The doom and gloom continues as the LA Times’ David Streitfield looks at the year that was in independent bookselling, marked by multiple closures, declining sales and uncertain futures. It’s a good piece that tracks how book nuts have been lured online and its “buy whatever whenever” policy, often at the lowest prices. “Why would anyone want to perpetuate small independents by paying higher prices?” wondered Curtis Faville, a poet who sells rare books on the Internet. “Most of these proud little independents were poorly run anyway.” Less harshly, poet and blogger Ron Silliman suggested in an e-mail that “we’re simultaneously caught in the wonder of the new and true mourning for the losses of the old.”