How Bookstores Pay Us Not to Go There

Photo: Barnes and Noble icon, from twimg.com.  (Notice the brick and mortar name and the .com.)

So a few days ago I walk into the only large (chain) bookstore left in all of Rhode Island: Barnes and Noble.  I wanted to go there because a) I'd forgotten if I'd pre-ordered Stephen King's latest, Dr. Sleep, his sequel to The Shining.  (For the record, I'm a little concerned about how I'll like the motorcycle gang, but we'll see.)  I ask the guy behind the help desk to look it up in my account, and it turns out that I hadn't pre-ordered it.  I ask him if I can do so, using this 20% extra coupon I'd been emailed, and hoping I'd be able to use it with the 40% off new hardcovers usually come with, and maybe even the 10% off I sometimes get because I'm a member.  (I realize that hoping to get 70% off a new Stephen King hardcover is extremely unrealistic, but as my previous blog entry mentioned, these are some hard times.)

He says No, that Barnes and Noble doesn't offer discounts on the pre-ordered books through BN.com because new books ordered online are already greatly reduced.

"How much reduced?" My ears perked up, because I like things greatly reduced these days.

He explains that to buy it in the store, I'd have to pay the $28 (or so) price, plus tax.  That's over $30.  I'd get the 30% off, not the 40%, and I'd get an additional 10% for being a member, and that's it.  No other coupons allowed.  No 20% additional from the coupon.  I was about to start a discussion about the meaning of the word "additional," as in, the coupon says "get an additional 20% off," but instead I ask him how much it would be to just pre-order it online.

"Nineteen dollars," he said.

Huh?  I quickly figured that 10% of $28 was $2.80, and that twice that was $5.60, and that twice that was $11.20 (that's the 40% off total, for those not so mathematically inclined), and that $30 (with tax) minus $11.20 was $19.80--essentially what it would cost me to sit on my butt at home and order it from there.  Plus, I wouldn't have to pay shipping, because I'm a member and I get that for free. And no money spent on gas, etc.

This gave me pause.  I told the guy I gave him credit for bringing the whole online thing up to begin with, as I had been ready to buy it from the store the week of September 23rd.  I said it was especially good of him to mention it, since everyone who orders a book at bn.com, and not at the store, makes his job more and more obsolete.  It also would make obsolete the jobs of the cashiers and the cafe workers, and it would negate the sales of a great many other books and magazines that are sold to people who come into the store to buy A, and who leave the store buying A, B and C.  From my experience, people who go online to a bookstore website to buy A end up buying A and that's it.  ("From my experience" here means me and a few friends.)

He acknowledged all of this, though it was clear that he hadn't considered all this before, and nobody had had the gumption (or the arrogance) to bring all this up to him before.  Times being what they are, I pre-ordered the book and had it delivered for free to my house, feeling badly as I did so, but at least congratulating myself for not waiting a few weeks or a few months and then buying it for just a couple of bucks on Amazon or Ebay.

To make myself feel a little better, I looked for a baseball card checklist / price guide I needed, but I was told that they didn't carry it in stock, but that their website did.  Sigh.  I bought a couple of coin books I needed instead, feeling that Barnes and Noble was at this point working against me as I tried to buy something in its store.  I had to go through entirely too much hassle and brainpower to do so.

In the long run I'll have to admit defeat.  Before long, the workers behind the registers, in the cafe, behind the help desk, and in the rows of books won't have a job, and the stockholders and CEO of Barnes and Noble will make more money because they won't have any workers to pay.  And there won't be even one large bookstore in my entire state.  Somewhere in there (though Stephen King himself probably doesn't need the money) the writers themselves, and the book publishers, will end up somehow getting screwed, as more and more people buy "books" online and then read them on their electronic devices, never having to actually be verbal with another person as they do so.  For this, book-makers will disappear, as will printers, type-setters, and all the middlemen who are responsible for the sometimes high price of books--but who also keep the economy going by being a necessary worker, and by holding a job.  This in turn makes them money, which they would spend on things that would also necessitate the jobs of other people.  The economy is a house of cards this way, and it's all going to someday blow down.

People will wonder why the economy got so bad.  And there won't be any economics books to teach them.

Or the teachers, for that matter.  But that's another blog.

Quick Jots--Rolling Stone, Self-publishing, etc.

More ideas that didn't find a way into their own blog entry:

--In a country of Freedom of Speech, Rolling Stone had the right to put the Marathon Bomber on its cover.  Stores like Walgreen's and CVS have the right not to sell it.  And the consumer has the right not to buy it.

But I wonder if any of the above has read the article, or even the headline and the sub-headline.  The point of the article--and the reason why the cover shows the bomber in, apparently, one of his most cute shots--is how a cute-looking, gym-going, college-attending and popular guy can turn into the Devil.  True evil, it seems to me, will look attractive, in its many guises.  That's what Rolling Stone was trying to say in its article, and the controversy about how cute the bomber looks on the cover proves Rolling Stone's point.

And for the record, Rolling Stone is not, and never has been, just a music magazine.  It's also a news magazine, and a cultural magazine, and a magazine of the same age demographic that the bomber himself was.  After all, even at the end of Stephen King's Firestarter, Charlie McGee, who could have gone to the New York Times or Newsweek, told her story of government control and murder--to Rolling Stone.  Again, it's not just about music.

It was then, and still is, a magazine of our times.  This recent controversy goes further to showcase that than the magazine itself, or any one article in it, ever could have.

--A quick thanks to all my readers who continue to read my blog despite my recent disappearance as a commenter on your blogs.  It's no excuse, perhaps, but my novel-writing and my blog-writing, as well as the house and yard renovations, are taking all my time.  I appreciate your readership.  I'm reading yours, too--just not commenting much right now.  Thanks for not leaving my blog due to that.

--I just sold my above-ground pool, thinking that if I didn't have the dying need to go into it this summer, than I never will, and therefore the upkeep of it seemed like a waste of time and money.  I have central air, too, and the country club, literally down the street, has really inexpensive seasonal pool passes.

--Sometimes I think that I can become rich and famous going the self-publishing route, and other times I think I'm crazy and I hope to God that an agent and a publisher love my soon-to-be-finished novel.  I could make a go of the self-publishing thing, as I'm a decent salesman and, hopefully, a decent writer.  But I don't have the time to do so, and I'm not exactly computer- or internet-savvy.

--I feel old when I realize how much I enjoy sitting in my backyard, or on my deck overlooking the cove.  Luckily, I also feel that I'm too old to care that I feel old, or to care that others think I'm old.

--I'm thinner than I was five years ago.  Then again, I'm sleeping a lot less, too, and not eating or drinking the same things, and in the same quantity, that I used to.  But, like, whatever.

--Vitamins and antibiotics make me lightheaded.  It's when I remember this that I truly do not understand how addicts and alcoholics can consume what they do, without disliking the side-effects so much that they alone make them not want to consume those things anymore.

--Considering a Congressman's recent hateful language about Latin Americans, legal or not, it occurs to me that every generation has to have someone to hate.  We're ending the time, hopefully, of politicians' hatred toward homosexuals, so who's next?  The immigrants, of course.  And which ones?  The ones who speak Spanish; the ones the pols think are making English the second language.

I wonder: After that wave crashes ashore, who will we hate next?

Stephen King's Blockade Billy / Morality: Barnes & Noble vs. Amazon

Photo: The book's hard cover, from bookdepository.com

The small hardcover of Stephen King’s Blockade Billy / Morality is handsome to hold and to look at, and it looks different than any of his other actual physical books.  The two stories inside are the same: very different than usual for him.  Not bad, exactly; just different.  But to compare them to his other works—and their quality—is like comparing apples to oranges.  There simply is no comparison.

"Blockade Billy" is about 80 pages long; "Morality" checks in at about 50.  They're both written in an oddly (for King) distant tone.  I wonder at that writing choice, especially for the second story, because it seems like he could have done more with them if he'd focused his lens a little more upon them.  "Morality," especially, could have gone places if he'd created actual scenes from the man's and woman's POV, rather than just tell the story in a detached, long distance way.  It's like he wanted to tell the stories without focusing on them too much.  The stories aren't bad, exactly, because of this; it's just that they could have been better.

The first story was published in a (very) limited edition previous to this.  The second story was previously published in Esquire, which seems right.  It's definitely an Esquire type of story--and a bit of a Playboy story, as well.  King's been published in The New Yorker and in Esquire recently.  He's always been mainstream, of course, though now he seems to be more of a mainstream writer for mainstream literary magazines, which is quite new for him.  You can add his column in Entertainment Weekly to this phase, too.  I don't know quite what to make of it, if anything.  I suppose the tremendous (and well-deserved) success of On Writing opened these doors for him.

Lastly, something needs to be said for the quality of stories that King gives to limited only editions.  All of his novels, of course, come in limited editions--signed, gold-plated, leather-bound with ornate boxes; you name it, he's got it going on--but some, such as this, come in editions that are only limited.  Even previously-published stories such as these are usually later published in mass-market hardcovers and paperbacks.  Stories of this length would be packaged with two others and sold in a book of four, like Different Seasons, or Four Past Midnight.  Why weren't these, and others like these?  (I'm thinking of the Hard Case paperbacks recently reviewed.)  I don't know, exactly, but I have to assume it's because he felt that they weren't worthy of such packaging and selling.  Are these two worthy?  I don't know that, either.  But I'm going to say No.  I think that because, as I mentioned, King himself seems to have just sort of let these go.  You have to sell what you write, of course, and they'll sell because King wrote them.  So you sell them to Esquire, or a (very) limited edition, and then you package them into a book.  But then why not mass market that book?  I come back to how he wrote them: tells more than shows; no exactly focused scenes in either story, exactly.  The first one is a dramatic monologue (a la Dolores Claiborne) told to Stephen King himself.  Huh?  This conceit is left completely unexplained.  I feel that he wrote them, and sort of shrugged, and didn't know what to do with them.  Then someone called him, some limited edition publisher, and asked him if he had anything.  He did.  Then Esquire called and asked the same thing.  And then, later, when the rights reverted back to him, he realized that they didn't go together with any other two longer short stories (fifty pages isn't quite a novella, in my opinion, though eighty pages is), and so he packaged them together for another limited edition publisher, since I feel he felt them sort of unworthy of mass market sales.  I mean, can you package a baseball meets In Cold Blood story with anything else?  How about an Indecent Proposal meets sadomasochistic behavior story?  Nope, not so much.

Well, whatever.  Stephen King fans will like these two stories.  Baseball fans will like the first one, as a certain 40s or 50s era game is brought back, though the players described seem more 1890s to 1910s to me.  Fans who've read his Esquire and New Yorker pieces will like the second one--and I read somewhere that it's won some awards somewhere.  This was the last of his (relatively normally published; not-so-limited) books that I didn't have, and I was annoyed because I remember seeing this at Barnes & Noble when it was released for (seemingly) a few days.  I didn't buy it because I was in some sort of mood; I remember thinking that a baseball story didn't belong in the same book as an S&M sort of story, and I remember thinking that some kid would buy it for the baseball story, and then be shocked out of his pants by the second story.  I was nuts at the time, of course.  I went back to the store, and they didn't have it anymore, of course.  But they could order it for me for $25.  Um, no.  So I went to my local used bookstore.  Nada.  So then, belatedly and with a sigh, I went to Amazon (which you should never do when buying a book because the author usually won't see a cut of it) and bought a brand new, never opened copy, delivered to my door, for a total of $11.  I hated to do it, but I can't afford to pay $14 more, not including tax and shipping, from the bookstore.

So I'll leave this rambling review with that.  I had to buy a limited edition book, from an even more limited edition run before it, from Amazon, because the bookstore charged way too much (it was a bit less on BN.com, but nowhere close to what Amazon had it for) and because the limited edition (limited, for whatever reason) didn't produce enough copies for a used bookstore to have a realistic chance to get it.  I know this is bad, and that I would hate it if people bought by books on Amazon for a penny, rather than from the bookstore for the real price, because I wouldn't see a cut of it at all, and it would be literally be taking money out of my pocket.  And that sucks, but in the same exact position, I'd have to do it again.

Would you?