Although the main point of this post is pretty general and obvious—the rich get richer by already being rich—it was inspired by some publishing-specific, inside baseball type stuff, so I think it’s probably best to start by explaining how we (Open Letter) input all the information about our forthcoming books.

Every six months, I have to create “Advance Information” entries for each one of our titles in Helix, the operating system that Consortium currently uses¹ to keep track of info—metadata, sales, inventory, etc.—for all the titles that they distribute. Like most publishers, I have a love-hate relationship with this process. On the one hand, it’s the first opportunity to start building out information for your forthcoming titles—which can be really exciting. I’ve spent the past week reading (or rereading) the books that we’re coming out with between September 2017 and March 2018 and have worked myself into a frenzy to share these books with reps, booksellers, and readers.

We have six books coming out during those months, and aside from a new Bae Suah and a collection of poems from Per Aage Brandt, the other four have never been translated into English. One of these authors is Madame Nielsen, whose first novel was recommended to me by the Icelandic author Sjón: “The Endless Summer by Madame Nielsen is my literary discovery of the year.” In all seriousness, I believe this book could be our first ever bestseller. It is both that good, that short (just over 100 pages), and that accessible (it’s a love story with a lot of tension and tragedy).²

So there are aspects to filling out these entries that make me really excited. In two weeks, I’ll be pitching all these books to the core staff at Consortium, who will give me some pointers for jacket copy, blurbs, promotional ideas, etc., based on what’s worked in the past for books like this. Their advice is invaluable, as is the process of taking five minutes to try and reign in the abounding enthusiasm for a book (“Holy Shit! The way the melancholy that runs throughout the book is so charming, as it spirals forward and backward in time, touching upon all these various lives, but all told by a ‘boy, who is perhaps a girl, but does not yet know it’ with a sort of writerly grace that I haven’t experienced in ages, especially in a translation so evocative and!!!) and hone it into something that others can latch onto, that they can process, that makes sense—that experience is also invaluable.

The part that sucks is actually entering all of the information. There are fields upon fields begging for metadata. Price, page count, carton quantity, four BISAC codes,³ shelving category, contributor bio, contributor role, contributor place of residence, promotional plans, selling and marketing points, and so on and forth.

Then there are the descriptive fields: key notes, which is a twenty-word “one-sentence summary crafted to grab the buyer’s attention,” and the description, which is limited to sixty words. Sixty! I can’t describe my mood in sixty words, much less a piece of literature. But again, as frustrating as this is—in part because I, and probably most of us, finish it last minute—it’s a great exercise in boiling things down to their core.⁴

All of that is fine—and not at all what I want to talk about. The main point is that, for every title we ever publish, we create these records that have a dual function: 1) to log all the important data about our books (price, ISBN, title, contributors) into Consortium’s database, and 2) to provide sales reps with some guidance for talking about these books to bookstores.

One of the toughest things to explain to my publishing students is why bookstore buyers bring certain titles into their stores. It’s easy enough to grasp that a store can’t carry everything, but the mechanisms behind their decision making can seem bafflingly opaque.

Over-simplifying here, but a successful bookstore tends to do a couple things really well: create a brand for itself by stocking a particular range of books (which oftentimes helps tie it to its community and make it something unique when compared to a “general” chain store), and stock books that will turnover fast enough that the store can generate enough revenue to stay in business. As much as one would like to stock only the books that they like, there is a need to have the books in stock that customers will come looking for. These don’t necessarily have to be the poppiest of the crap titles (Twilight, etc.), but the books that have the right amount of marketing push and publicity buzz to enter into the consciousness of a significant number of general book buyers.

For example, you need to have enough copies of The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead before it’s reviewed on NPR and New York Times and becomes a finalist (or winner) for basically every single book award possible.

There are two things related to this that anyone outside of the book industry might not realize: 1) if a customer comes looking for a book and you don’t have it, you lose the sale, period, and 2) you have to order your initial stock on these titles 4-8 months before publication date. Granted, you can always order more copies from the wholesalers, but the numbers work out a lot better for the store if you order the right number up front.⁵

Let me go back to an idea from last week’s essay to help bring this forward. From that piece:

To know which books will do well enough, to cover the titles that people will definitely be talking about (thus perceived as “important”), to stock the titles that are most likely to sell—the closer these things are to certain, the more stable and profitable the industry is. Hits can come out of nowhere and far exceed sales expectations, but it’s best if that happens in a context in which you already control the baseline for as close to 100% of the products you’re putting into the market as possible.

To reiterate and clarify: Publishers, booksellers, critics, authors never know for certain which books will be hits. But there are titles that we can know—with a high degree of certainty—will sell a particular amount. Because of x, y, and z (review coverage, past sales, author profile, book topic), there is a range that publishers can rely upon. A particular book might sell 300,000 copies, but will likely sell 30-50,000, and will only in the most catastrophic of circumstances, sell a mere 5,000. Being able to project this—the stable books, with decent upside and high floors—is the key to being a successful large(ish) publisher.

Bookstores play a dual role in this: to stay alive, they need to make a significant portion of their revenue from these “solid” books, and also, the more they stock these books, the more likely they are to hit the upper level of the predicted range.

Sure, there are all sorts of unpredictable and unexplored (at least for now, until future essays) mechanisms for why a book goes from selling 30,000 copies to 300,000 copies, but still, if I owned a bookstore, I would want the majority of my inventory to consist of titles that are almost guaranteed to sell 30,000 across the country, saving a small portion of my space (maybe 15-20%?) for the strange indie books that would differentiate my store from Barnes & Noble, yet would probably sell 3,000 copies across the country. To make this as specific as possible, for every eight copies of The Underground Railroad that I stock, I’d stock two titles from Open Letter/Deep Vellum/Dalkey Archive/Archipelago (sans Knausgaard)/NYRB/etc.

If I were a bookstore, I’d want in on stocking the titles that will make up 80% of the revenues for publishers and other bookstores. I want to be the norm, for the most part, and variate on the fringes.

Which brings us to comparative titles. Comp titles. And a caveat.

With every entry that I create for our forthcoming books, I have to enter five (or more) “comp titles.” As the people at Consortium have explained (over and over and over and again), comp titles are books similar in format (paperback original vs hardcover), publisher (indie vs big five), marketing budget (again, indie vs big five), author brand (six previously published novels vs some dude from the Faroe Islands), and publishing proximity (all comp titles have to have been published in the last five years).

This probably seems weird to anyone outside of the publishing industry, so it might make sense to go over what doesn’t make a good comp title: book that is similar in theme or setting to a book published ten years ago, a book similar in theme or setting to a book by a best-selling author, book similar in style and character to one by a publisher significantly like you.

As I’ve been told over and again, comp titles are for bookstores to know how many copies to order upfront, based on three-month sales of books similar—in publisher, publicity access, marketing budgets, overall prominence—to those of Open Letter.

One the first⁶ level, I totally get this. Comp titles are signals to bookstores of which titles are in that group almost guaranteed to do really well (30,000 sales or whatever), with huge upsides. They want to know what books they can get a couple copies of and restock whenever.⁷ If you haven’t been reading the footnotes, you might want to go do that now.

Theoretically, except for Amazon, all bookstores are limited in the number of titles that they can carry. And the more titles you can carry that will sell 80+ units, the way better. (See footnotes, but if you buy right on a popular book, or over, that’s for the best, even at the expense of shelf space.) The best option is to buy “slightly” under on books that are “Solid Titles,” and buy way under on “Indie Books” that might break out. In terms of numbers AND common sense, this feels right: if you have a solid bet, go for it, buy a bunch, and then buy as many titles as possible that might take off, but probably won’t. I feel like this is a legal betting strategy.

What I’ve been told time and again about Comp Titles is that these are used by booksellers to help them decide how many copies of a book to order up front. They look at how similar (or “comparable”) titles sold over the first few months, and then place their bets. Given all that’s come above, that totally makes sense. You want to buy right on the books that will do the best for you, because maximizing turnover of stock bought with the highest discount, is the most efficient pathway to profit.

But what makes for a good comp title?

Here’s what most people assume: A good comp title is a book similar in plot, or setting. (Like comparing a mystery set in Morocco to another Moroccan mystery.) A book with the same tone (comic, suspenseful, etc.), or general appeal (“family sagas about Italians are hot right now!”). The assumption is that books should be compared to books that have a similar aesthetic, since readers tend to look for titles that are in line with what they already like. (“I just finished Ferrante—what do you have that’s just like that?”) So a store would be well served to operate under a “If you liked X, you’ll love Y” sort of methodology.

All of that is completely wrong.

Relying on Consortium’s expertise in this (which has been backed up by various sales reps), what makes a good comp title is a title with more paratextual similarities related much more closely to the publisher’s position in the marketplace than the book itself.

What makes a good comp title? A title that is published by the same publisher or publisher of a similar size and situation. A title with the same sort of marketing budget and initial print run. Titles from authors at a similar point in their career, or that have other structural similarities. And all comp titles have to have been published within the last three years.

All of this makes good sense—especially from a buyer’s perspective. They don’t want every tiny new indie press comparing their 700-page “postmodern masterpiece” to Infinite Jest, since there’s a one in one trillion chance that this book will sell one one hundredth as well as IJ. When it comes to books that aren’t necessarily likely to sell 30,000 copies total, stores are deciding whether they should initially buy 3 copies for their shelves or 1. Maybe, if you’re really lucky, the store will order 7 for a display. To show buyers comparisons to books that sold 50+ copies in their first couple months is in no way helpful, when the book they’re considering is very unlikely to sell more than 5.

But there is something within these parameters that constantly nags at me . . . In this system, the quality and nature of the books themselves have been eliminated, and your chances of getting significant pre-sales depends on the pre-existing size of your publishing house, and how much money you have.

For example, we published Bae Suah’s A Greater Music last year, a book that has some general similarities to The Vegetarian by Han Kang. Preference for one book or the other put aside, it would seem to make sense—on the surface—to use The Vegertarian as a comp title. After all, Han Kang and Bae Suah are two of the hottest authors coming out of South Korea, and are more or less equals in that country. People who read and loved The Vegetarian would presumably be interested in reading another female writer from South Korea—especially one translated by the same translator. (Who, it’s worth noting, was responsible for promoting and getting both of these authors published in English translation.)

But that’s totally wrong. On the one hand, the odds of any book selling as well as The Vegetarian (even pre-Man Booker) is highly unlikely, so the numbers you get from looking at past sales are pretty garbage. And, more importantly, Crown has money and power, whereas Open Letter is run on a fraying shoestring of grants, kindness, and self-sacrifice. I wouldn’t be surprised if Crown spent more on marketing The Vegetarian than Open Letter spent total in the last six months.

If Crown were to have done A Greater Music, they could definitely have used The Vegetarian as a comp title—and bookstore buyers would’ve taken the numbers seriously. They wouldn’t have ordered quite as many copies as what they sold of Han Kang’s novel, but they would’ve bought in at a far higher rate than they did for us. (Throwing out bullshit numbers here, but it’s not unreasonable to assume an average store would’ve ordered 12-15 copies of A Greater Music from Crown, versus 1 or 2 from Open Letter.)

In short, if you’re of a certain size, you can compare your books to books that came from publishers of a similar size which, in almost all instances, sold much better than books from smaller publishers (like Open Letter). As a result, your books take up more space in bookstores, are more frequently displayed, and end up selling better.⁸

As helpful as the comp title process might be for buyers, reps, and the like, its very structure reinforces the core inequality of the publishing business: the haves get to take up more space and sell more books, the have-nots have to get really lucky and work outside of the system to get a book to take off. And for smaller presses, it makes it almost impossible to get through to buyers about the quality of your book. Unless they read a title and fall in love with it, all the signals in place telling them what to buy, what to pay attention to, are pointed away from the indie press book toward titles from the most successful. All of which reinforces the idea that there is no meritocracy at work here. The best books very rarely rise to the top; a mediocre book with more resources behind it will always beat the “better” book from a smaller press.

The quality of the book itself—this cherished object, this artistic enterprise that editors, booksellers, and the like tend to fetishize—is less important than the business structure surrounding that salable object.

¹ Consortium was recently purchased by Ingram, so starting in April we’ll be using something called “TitleSource.” (Everything at Ingram ends in “source” for some unknown reason. Like LightningSource. Not sure what this is about, but it’s pretty essentialist and pervasive.)

More importantly, every distributor uses a different one of these management systems, but in the end, they’re all basically the same: a database to store metadata about titles and track the movements of all units into the warehouse, out to stores, back to the warehouse. So what follows in the piece above is not Consortium-centric.

² It’s also written in an inimitable style, which, in today’s book world, is probably a strike against it. But that’s a topic for next week’s essay.

³ Basically the codes that help categorize books. For example, “Fiction, Literary.” Or “History, Latin America, General.” You can see the whole list Even a cursory glance will show that this list is both incomplete and gated in funny ways.

⁴ CoreSource perhaps? Sorry. So sorry.

⁵ Here’s a mathematical model for you that should help to make this clear: Let’s assume that over the course of a month, you end up selling 80 copies of The Underground Railroad (retail price: $27). This is obviously contingent on the size of the store, but let’s just see what happens under three different scenarios: you order too few, you order the right amount, you order too many.

Couple more premises: 1) you get a 47% discount from the publisher, 40% from the wholesaler, 2) you get free freight from both, 3) it costs $50 to return excess stock—no matter the amount, and 4) 75% of people who would buy from your store decide not to, if you’re currently out of stock.

Scenario A: You initially order 32 copies of the book from the publisher. You sell all 32 copies ($27*32*.47=$406.08), but have 48 customers who come in to buy the book when you’re out of stock, only 12 of which end up buying the book from you ($27*12*.4=$129.60). (These copies you order from the wholesaler because it’s faster and more efficient.) You don’t return any copies, so you make $535.68 on this title.

Scenario B: You somehow order exactly 80 copies right off the bat and sell all 80 ($27*80*.47=$1,015.20). You make almost twice as much as you did by under-ordering—$1,015.20.

Scenario C: You buy hard, because fucking Whitehead, you know? So you get 120 and sell 80 ($27*80*.47=$1,015.20) and return 40 (-$25). That’s not bad; you made $965.20.

Scenario D: What happens if you buy hard on a dud? What if you only sold 20 of the 120 you bought? Then you make $286.20 on the sales ($27*20*.47), but lose $50 (or more?) on returning the extra 100. So you end with $236.20. That’s a better per copy revenue ratio (barely) than scenario A ($236.20/20=$11.81 vs $535.68/48=$11.16).

Main point: Getting it right is how to maximize your income. Know which books are going to sell, get enough to cover demand, but not too too much. (Especially if you multiply these numbers out across 100 or so titles a year.) But how to judge which books and how many copies? Those are the questions.

⁶ “CoreSource”?

⁷ I think the crucial point is that bookstores maximize profit by stocking titles that have a large turnover rate. You have to figure out what that rate is for your store (maybe you sell 20 copies of The Underground Railroad every month, and five copies of War, So Much War; whereas a different store does 100 of the former and .25 [one every four months] of the latter), and adjust to that. But the more information you have when you place your initial order—the more likely a title is to sell 20+ copies—the better off you are.

⁸ Another idea to explore in a future post, but I doubt anyone would question the fact that the more copies of a book on display in a store, the more likely it is to sell. These are the books you notice, that bounce off the periphery of your awareness over and over, and which a lot of people end up buying. Especially in comparison to the single copy of A Greater Music hidden back in the fiction shelves . . .

While I was sorry to read the article in the Jan. 5 Seattle Times that M Coy Books will be closing, I was disturbed by the tone. The local media are quick to mark the demise of an independent bookshop and say once again how it is nearly impossible for a small independent to survive. Difficult, sure. But not impossible. [. . .]

After illustrating the growth of the store, and pointing out that 2007 was its best year ever, Dickey goes on to slam the media:

If you want to know how independent booksellers really are doing, come ask us. Reacting to the closing of one bookshop by saying it is another death-knell of an industry simply isn’t fair or correct and can be counterproductive. It can also mislead customers and drive more into the hands of the corporate Big Boxes, encouraging the difficulties that small independents face. Why not do a story about how some independents are doing fine because of their customers who want to support small businesses? Isn’t there a story in that?

It’s tough not lament the current climate when stores like Coliseum or Gotham shut down, but in general, I agree that the great indie booksellers should be praised and applauded. People like Karl Pohrt, Rick Simonson, Sarah McNally, the list could go on and on. These stores are incredibly important to literary publishers, and deserve way more attention than they receive.

Karl Pohrt (owner of one of the best bookstores in the country) promised to write a blog about his experiences in Beijing, and as soon as it’s available, I’ll post about it here. In the meantime, he sent me the text of the speech he plans to give, which is a great overview of the current situation in America, and worth reading in its entirety. He presents an interesting perspective on this profession which features a 2% margin and an incredible set of challenges, and yet seems so vital to culture. In particular, the info on sales at indie stores for the top 300-500 books is very intriguing . . .

THE CHALLENGES AND OPPORTUNITIES FACING BOOKSELLERS IN A POST LITERATE WORLD

Xinping posed two questions to us prior to this forum:

1. How do booksellers in the United States balance business demands with cultural advocacy?

2. How do booksellers respond to the challenges of the digital world?

Because I want to respond to both of these interesting topics, I asked Xinping if I might speak about the challenges and opportunities facing booksellers in a post literate world. I chose the term post literate in part because I wished to be provocative, but also because I wanted describe our present cultural moment. Perhaps the term post literate is too loaded. It has a kind of science fiction quality to it, and for some people I think it implies a decline in literacy. In the interest of fairness, it might be better to describe the world we are living in as transliterate, a term coined by Alan Liu from the University of California at Santa Barbara. This means the ability to read, write and interact across a range of platforms, tools and media from signing and orality through handwriting, print, TV, radio and film, to digital social networks.

The first time I heard someone describe a book as an information platform was maybe eight years ago. I was startled by the phrase information platform, not because it isn’t absolutely accurate (it is), but because it implies that the book is just one among many platforms for disseminating information. In this formulation, the cinema, television, ipod, compact disc, and the computer are all platforms for disseminating information. The subtext here is clear: The book is no longer in the privileged position it has held since Guttenberg invented movable type five hundred years ago.

The implications of this shift for everyone is enormous, but it is especially so for those of us who make our living as booksellers. How will we remain vital participants in the cultural life of our society? More importantly, how can we even stay in business?

The world of bookselling exists within the for-profit economy in America, which is (and always has been) a volatile arena. Those of us here today from the United States are representatives of the independent bookstore world, and all of us will tell you that our retail environment is much more competitive than it was two decades ago. In the last twenty years we have been challenged by the rise of superstore chains, the advent of internet sales, and the growth of discount warehouse clubs.

At our peak in the 1990s, the American Booksellers Association had 4,800 member companies and 6,000 stores. Today we have 1,800 member companies and 2,500 stores. For a decade, 200 to 250 stores a year closed. This was consistent with our attrition numbers in the past, but nobody was opening any new stores.

The retail bookstore in the United States today has been called a 2% business. After we subtract our costs, many of us net a 2% profit. This model insures that booksellers can expect a razor slim profit margin at best. Mark ups in the book business range from 25% for professional titles and textbooks to 45% (if you’re buying skillfully) for trade books. In the world of retail business, the mark up from wholesale to retail is usually 100%. There is a telling joke circulating among bookstore owners these days: How do you make a small fortune in the book business? Answer: You start with a large fortune.

As you might imagine, it is very difficult to attract talented young people to our business under these circumstances.

During the 1980s independent bookstores accounted for 33% of the market share of books sold in the United States. In 1998 we had 17% of the market, and today our market share has stabilized at between 9% and 10%. Chain stores account for 22% or 23% of sales, and 60% of book sales happen outside bookstores.

Twelve percent (12%) of book sales occur over the internet. There has been consistent growth in a relatively short amount of time in this retail channel. A few years ago experts predicted that a third of all book sales were going to occur on the internet by 2005, but this did not happen. However, 12% is still a huge percentage of sales that have migrated from traditional book stores.

This isn’t the whole story. We need to also carefully consider how the independent sector functions within the various retail channels that sell the top 500 titles each week. Of the retail channels that sell the first 150 titles on the list, it turns out that we underperforms in terms of its market share. Independent bookstores account for less than 9% or 10% of the sales of the most popular titles on the list.

However, for the next 150 titles, we dramatically exceed our market share. We also exceed our market share for titles sold in the 300 to 500 range. Ultimately, of course, many of these titles will move up the list.

When we do our job properly, independent booksellers act as an early warning system for publishers. We help publishers launch books. It should also be noted that the 150 to 500 range of titles is where publishers are making money, because they haven’t made huge investments that they have to recuperate in contracts with best-selling authors and large ad campaigns. So we also augment sales from the top 150 to 300 titles.

To answer one of Xinping’s questions, independent booksellers in the United States have responded to the digital revolution by embracing internet technology. It is an essential business tool now if we are to stay competitive in the global marketplace. A website allows us to be open for business 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, which is what our customers all expect. It also gives us access to any customer anywhere on the earth.

I recently read a report in the on-line newsletter Advertising Age (Dec 6, 2007) that China, which currently has 500 million mobile phone subscribers and more than 122 million broadband users, will very quickly become the number one internet market in the world.

There are some other examples of the impact of the digital revolution on bookselling in America. One is the promise of electronic books. E books have received a great deal of press attention two months ago when Amazon unveiled Kindle, an electronic device for reading digitized books. And recently Sony brought the Sony Reader to the market. Over the years I’ve watched developments in this area fairly closely, and my sense is that the e-book moment has not yet arrived. The examples I just mentioned are too expensive and, of course, it would be a mistake to read using them in a bathtub or on the beach. At this point they appeal to gadget lovers rather than readers, and they are not a serious challenge to the traditional model of the book.

This is not to say they won’t be a challenge in the future, and I think textbooks will be the first market to be seriously impacted by e-book devices. Imagine a chemistry textbook with animated three dimensional illustrations of complex molecules and with footnotes that you can click to view film clips of interviews with Nobel Prize winning scientists. These are ways of providing content that a traditional book can’t replicate.

However, I do believe the traditional book is still a very efficient technology. A few years ago archaeologists excavating an Irish bog dug up a prayer book that had been tossed away in the 12th century. The book was carefully cleaned and the text was still legible.

The digital revolution has also brought us Print-On-Demand books, which perhaps is less glamorous than e-books, but just as revolutionary. Any book that is digitized will theoretically always be available to readers, either in an electronic format or as a traditional book. Printers have told me that they now define an ultra short print run as one copy. This technology makes the utopian dream that no book will ever go out of print a reality.

Furthermore, the traditional publication process as we defined it in the 20th century could be radically decentralized if the technology to print digitized books becomes available to booksellers. Local bookstores could become publishing sites, much like they were in the early days of the American Republic when Ben Franklin printed books in Philadelphia.

There are also a number of sophisticated electronic inventory control systems on the market in the United States. Each of us can speak to the various strengths and weaknesses of the specific systems we use. One of the most exciting recent innovations in this area is a program from Above The Treeline, a company which describes itself as “a provider of collaboration based business intelligence.” Their program gives booksellers, publishers and distributors the ability to analyze and share information to make faster inventory decisions. You might want to look carefully at Above The Treeline. All of these systems help us work smarter and more efficiently.

By the way, a small group of bookstores in the U.S. have arranged bookseller to bookseller staff exchanges so that they might share each others’ best practices. Perhaps we could discuss developing a pilot project between booksellers in the Peoples Republic and the United States. I have no doubt that much of value could be gained by such an exchange.

And what about our customers? American booksellers love to tell each other that people will always need books, but this avoids a key question: How many people are really out there who feel the need to own and read books? The evidence coming in isn’t particularly reassuring. Recent reports from the National Endowment for the Arts indicate that there is a precipitious decline in readers. In 2004 the NEA published Reading At Risk and in late 2007 they published a new study, To Read or Not to Read. According to the first study, the rate of decline in literary reading has accelerated from -5% to -14% over two ten year periods.

Our traditional customer base has changed due to the explosion of entertainment choices available to people, the shrinking of leisure time, and the erosion in cultural and civic participation. Some experts tell us that children are processing information “differently” these days (which means their attention spans are shorter) and that publishers and booksellers should embrace multi-media products. I would rather declare children’s shortened attention spans a national illness, like childhood obesity. Instead of accommodating this situation, I’d rather call the Center for Disease Control.

A psychotherapist who oversees the training of clinicians at the University of Michigan Hospital, told me recently that he has noticed a decline in his students’ abilities to contextualize the information they learned, although these students were every bit as intelligent as students a decade ago. He blamed this decline on shortened attention spans and the computer. His observation echoes Marshall McLuhan’s assertion almost fifty years ago that the technology we use to record and access information shapes our view of the world.

If these problems are the consequences of transliteracy, maybe we should all just take a deep breath and say no thank you! I understand, of course, that these are weightier problems than we have time to do justice to here, but we should be there when these issues are discussed.

I’m fairly certain the business model we’ve developed in America doesn’t work very well for any sector of the book business there, and many of us are looking for new ways to publish, market and sell books. The question is: Will the new business models be expansive and robust enough to sustain our community of stores in the new information economy? Obviously the world of books is changing very quickly, but this has always been the case with everything as both the Pre-Socratic philosopher Heraclitus in ancient Greece and King Wen of Zhou noted a few millennia ago.

In spite of the business challenges we face, independent booksellers in America still manage to act as cultural advocates. We respond creatively to social issues beyond the narrow range of our immediate concerns regarding our own survival. I’d like to describe two examples.

Five years ago, following the U.S. military intervention in Iraq, a small group of American booksellers met over dinner and discussed the best action we might take at that difficult moment in history. We decided that the most progressive response would be to make a concerted effort to market more international fiction to the American public. Our assumption was that we might possibly prevent lethal conflicts with other people if we were able to see them as human beings with internal lives, capable of loving and making mistakes just like us.

For example, I think of Orhan Pamuk’s novel Snow, which is about the rise of religious fundamentalism in an economically depressed rustbelt town near the Russian border in Turkey. I grew up in what is now a rustbelt industrial city near the Canadian border in the United States, and as I read Pamuk’s novel I felt a shock of recognition. Because of my own experience, I understood the vulnerability and misery of people who realize they have no economic future due to historical shifts beyond their control. Snow gave me more insight into the social conditions that give rise to religious fundamentalism than any news or journal article I’ve read.

We developed a program called Reading The World which is about learning to listen more carefully to people speaking from outside the rooms we occupy. The American booksellers here today all participate in Reading The World, which is a collaborative project between booksellers and publishers that introduces to American readers literature in translation from around the world. Last years’ writers included Chinese authors Eileen Chang and Cao Xue.

The second example of independent bookseller social activism involves our response to the problem of illiteracy. Given what I’ve said about literacy, post literacy and transliteracy, you might assume that illiteracy isn’t still an enormous problem in the United States. Unfortunately, this is not the case. Illiteracy, of course, is the inability to read and write at levels of proficiency necessary to function on the job, in the family, and in society.

In one of the states in our American south, over 33% of the population is functionally illiterate. In another southern state, officials project out the number of future prison cells they need to construct on the basis of the percentage of eight year old children who fail their reading tests in the eighth grade. The social costs of illiteracy are staggeringly high.

Many independent booksellers respond to this crisis by partnering with various literacy organizations in our communities. There is a bookseller in Connecticut, Roxanne Cody, who established a program called Read To Grow that gives a book to every newborn child in her town. Her initiative was expanded to include the entire state of Connecticut. Reading experts tell us that the single most effective action parents can take with children to assure they successfully master literacy skills is to read to them when they are very young, because from then on they associate reading with being loved. The social impact of a program like this is incalculable.

In Washtenaw County, which is where I live, around 12% of the adult population is functionally illiterate. The city in which I live, Ann Arbor, is the home of the University of Michigan, one of the great public universities in the United States. Recently the University announced they are partnering with Google to digitize the contents of the University library system, the eventual goal being a digitized universal library of all the world’s books.

I mention this to make the point that I live—as we all do—simultaneously in multiple worlds. In this complex world and at this pivotal moment in our history we all need to be as clear as possible about what we stand for and what we value.

Late last year Doris Lessing was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, and in her acceptance speech she asked us to imagine a recently literate young mother in southern Africa proudly reading Anna Karenina. Lessing said she thinks this girl who was talking about books and an education when she had not eaten for three days “may yet define us.” I believe she is correct.

The social, political and ecological issues we all face are absolutely daunting, and we need a literate citizenry with attention spans long enough to honor the complexity and subtlety of these problems. I first heard the phrase deep literacy from my friend Paul Yamazaki, and I believe this is where we begin to solve our problems—with a commitment to deep literacy.

I want to end by telling you how delighted I am to be in this room with you today. As booksellers, we stand at a key cultural intersection. We help bring ideas to the marketplace, and we encourage conversations about these ideas. Ours is a noble and important profession.

Thank you.

Karl Pohrt
Shaman Drum Bookshop
Ann Arbor, Michigan
USA