they're doing better for its presence, at least when it comes to used books.  For many years I nearly had the sci-fi/fantasy used book section memorized, due to the low influx of new used books.  That situation has changed now, thanks to B&N.  It also forced Gulliver's to step up their game in the new book department as well.

We also have a non-profit used book store called Forget-Me-Not Books, which helps to fund local literacy programs.  While not a true competitor to either of the previously mentioned stores, they do provide another option.

The sci-fi/fantasy section at our local Fred Meyer's stores used to be good as well, but of late they have been nearly half-overrun by Laurell K. Hamilton clones.  One can only tolerate so many leather-wearing female half-vampire/half-succubus/half-werewolf/half-witch/half-druid kickers of evil arse.  Can't have them be whole anything, it wouldn't be edgy then, don'tcha know?

I still manage to pick up some decent sci-fi/fantasy there from the uncontaminated half of the shelves, especially when they have one of their "Buy Two Paperbacks, Get One Free!" sales, which occur quite frequently.

If the market demands it, someone will step in to fill the book store niche in that town.  It just might be in a form other than that of the chain stores.

[Boggled Coriander]

I've heard the news about Laredo, and it utterly astounds me. 

I grew up near Bangor, Maine, population 31,473.  It's a tiny fraction of Laredo's size, even if you add in all the nearby towns - Wikipedia gives the population of the whole area as 148,000. 

But it supports a fairly big Borders in its commercial center, and a couple of smaller chain bookshops like Mr. Paperback.  The University of Maine, just a short drive north of Bangor, has a fairly good campus bookstore.  And the last time I was home, I was astonished and delighted to find not one but several excellent new and used bookstores in Bangor's historic downtown area, that I hadn't even realized existed.

So what's up with Laredo?  Do Mainers just read more than Texans?  Is there a socioeconomic explanation?  The article mentions a high illiteracy rate.

[Glacier Gruff]

It seems that there are those that read in Laredo.

http://www.pro8news.com/news/local/81822422.html

I did a search on "B. Dalton closing" and turned up several related articles.  It seems that the entire sub-chain of B&N is being shut down, with the last fifty to be closed this month.  So it is not that Laredo doesn't want a book store, but that the only one they have is being shut down as part of a larger streamlining process. 

Of course there are many factors relating to how well they did or didn't do.  I found what Boggled Coriander said about Maine to be interesting, and it roused my curiousity about the population density surrounding Bangor, Maine.  We're rather tightly packed where I live, relatively speaking, with the next major city being hundreds of kilometer to the South, though some of the areas people used to commute to Anchorage from have grown into cities in their own right.

I would like to see a survey tracking the sale of books in conjunction with regional climate and weather, especially as related to the shifting of the seasons.  One article I read said that people from my State read four times more than the average American, and people from my area of the State read four times more on average than the rest of the people in the State.  Given our climate and the length of our Winters I don't find that at all surprising, but I don't know that I would read less in a more temperate clime as I tend to do more of my reading in the Summer, short though it may be.

Our B&N did do enough research before moving in so that they apparently realized the local readership rather enjoys being indoors and reading as an escape from the cold.  While our store has the B&N Cafe to supply you with soup, sandwiches, desserts, and coffee drinks, they also have a scattering of comfy chairs (cue Cardinal Fang), including a ring of them surrounding a large fireplace that does radiate some wonderful heat, though I believe it is a faux fireplace operating on natural gas.  So nice is it that one must often be quick to acquire a seat around said fireplace, and the store was forced to put up signs insisting that there not be any hibernation undertaken in that area.