What Borders' Closing Means to Local Bookstores

Whenever something with cultural importance happens, I always look for the third (or more) way of looking at it. When the BP oil spill happened last year, I was as uncomfortable with the "boycott BP" opinion as I was with the "who cares, don't boycott" opinion. Instead I preferred looking at it in terms of whether local branches are really locally owned, how much of their oil is required to be from BP, etc. So when I got this email from my favorite independent bookstore, I thought it needed to be shared.

You may have heard that Borders is officially closing all of its remaining stores and liquidating all of its assets. Many of you in the community have asked what this means for Charis and if we are happy about it. The truth is that while losing a competitor is generally a good thing, Borders' closing is bad for the book industry on the whole and especially sad for the thousands of fellow booksellers who have lost their jobs. We mourn the loss of any place where people go to talk about and celebrate books. Richard Nash, former head of Soft Skull Press, expressed what many of us at Charis think in a recent CNN article: "We have more culture, more media, than we can now consume in a thousand lifetimes -- we don't need any more choice. What we need is help in choosing. Borders was not offering that. The reality is that the logistics of selling books to America's readers doesn't require a few thousand superstores with 40,000 titles in each. So the book retail sector has to shrink and will continue to shrink, whether it was more independent stores, or some chains closing, or other chains shrinking. But it need not vanish. Sixty-four million Americans read five hours a week or more, 16 million Americans report they have engaged in creative writing, and more than 2 million titles went on sale in the U.S. last year. With all that supply and demand, we need matchmakers, people with expertise, knowledge, and intuition to connect people with books, to offer help in choosing what to read. Bookstores can and should be sites for this conversation. Increasingly, the good ones are places where people seeking deeper engagement with their culture and society choose to congregate."

We sincerely hope that Charis can be a place that encourages your deeper engagement with the world. That is why we are here. We believe in the power of books, of ideas, of fellowship through conversation and debate. We need your voice in the room but we also need you to continue to buy your books (both digital and print) from us. We want you to help us shape the future of feminist literary community in Atlanta by offering your ideas, your time, and your resources to build the Charis Center and to continue to support Charis Books and Charis Circle.

We are so grateful to still be here and hear so many of you say that we are more vital to your lives than ever before. When people ask us "how we do it" we always say that we have the most loyal customers in the world. We are still here for and because of you. Thank you!