Yesterday’s PW Daily has a story from Claire Kirch about a Chicago bookstore using MySpace to boost business. With revenues dwindling, the owners of Women & Children First posted a series of articles on their home page last week, explaining “why feminist bookstores are culturally essential” and “how you can help insure the future of feminist bookselling in Chicago.” According to Kirch, the resulting influx of customers led to the store’s best weekend since Christmas, including a huge increase in online orders.
Among the arguments raised by W&CF’s owners on their blog was a claim that e-commerce outlets like Amazon.com were responsible for the financial failure of several independent publishers. “Think of it this way,” they wrote. “The less often people actually go into real bookstores to browse, the less likely they are to stumble across the work of one of these authors and the more likely, then, that the author will fall into obscurity, and with it, our culture, our history, our feminist presses, our feminist bookstores.” This, it may be observed, runs contrary to the “Long Tail” theory, which suggests that decoupling books from the inventories at physical bookstore locations would allow publishers to keep production costs down and thus make more books available. So who’s right? I don’t imagine that argument will be resolved any time soon…