Reluctant Capitalists: Bookselling and the Culture of Consumption (review)

The current plight of independent booksellers has the misfortune to be the latest in a series of plights. Laura Miller's Reluctant Capitalists explains that their troubles are long-standing and systemic, due not only to their competition with the chain-stores, Amazon, and each other but also to computer technology, to changes in American consumer culture, and to the means whereby publishers and retailers vie for the profit of a sale. Miller notes how conglomerate publishing favours conglomerate bookselling, and vice versa.

Independents' battles with the chains go back as far as the Coolidge administration, and for years they held their own: 'According to US Government figures, there were thirty groups of bookstore chains in 1929. Between them, they owned 349 of the country's 2,647 bookstores, and accounted for 31.6 per cent of bookstore sales. Three decades later, those numbers had barely changed' (42). Then came suburban expansion, shopping malls, B. Dalton, and Waldenbooks. 'By the early 1980s, Walden was opening eighty to ninety stores a year; in 1981, with 704 branches, it became the first bookstore chain to have outlets in all fifty states' (45). By 1982 B. Dalton and Waldenbooks had captured nearly a quarter of all US book sales. By 1997, Borders and Barnes & Noble had taken over, together accounting for 43.3 per cent of bookstore sales.

Other forces gathered against the independents. Steadily improved computerization and the technologies it permits – bar-coding, inventory management, the Internet – favour economies of scale that deep-pocket chains are better able to turn to advantage. 'Far from the Internet resulting in a more decentralized bookselling environment, the shakeout among online booksellers contributed to the growing concentration of the book retail market' (53).

Independents joined forces in common cause, forming the Independent Booksellers Cooperative in 1973 and the Independent Booksellers Association in 1978. Within the much larger American Booksellers Association (ABA), they flexed their muscle and pooled their dues to woo public support and fund litigation. They lobbied for laws that would remove the sales tax advantages of Amazon and other Internet retailers. They fought Barnes & Noble's attempt to merge with Ingram distributors. In 1997 Barnes & Noble left the ABA, 'signaling its belief that the association no longer represented bookstores like its own' (183). In 1998, the merger fell through.

Independent booksellers have also fought back by innovating, but the conglomerates can imitate any innovation quickly and multiply it more rapidly. 'The department store Marshall Field's of Chicago pioneered the practice of autographing parties, as they were then called, in the second decade of the twentieth century' (128); such signings are now routine affairs in superstores. Some independent bookstores succeeded for a while by locating near coffee shops and cafés. 'Barnes & Noble opened its first bookstore café in Bryn Mawr [Pennsylvania] in 1992. By the following year, coffee bars became a standard feature in the company's superstores' (126).

Miller's analyses rely heavily on 'rationalization,' a word that euphemizes justifying all decisions by profit. She discusses rationalization of book selection, rationalization of discounting, rationalization of acquisition, rationalization of computerization, and much more. She has done her research thoroughly, drawing on historical studies, trade journals, corporate and association reports, interviews, legal testimony, and law. She pays close attention to the court battles over market practices, especially discounting: 'There is probably no issue in bookselling that has been so contentious for so long' (143). As a bonus, the book concludes with a set of chronologies tracking changes in ownership of the main chains from 1910 to 2004.

There is plenty of business history in Reluctant Capitalists that every self-respecting bookseller and publisher should know. The book also addresses culture studies. Once felt to be a prestige business, a preserve of the educated and refined, in the last thirty years bookselling has become a standardized part of consumer culture. Superstores provide the pleasure of browsing over a wide...