bricks and mortar

[aamcnamara]

Today, my morning class got out early, so I walked over to the bookstore just across the street from campus. I was looking for matociquala's Chill, though not really expecting to find it. I did not find it. I approached the friendly woman at the desk, who looked it up for me in their database and said, Oh yes, we just put in our last order for the week, but we can have it for you by the middle of next week. It's this much. What's your name? Telephone number?

Just like that, next week, after I have finished my papers and exams, I will have a copy of Chill waiting for me.

So here is my question. It might be a silly question, but I am wholly serious in asking it.

Why don't more people order books through their bookstores?

Okay, yes, Amazon is helpful for small presses, for obscure books, for things which are out of print. And I get that a lot of people in rural areas, in places where there aren't any independent bookstores, etc., don't exactly have this option. That is understandable.

But I am under the impression that, a lot of the time, that is not what Amazon is used for.

Get this, O children of the 21st century: I am putting money into a local independent bookstore. It is just as handy, maybe even more so under my particular circumstances, than ordering it from Amazon or Borders or Barnes & Noble.

And? I did not even have to pay shipping.

Dear people of previous generations: what exactly is it which is so handy about ordering online? Is it just novelty? Do warehouses run out of books a lot? Did I just hit upon a book which happened to be available? What are the factors which made everyone converge suddenly on this option?

The confusion of my generation thanks you.

Comments

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

If I order through a bookstore, I have to go out to a bookstore to get it. If I order it online (whether it's from Amazon or Powell's or ABE or whoever), the book comes right to my house.

I'm not rural. But it would be a 20 minute drive up to True Colors (which used to be Amazon Bookstore) or Dreamhaven, 25 to Uncle Hugo's/Uncle Edgar's or Wild Rumpus. And I can't drive. With the vertigo, I can't even take the bus by myself, and taking a cab by myself has some major drawbacks/risks about getting from the cab to the inside of wherever I'm going, never mind costing money. And in at least three of the above locations, there are difficulties for me getting around inside the store--Uncle Hugo's, for example, is nearly unnavigable for those with vertigo due to the piles of back stock nobody wants all over the floor.

With free shipping offers and discounting offers and coupons and this and that, ordering online is often no more expensive in money. But it frees me from having to say to someone else, "Please run me on this errand." It is an independence factor for me.

Also--and I don't feel as firmly on this point--when an independent bookstore consistently doesn't stock anything I want, the impetus for me to support them goes way, way down. This is less a factor with the stores I've listed, each of whom has gotten some of my money in the last two years, than with other independents I've known. What is the value to me in having a brick-and-mortar bookstore that only carries the bestsellers and special interest books for interests I don't have? Why should I put the extra time into going out to the bookstore, telling them what I want, and returning to pick it up? (Or using the phone to order and then going to pick it up--I hate the phone.) Not just any independent will do.

It's not novelty to me--I've been ordering online my entire adult life. And I don't think you've hit upon the rare case where a book was in stock in a warehouse. I do think that "the independent bookstore was right across the street and was not an undue amount of effort compared to my schedule for the week, and I already had warm fuzzy feelings about this bookstore" may be a pretty unusual combination, though.

Also, I don't like other people. I mean, I loved my bookstore clerk at The Other Change of Hobbit, when we still lived out there and he was still employed there, before he got fired for haranguing people who bought the new Orson Scott Card book. But other than him, I have at best found it to be neutral to have to put my book requests through other live human beings and make sure they were looking under the right thing and spelling it correctly, and often it's worse than neutral for me.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

I just picked up the three new SF mmpbs at the top of my to-read pile: three authors, three publishers, three subgenres.

Two of them had ads in the back.

None of the ads was an order form.

Go check the books from before the late '90s. Almost all the mmpbs have order forms in the back for getting those books directly from the publisher. If ordering books directly from an independent bookstore was easy for many/most people in the pre-Amazon days, I don't think you'd have seen as much of that because now that it is easy, the publishers have dispensed with it. There are ads, but not order forms. To my way of thinking, if the order forms were making them money, they'd have kept up with them, and the order forms would not have been making them money if it had been as easy as you're thinking to just go through a local bookstore.

I may be missing some factor for why people stopped ordering directly from the publisher, but I think it was their last resort. Certainly the person I know who did the most direct-ordering seems to have stopped when he moved to a location where he could actually get what he wanted in stores.

[jennygadget.livejournal.com]

"Go check the books from before the late '90s. Almost all the mmpbs have order forms in the back for getting those books directly from the publisher."

I'd totally forgotten those! :) I'm pretty sure I never used them though. I think the only books my fmaily ever ordered pre-internet were the Valu-Tales.