He was talking about the opportunity to for brick-and-mortar stores to put a link to the Google eBook reader on its website, allowing patrons to buy e-books from local independent bookshops rather than shop through Amazon.com, at no additional cost to patrons — except the need to buy a tablet computer, an iPhone or an Android-powered device in order to read the books, because only the Kindle Fire is compatible with Google eBooks.
And, yet, booksellers can’t quite snuggle up to the idea of digital books, no matter how easy they make it to increase font sizes, manage page turning with arthritic hands, or pack for vacations.
The Regulator’s home page includes a link to ebookskeptic.net, with the teasing linke “When it comes to reading, is digital dumber?” (The answer: Yes, they think so.) But, still, The Regulator hopes readers who choose to buy eBooks do it through their site.
“We didn’t want to just give that business away to someone else,” Regulator owner Tom Campbell said. “I have my preferences and they’re not for reading e-books, but other people have theirs.”
Mock struck a similar the-devil-made-me-do-it tone.
“E-readers are becoming pretty prevalent,” he said. “They’re not going to be nearly as prevalent as everybody thinks they are, but we want to be able” to give customers the option of online shopping. “It’s just going to be a matter of educating our patrons that you can shop here, you don’t have to shop Amazon, you can support your local bookstore or your favorite independent no matter where you are in the world.”
As Mock notes, it’s free money. In another sense, it’s money that shoppers can finally recapture for their communities. Unless the author, like Jeffrey Deaver, Lee Smith or Tim Tyson, lives in the area, none of the money from Amazon book sales comes to Durham or Chapel Hill, but money spent on books recirculates in the community when it’s channeled through stores like The Regulator and Pageturners, which are already set up on the IndieBound e-Book Reader app, or McIntyre’s, which is working on it.
And here, ultimately, is why that matters for consumers: While the public libraries can (and do) use taxpayer funds to create author events and promote different books, the role of the brick-and-mortar bookshop has been matchmaking readers to books.
“If you know, ‘I’m going to want the new John Grisham,’ fine, but there’s a lot of good mysteries you may never have heard of, and we can point some of them out to people,” Campbell said. “... Writers and readers come together in a place like this. It’s not just nationally known writers, but local writers. We have the storytelling group that meets here. It’s a place where you can kind of savor books, maybe, is a way to say it.”
We’re not persuaded that Google eBooks is a permanent solution, in part because it relies on readers who have a relationship with a bookshop and go through the IndieBound app rather than connecting directly to Google eBooks. But relationships are what bookshops are all about — so they need to think about how to put their personal, valuable-to-shoppers touch on digital book buying.
