Law school dean Jeremy Paul is a guest contributor to UConn Today. His posts appear on Thursdays. To read more of his posts, click here.
Let me start with a personal gripe. When driving my family to Manhattan to visit my mother, I loved stopping at the Borders bookstore in Stamford. What better way is there to break up a trip than to stroll through the aisles, grab a cup of coffee, and perhaps pick up a new title or two? Alas, Borders is no more. Now, according to the New York Times, Barnes & Noble is fighting for its life. We will all suffer if bookstores follow classical music stations down the road to oblivion. So it’s worth pausing to ask how our social and political understandings trap us into believing that there’s nothing to be done.
Everyone understands the forces threatening the bookstore. People can purchase physical books more cheaply at discount stores such as Wal-Mart and over the Internet from Amazon.com because these sellers have lower costs. More people are choosing to buy electronic books that cost less and are easier to transport. Customers may one day prefer electronic books to the more expensive printed versions, and bookstores may then truly be obsolete. For now, however, I am interested in the more immediate danger posed by physical and online discounters.
Market purists may tell us all is well. If individuals race to the cheaper prices online, isn’t the market signaling that bookstores are no longer valued? Perhaps, but what about the consumer who loves the lower prices only because she can browse for free and then pay less later. She might feel no guilt about this, because getting a cheaper price is considered almost a moral obligation in contemporary America. Yet she may be sorry when the bookstore vanishes.
I lived in Hamden during the 1990’s and patronized a local video store, despite its higher prices, to help support its taste in films and its independence. One day I entered the store seeking to buy some blank VHS tapes. The store clerk pointed me to them but quickly added that I should buy them next door at Walgreen’s, where they were cheaper. In such a climate, no consumer dare take the risk of overpaying for a book in hope of keeping the bookstore alive, when she knows her neighbor is browsing at the store but then buying cheaper on line. Cheaper prices drive individual consumers to take actions that end up depriving everyone of the public resource the bookstore has always provided. And the consumer may regret this only after it’s too late.
Market skeptics offer few viable solutions. They wonder why we would ever expect the invisible hand to produce socially desirable outcomes. They cheer public institutions, such as our local libraries, as places to bring people together around books in settings that don’t depend on consumer payments other than the occasional fine for late returns. Libraries are to be treasured, and I predict they will become more rather than less important in coming years. But there will never be enough tax dollars or philanthropic contributions to permit libraries to replace the many books now available for browsing and purchase through the national network of bookstores.
What we need is a better understanding that markets are something that we build together, and so we can search for rules that produce the life we want not simply the cheaper prices we crave. In this case, we should be striving for an approach that blurs the public/private distinction that now sharply divides the library from the bookstore. This means creating a way to get people to pay a bit more for their books than they now do online, knowing that their shopping is part consumption and part philanthropy. Barnes & Noble does collect membership fees from customers to help the bottom line. The company could do more, for example, by selling some customers special membership cards that would allow them to get signed copies or go through faster lines. But all such approaches play on consumer demand for discounts.
Perhaps the venerable bookstore chain could attempt a true gestalt shift, telling its customers why the store is a public resource and seeking proud patrons willing to pay a bit more to keep the lifestyle alive. This could only succeed if the owners accepted certain caps on profits and salaries so as to reassure customers that they are acting like citizens and not suckers. In this way, we can experiment with institutions that combine the self-interest of the market with the public-spirited aspects of the library. I encourage readers to devise still better ideas to save bookstores from extinction. But one thing is clear. If bookstores die, it will be more than a failure of the market. It will be our failure of imagination.
