Wake Up, Nevada County!
Why is it that some merchants on Broad Street in Nevada City are selling books in competition with all the local booksellers, especially with their immediate neighbor, Harmony Books?
Here’s an even more disturbing question:
Why is such a large volume of books being shipped from Amazon to local businesses and residents? The volume probably exceeds that of the bookstores’ own orders!
Wake Up!
One day in 2005, citizens of Bay Area Peninsula cities were suddenly shocked to discover that Kepler’s Books, a fixture on the peninsula since the 1950s, had shut its doors without warning. Only then did a hue and cry go up, and some local financial angels stepped forward to rescue the bookstore.
“I’ve been so humbled — to have a community say ‘we love what you do and we want to help you,’ ” said Clark Kepler, owner of Kepler’s Books and Magazines in Menlo Park, Calif. In 2005, his store, near the Stanford University campus, was one of the first to attract investors after struggling financially. Since then, Mr. Kepler has heard from at least a dozen other stores that were trying similar ways to stay alive. He has told them what his own investors were told: “This is an investment from the heart. Don’t do this if you expect to see this money again.”
From “Who’s Buying the Bookstore?“
Wake up! Don’t let that happen here.
Buy your books locally (from a bookstore!).
Order your books locally (from a bookstore!).
Keep the money in our community.
Keep the local bookstores alive.
5 thoughts on “Wake Up, Nevada County!”
Amazon is the future of books. It would be impossible to find the books I want any other way. I buy dozens a year form Amazon and few of them would be in the local book stores nor would they have the means for me to find them to order. To suggest I do otherwise is to suggest I forgo the knowledge I crave.
Soon paper books will be obsolete. Times have changed.
Greg
I find it extremely rare to run across a book that the local bookstore is unable to order, but somewhat common for it be more costly to order it locally.
Nevertheless, I try to order it locally — as a matter of principle — even when it sometimes costs me more.
Either you care about supporting the local bookstores, or you don’t.
By the way, personally I think the idea that paper books will become obsolete is a techno-fantasy.
Read James Kunstler’s World Made By Hand to glimpse one of the possible future worlds in which books will still exist as the primary repositories of human knowledge and civilization. It’s not a great literary achievement, as novels go, but it makes a point.
> I find it extremely rare to run across a book that the local bookstore is unable to order
Unable to *order*, yes. But at this point for me, as with Greg, it’s extremely rare that they’ll have it in stock.
And if I had to pay list price for the books I want to read, I wouldn’t be able to afford most of them – but used, through Amazon, I can.
I’ve ordered plenty of books from Amazon over the years. I’m just trying to be more aware of when I don’t absolutely need to.