Indie bookstores

The Bookkeeper in Sarnia.

It is awesome. I worked there 6 years. Was manager, in line to buy, went crazy, and have never worked there again, altho I've tried to get hired back.

Susan Chamberlain is the owner. She has won a CBA award, and so has the store (while I was there!)

[url=http://www.mcnallyrobinson.com/content.php?txtFileFileName=locations]McN... Robinson books [/url] has a number of locations in Winnipeg, Saskatoon, Calgary and New York City. They went "big box" even before Chapters came along to Winnipeg and did not go under as Mary Scorer books did.

Winnipeg once had a small, independent bookstore called Heaven and Art Book Cafe. Sadly, it is no more.

There are many second-hand bookstores in the city, far too many to mention.

In Toronto:

Pages (Queen St W)
Another Story (Roncesvalles)
This Ain't the Rosedale Library (Church St)
Toronto Women's Bookstore (Harbord St)
A Different Booklist (Bathurst St)
Book City (a few locations around the city)(it's a mini-chain, independently owned)

What used to be a left/Communist bookstore is still a going concern in Vancouver. When I'm on the coast I always drop in and go for a walk up and down Commercial Drive afterwards. It's an interesting neighbourhood.

[url=http://www.peoplescoopbookstore.com/]People's Co-op Bookstore[/url]

My favourites are [url=http://www.octopusbooks.ca/]Octopus Books[/url] and Mother Tongue Books, both in Ottawa. Now that I'm near Toronto, [url=http://pagesbooks.ca/]Pages[/url] is my usual bookstore of choice. Great books, and great staff.

[ 18 June 2007: Message edited by: jrose ]

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Good to see Octopus is still around. I bought many books there in the mid-eighties when I was a grad student at Carleton.

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That’s how I came across it as well. There is always a core group of professors who prefer to give their business to the independent sellers and have their students walk the short walk up to the Glebe to get them, instead of giving the business to the campus bookstore monopoly. After that, I just kept going to pick up books for class, and for pleasure reading. I know they also do a fair amount of book launches and readings in their tiny premise. It’s a small, unassuming building that I probably wouldn’t notice from the street, but ever since I knew it was there I could honestly spend hours inside.

The decline in Feminist bookstores in Canada is remarkably depressing, especially while searching for book-related events to add to rabble’s book lounge. [url=http://section15.ca/features/reviews/2007/07/23/feminist_bookstores/]This article [/url]cites only four left in existence, at least one of which has shut its doors.

As delightful as your uninformed and consistently anti-independent-bookstore scribes are, Sven, you are incorrect about the role and importance they have played for the past several decades in Canada and the U.S. and still do play, for those who wish to engage in community. There is more to community than the internet, if one chooses. So you don't. Fine.

Independent and small bookstores have always been places for lesser known authors to develop an audience. Forgoing the lefty slant, they have been and are places for communities, and neighbourhood communities, to connect. Specialty bookstores have cultivated specific audiences, through in-person interactions (I know, I'm so 20th century). This is not at all the same as the internet, including sites like rabble.

As for purchasing, it depends. If you know exactly what title you want, then it may be cheaper to purchase directly from the publisher. However many small publishers charge shipping fees. Which if one is ordering all their books online one will be paying anyways.

If all you want is the cheapest, then you will get the world that you deserve. Walmart anyone?

[ 05 August 2008: Message edited by: bigcitygal ]

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Sven: If people want them in enough numbers, then they will be there. If not, they won’t.

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Spoken like a free marketeer.

You have no idea the illegal activities the big box stores in Canada and the U.S. have done in order to ensure that they will dominate the market. This is not a simple case of the theory of capitalism, which is flawed anyways.

Independent bookstores have declined because corporate bookstores use techniques such as loss leaders, unlimited and damaged returns, deeply discounted books that they actually lose money on, delayed payments to publishers to the tune of 6 months to a year, poorly paid non-unionized staff, many of the classic ways in which corporate owners run business to maximize profits. The problem with this model in this instance is that books (in Canada for sure, I'm less knowledgeable about the US) are hugely subsidized by government grants and funding: the markup on books is miniscule, compared to other retail such as clothing. This is not an industry that has huge profit margins, hence why Indiglo sells all those lifestyle products such as candles and yoga mats.

"Indiblow" and "Crapters," I might add. [img]wink.gif" border="0[/img]

The world's most inspiring bookstores

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W. Somerset Maugham called books "a refuge from almost all the miseries of life" -- and as fun as travel can be, being far from home can also be exhausting, hectic and fraught with flashes of sweet misery. For literate travelers, a good bookstore is a sanctuary.

What makes a bookstore beautiful? As their numbers dwindle in so many places, just having the doors open may qualify. Many of the shops in this slide show took over repurposed buildings whose previous tenants were once important local institutions like glove factories, theaters, friaries and grist mills. All of them are brimming over with beauty of one kind or another -- opulent architecture, quirky one-of-a-kind collections, unique ways of encouraging exploration, teetering stacks of mystery and chaos that reflect a community's reading habits. It's terrifying to consider that the generations alive today may be the last to experience the serendipity of scouring shelves of books side by side with other bibliophiles.

More about the predatory business practices of the corporate bookstores might be in order here. Especially after rather too many uninformed remarks upthread.

Big chains like Chapters will make arrangements to buy up ALL the copies of a popular book. Or damn near most of them. The big store will make the lion's share of the profits in selling such popular items. But here's the thing; these "buyers" of books are able to impose their own conditions on such a ''sale" ... even from small publishers. Think Loblaws. Such conditions might include the right to return the books, at ANY date in the future, at full refund, no questions asked. If sales don't go as well as "planned", then such small publishers wind up with a glut of difficult to sell books that they have to refund.

Chapters succeeded in putting some publishers out of business that way. "One capitalist always kills many", as Marx once wrote.

Anyway, the Loblaws-like predatory practices go much further than this one example. Books are part of the culture of a society and their significance can't be exhausted by reference to the latest iTurd.

An Arc poetry magazine author (Barry Dempster I think) once wrote that "we all began in a little magazine" in making reference to the role of small publishers in the developing life of Canadian poets. I think maybe Canadian leftists "all began" in a little, independent bookstore. And that's reason enough for this leftist to support such stores.

N.Beltov wrote:

Chapters succeeded in putting some publishers out of business that way. "One capitalist always kills many", as Marx once wrote.

In my case it was the double whammy of Chapters deciding they would no longer return the phone calls of their smaller publishers and Canada Post.

Canada Post not only dropped the book rate and increased the cost of shipping books by some 1000% they also brought in a volume discount system that meant it would cost us twice as much to send a book to Chapters as it would for them to send a book to me. (Even though we dropped off our shipments and Chapters received many and we did not receive as many so the cost to ship from Chapters to me was actually higher.)

Shipping rates destroyed a huge number of publishers and arguably Chapters decision to bury the walking wounded was also in part because of shipping rates because we could not match the shipping costs of larger publishers.

During the same period the GST was imposed--not as big a deal as the shipping rate changes but it did not help. Also the granting agencies got more vicious on small publishers and more active in telling them what types of books they could publish (more fiction less nonfiction for one)

This country's approach to publishing stinks-- we would even give grants to publishers to make books and then remove their ability to bring them to market so nobody could read them. If that makes sense to you please explain. Of course with the smaller publishers there would be a lot less money wasted because they would get a lot less grants as well. It would be like having a small restaurant and having the government subsidize McDonalds to open up across the street and compete with you.

My company Voyageur Publishing went out of business 11 years ago. I am still pissed off like it's 1999. Ask me in another decade and I can tell you if I have cooled off or regained any respect for this country's approach to culture.

Apparently small-town (plus Ottawa, Waterloo, Halifax and Victoria) readers buy more books and/or listen to CBC radio more:

http://www.cbc.ca/books/2011/08/your-top-10-favourite-canadian-bookstores.html#more

Uxbridge, Sarnia, Halifax, Ottawa, Creemore, Port Hope, Almonte, Victoria, Dartmouth, Waterloo.