Wal-Mart is driving small-town Americans away from books, despite its literacy-related donations.
Part I of this three-part series bemoaned the disgraceful movie-to-book ratio in the Waltons’ typical big box. I also suggested that the MacArthur-funded Caravan project and others could team up to use new technology to strengthen indie bookstores in small-town
E and POD efforts already happening
Caravan is already encouraging the use of both e-books and print on demand to help retailers in general. But why not also a related campaign focused on assistance for small town indies? Ahead are specific ideas for Caravan and allies, and in Part III I’ll offer some for Wal-Mart, which ideally could coordinate its efforts with Caravan’s.
Both MacArthur and the ABA-endorsed Caravan should look ahead to the era of decentralized print on demand—rather than expecting shoppers to wait for books to arrive via mail from Lightning Source. That’s a nice, obvious start, but not enough for the long term. I also want to see indies able to create print on demand books in formats beyond “Large Print Paperback (shipping required).”
Encouragingly, a Washington Post article mentions future in-store kiosks for printing on the spot, and I hope that this happens along with the involvement of many more publishers and a wider variety of E and P formats. Tradition-bound houses should remember the huge number of returned books—which print on demand can reduce—and the possibility of reaching new markets in small towns and elsewhere. Yes, these arrangements need to make business sense to publishers, as Sara Nelson has wisely pointed out; but with enough volume, POD could pay off for them.
IndiE as an improver of small-town life
What’s more, I hope that MacArthur or another foundation actually will go on to complement Caravan by funding a major, systematic campaign to preserve small-town bookstores. The IndiE campaign, as I’ll call it, could even encourage the opening of new bookstores in small towns, with decentralized print on demand and other modern wrinkles integrated. Some of the baby independents might start up in urban areas, too—in book-starved neighborhoods not served by the chains or existing indies.
Perhaps IndiE could act in partnership with ABA and banking organization and financial companies to ease the way for finding, screening, financing and preparing the new proprietors, in addition to helping existing owners adapt to the Google-zon era.
No, the issue isn’t just setting up a print on demand machine (example here) while stocking paper copies of the popular titles. It also means promoting books and authors, especially local ones—ideally in cooperation with local libraries and Friends of the Library-type groups.
I can even see certain of the reborn small-town bookstores selling and supporting e-book reading devices–not all English lit majors are technophobes.
Maybe publishing, too
Perhaps in some cases these reinvented little indies could even publish books, E and P, working with librarians, academics and others to maintain quality. Large publishers could pick up the very best titles. Whether or not that happened, writers could more easily reach the readers most interested in them—those living nearby–and new audiences could develop for local histories. Certainly little indies could cooperate with genealogical societies as well.
Meanwhile here’s an obvious idea for towns too small to support even a little indie bookstore—use of print on demand to bring literature to copy shops or even bookstores. Are any national copy chains open to this scenario, assuming it isn’t about to happen already?
As much as I believe in E, I’m confident that P will be with us a long time despite the doomsayers.
That’s especially true in under-wired rural areas where most people today would rather get the majority of their reading in P. Let’s not forget them.
Meanwhile, in Part III, I’ll offer specific suggestions on ways in which Wal-Mart itself could help books and small-town indies in particular. Despite “Bypass” in the title of this series, Wal-Mart indeed has a role to play—but ideally one much more supportive of books.
