Buy the Book: The Bookstore Wars in American Culture

In December 1998, Warner Bros. Studios released You've Got Mail, a romantic comedy reuniting Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan (both of Sleepless in Seattle fame) as anonymous e-mail correspondents who lose themselves and their hearts in the nebulous world of cyberspace.¹ Amid their online exchanges—which include observations about New York in the fall, promises of bouquets of sharpened pencils, and speculation as to why men are so enamored with The Godfather—the would-be couple carefully sidesteps any discussion of where they live or what they do for a living. This omission of information sets up the film's major conflict, as Hanks's Joe Fox and Ryan's Kathleen Kelly are also the proprietors of warring bookstores in New York's Upper Westside. Kelly owns and operates The Shop Around the Corner, a children's bookstore that has been a treasured neighborhood institution since Kelly's mother opened it several years earlier. Fox is the scion in a family-owned corporation of chain bookstores whose success imperils the future of every independent bookstore on the island of Manhattan. When Fox Books opens its newest branch mere blocks from The Shop Around the Corner, tensions erupt into a full-scale conflagration, complete with verbal assaults, a media blitz, and a demonstration of Kelly's supporters outside of Fox Books, chanting in unison: "One, two three, four, we don't want your chain store."

Though annoyed by the unwanted publicity, there is never any doubt in Joe Fox's mind—or our own—that he will win the day. "They'll hate us in the beginning," he quips to his business associate at the start of the film, "but we'll get them in the end." The casual allusions that Fox makes to The Godfather throughout the film suddenly take on a more ominous tone. Instead of waking one morning with the severed head of a horse in her bed, Kelly wakes to the horror that her customers—loyal supporters of many years—have deserted her. The outcome of this bookstore war seems as inevitable to the audience as to Fox himself. And it is this certainty that is so troubling and so pervasive to our collective understanding about the uphill battle that independent businesses of all kinds face in the wake of widespread corporatization. Why are we so certain that Kelly's independent bookstore cannot win? Is the sense of loss palpable to the customers Kelly leaves behind, or have they simply moved on to something bigger and better, moved on, that is, to their own Fox Books? When did it become so hard for independent bookstores to compete in the marketplace for books? Is there any hope for their survival when their numbers have declined by nearly two-thirds since the 1990s? These are but some of the questions sociologist Laura Miller asks and answers in her new book, Reluctant Capitalists.

Drawing upon interviews with book professionals and customers, annual reports and investment analyses from incorporated booksellers, and an extensive range of material from industry trade journals, Miller provides an in-depth and thoroughly fascinating account of the book retail industry and the unique challenges faced by independents since the advent of chain bookstores in the 1960s. The overarching theme of Miller's work is how rationalization—the development and application of business practices that ensure cost efficiency and maximum profit—transformed bookselling from a relatively haphazard affair to the more systematic and profit-motivated phenomenon that it is today. Since the establishment of the modern book trade in the late nineteenth century, Miller contends, complaints about distribution have been widespread in the book industry. Critics—mainly in the form of publishers—lamented that booksellers cared more about literary taste than about the bottom line. More dabblers than businessmen or women, booksellers sold their wares at their own pace and in their own time, and the effect, these critics claimed, was...