The Daily News
http://www.nydailynews.com
Friday, February 18th 2011, 4:00 AM
Henny Ray Abrams/AP
Borders plans to close 200 stores and layoff 6,000 employees.
Borders is bankrupt, and you shouldn't gloat about it, no matter how much you hate chain bookstores. In fact, if you are a writer, an editor or a reader, you should be downright furious. I am, and I rarely shopped there. Still, even if you only buy books at the smallest, most charming bookstore in the West Village, you're going to feel the tremors of Borders' demise. We all are.
Though some have suggested that Borders' loss is a gain for small bookstores, it is a loss for them, too - and for anyone who believes that books deserve better than a Walmart discount rack or your neighborhood tag sale.
The notion, suggested in yesterday's New York Times, that "the troubles of Borders are rooted in . . . problems . . . of [its] own making" - is a comforting but dangerous illusion, because it concentrates blame on one bookseller, as opposed to the entire publishing establishment - where it without question belongs.
Borders did expand too quickly and never adapted to the digital marketplace. Now, carrying $1.29 billion in debt, it's about to close 200 stores and lay off 6,000 employees. But this will hardly prove an isolated case. Though currently treading water, I am certain that Barnes & Noble cannot be very far behind. Smaller stores might survive, but it's hard to imagine them thriving - after all, most of them have already been battered by the forces assailing Borders.
What happened to real estate is now happening to books: An industry colluded to push an overpriced product on a public whose purse strings were tightening and whose tastes were changing. Demand dropped steadily, but supply kept soaring - only now is it coming down to earth. Nothing reminds me so much of those tracts of foreclosed houses in Florida as stack upon stack of hardcover books, desperate to be bought for $25.99.
Borders owes publishers vast amounts for such books, which it bought but then could not itself sell: $41 million to Penguin and $33.8 million to Simon & Schuster. Should they remain unpaid, every editor, author and agent in America will feel the pain.
But maybe such a reckoning is deserved - for too long, publishers have been out of touch with what Americans are reading, how they're reading it and how much they're willing to pay for it. But publishers, like financiers, appear to be largely immune to reality. The rise of Amazon, the profusion iPads and Kindles, the dominance of video games and movies - none of this seemed to trouble executives who imagined themselves immune to such obvious market forces.
For the love of God, Manhattan's flagship Barnes & Noble sits in Union Square, across from the shuttered Virgin Megastore, which was once so packed you could hardly reach for the latest REM disk. While reading itself is no more extinct than music, the bookstore will soon go the way of Bleecker St.'s famous record stores.
Indeed, the cause of recycling has never had a better friend than the next sure-fire hit novel. Yann Martel received a $3 million advance for this second novel, an allegory about the Holocaust. Not unlike a home mortgage, an advance comes with the hope of being repaid. In this case, though, Martel would have had to sell 120,000 books just to make back the advance. Instead, the book was a complete bust - an abandoned McMansion.
Hey, remember when Dan Brown's "The Lost Symbol" saved the entire publishing industry in 2008, as an article in the Wall Street Journal suggested it would? Me neither.
Much as real estate speculators bought up cheap land with the conviction that gentrification would continue forever (like the not-quite renaissance of the South Bronx as an artists' haven), publishers seized on every literary trend, convinced that if readers bought one book, they would like 20 more like it.
When Iran was the topic du jour some three years ago, they rolled out, among others, "When Skateboards Will Be Free: A Memoir of a Political Childhood" by Said Sayrafiezadeh, "Sons and Other Flammable Objects" by Porochista Khakpour, "Reading Lolita in Tehran" by Azar Nafisi and "The Septembers of Shiraz" by Dalia Sofer.
These may all be excellent reads, for all I know. Maybe all those "Twilight" and "Harry Potter" imitations are the finest stuff out there, rivaled only by the latest contender from Sweden trying to dethrone "The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo."
In truth, flooding the market with books doesn't work, because books aren't like shoes or groceries. Readers don't demand choice as much as they demand quality. Fewer books, rigorously edited and thoughtfully published, would have better served both readers and writers.
Take, as a contrary example, Paul Harding's "Tinkers." A complete unknown, Harding received a tiny advance of $1,000 from tiny Bellevue Literary Press, for a tiny print run of 3,500. But small bookstores loved his book and recommended it to readers. They seemed to like it, too; so did the Pulitzer Prize committee, which awarded him the 2009 fiction prize. If there is hope for publishing, it is with modest presses and modest books, putting out titles for small but loyal audiences. But that's not something that's going to warm the heart of Penguin's CEO.
It's not only the publishers who are at fault. MFA programs train writers whose goal - not always, but far too often - is a six-figure advance, not the publication of serious (or even readable) literature. They write with the market squarely in their sights - the market, in turn, dictates what it thinks the reader wants from them. "Eat Pray Love" was huge? Better enroll in that memoir-writing course. Oh, and do you know anything about Iran?
And the people who write books - and teach the writing of them - also often write reviews, which is why your average book review (disclosure: I've written plenty) is about as honest as a real estate ad describing a run-down property as a "charming fixer-upper." Very few writers want to say something negative about another author, fearing that they will be punished in return. To hear reviewers tell it, every writer is the next John Updike, every novel a great American one. Say what you will about the movie business, at least there's very little sanctimony - no one, as far as I know, is calling Judd Apatow a reincarnated Orson Welles.
But people aren't stupid - not that stupid, anyway. Borders' meltdown suggests a deeper unwillingness of the American reader to partake in the cycle of poorly written books rushed to the market, wildly hyped and then promptly turned into so much blank paper again.
Those 200 Borders franchises about to shutter will further diminish bookstores in the crowded American marketplace, relegating them to the niche status of, say, taxidermy shops. The sad truth, though, for us book people, is that this was a long time coming and isn't over yet - and that we did it to ourselves.
anazaryan@nydailynews.com
Alexander Nazaryan is on the Editorial Board of the Daily News
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