What’s the point of having a blog if one doesn’t use it as a platform for one’s personal rants?
I’ve been listening to Guardian Books podcast coverage of the Guardian Sponsored Ten-Day Festival of Books at Hay-on-Wye in Wales. Hay, a small town with less than 2000 residents has over 30 bookstores! Even if the majority of them actually are used book stores this is still a remarkable feat. One that is not possible on this side of the pond. If you have to ask why, then you haven’t been following the juggernaut that is Heather Reisman’s Chapters Indigo. Chapters is to book selling what Staples is to office supplies, Wal-Mart is to department stores, Tim Horton’s is to doughnuts, MacDonald’s is to fast food… an attempt to monopolize its sphere of enterprise. The ascendancy of Chapters in the book market has made life difficult if not impossible for independent book sellers. Their demise has led to a lack of diversity in the book trade and a loss of the kind of personalized service a small bookseller can give. When any business corners up to 90% of a market the old saw about “absolute power corrupting absolutely” starts to come into play. The ability to dictate terms to book publishers, ban books one dislikes from one’s stores, market titles weeks before independents get their hands on them, ban free tabloids including the Montreal Review of Books (?!), sell klap trap like candles and crystal, refuse to do customer book orders—“buy it online”…. Whether or not I like Amazon.com, Chapters has driven me to their arms in protest.
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