On Bookstores

Going into a bookstore can be profoundly frustrating for me.  I don't know how much of it is because I'm a librarian, but one of the largest sources of frustration is because the books are never where I expect them to be.  Bookstore classification and whatever logic underlies it just don't mesh with my internal ordering of books.

This leads to other problems.  I wanted a book on making sewing patterns.  I had read McCunn's excellent How to Make Sewing Patterns, and I was hoping for something to expand on that.  Sewing, whether you're looking at Library of Congress (LC) or Dewey Decimal Classification, is in the technology sections - the same area as cooking, engineering, and so forth.  For LC, this is the T's.  Well, at Barnes & Noble, sewing is in the vicinity of neither the cooking nor the other technology books.  No, sewing is over by... the paper crafts materials they also sell.  That makes sense from a marketing perspective (hey, you're into craft books, here's the craft supplies we sell), but if you're looking for a book on handwork that they don't sell the resources for, the logic breaks.

I suppose part of the problem I have in bookstores is that I don't go in to browse.  I go in to find specific books or subjects.  Modern brick & mortar bookstores aren't really good for that unless you're looking for something recently published (say, the Dresden Files) or something in perennial demand (a dictionary).  I want a copy of McCunn's How to Make Sewing Patterns, but going to the bookstore in the mall probably isn't going to work.  (I've tried.)  It's in print, but they don't stock it locally.  Heck, Barnes & Noble doesn't even sell it new on their website.  Amazon it is.

I've been using the library as a reader again more recently - for the Dresden Files, for example.  But books I check out that I really like I tend to buy, especially non-fiction titles.  The gardening book I love (the Self-Sufficient Gardener) I borrowed several times from the library, then bought. I started reading Halberstam's book on the Korean War, got into a time crunch, and ended up buying it later from Borders when they were going out of business.  But just because I found it in the library doesn't mean I can find it in the bookstore.

To some extent interlibrary loan spoils me.  If I find a book I want to read that some library owns somewhere, as long as they're willing to send it, I can probably read it.  Unfortunately, if I really like the book, finding a copy to buy can be more complicated.  S. E. Smith's book on the history of the U.S. Navy in World War II has been available used on Amazon for a while; I read it three times in junior high.  But it was always more expensive on Amazon than I wanted to spend.  I ended up getting it in Delhi when we stopped for lunch in a cafe/bookstore on a trip for work.  (I may have, ahem, gasped when I saw it on the shelf, halfway through lunch.)  I could have gotten it easily through ILL (you can see in that WorldCat link that almost a thousand libraries own it), but purchasing it was a bit more complicated.  (That cafe has amazing sandwiches, and if I could find an excuse to go to Delhi again, I'd really like another tomato/bazil/mozzarella panini, hold the tomato and basil.  Yes, basically a grilled cheese with mozzarella.  It was awesome.)

Another problem I have in bookstores also stems from working in interlibrary loan.  If I don't have a specific book in mind, a bookstore isn't necessarily going to help.  Say I want to read a book on the Korean War.  Is the bookstore going to have anything?  Is it going to be a historical book, or something else?  Something as engaging as Barbara Tuchman's The Guns of August is for World War I?  What got me about Borders was that they had sections - history, military history, U.S. history, politics - that broadly overlapped and required extensive browsing to find things.  Genre fiction?  Not generally a problem.  Non-fiction?  Well...

I think this is why Amazon has been getting so much of my book business.  If I want to read a book about, say, Secretariat, I can pop it into WorldCat, see what comes up, and see if there's anything local.  My local public library is pretty good about getting books on racehorses.  And then if I like it, I can pop the title into Amazon and buy it.  (There's a book I read a while back about the American Eclipse that I've been thinking about getting.)  Going to the bookstore isn't really the most useful way to find a book on a specific topic if nothing on the topic has been published recently.

It's been a long time since I've bought a book I didn't know anything about just browsing in the bookstore that wasn't either deeply discounted or... well, deeply discounted.  The last time I recall doing so was Robin Hobb's first Assassin trilogy, back when I was in high school.  (I read them in one night.  It was, perhaps, a mistake, given that I had school the next day.)  Nowadays I tend prefer to borrow before I buy.  For a while I was buying bargain books because they were a subject I wanted a book on and they were cheap, but they didn't necessarily turn out to be helpful.  I'm trying to make my book purchases more efficient, more meaningful.  Borrow it, read it, and if I want it to read again or for reference, then buy it.  If I don't get around to reading it when I borrowed it from the library, I probably don't need to buy a copy.  I don't gamble on authors by purchase anymore.  (A good thing, too, since I tried getting into George R. R. Martin's series that everyone is so excited about, and it just didn't work out for me.)

At this point I go to the bookstore a) if I'm looking for a book for someone else; b) if there's a book I want and I know it's in the building (and that it won't be cheaper to buy online, because someone with an Amazon app on his phone will point it out to me if it is); or c) if I've got a gift card or they've got a really good sale going on that makes it work buying a book I wasn't planning to.

For something new to read?  I'm back to the public library.  So that's at least one bad college habit crossed off my list.