Why Booksellers Are Going Belly Up

By Anneli Rufus, East Bay Express. Posted August 19, 2006.

Balloons, sky-blue and gold and arterial red, bobbed against Cody's glass facade the afternoon before the store closed. July sunshine basted the hordes jostling inside, plucking strawberries from trays, eyes darting as if to say, "I'm making history." News cameras swiveled. A fat man with a sheathed knife at his waist, leather hat strung with small animal skulls, perused the horror-fiction section. A combo played Parisian bistro tunes: accordion and fiddle, happy-sad. The shelves upstairs were bare.

One could be picky and say this was Cody's Telegraph to differentiate the 50-year-old Berkeley, Calif. flagship from the two other Cody's stores, one of which opened on Berkeley's Fourth Street in 1997, the other in San Francisco last fall. Neither of them appears doomed, but the July 10 closure of Cody's Telegraph Avenue store garnered extraordinary attention. Local and national media -- The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, NPR, MSNBC, to name a few -- have proved generous with their time and ink since owner Andy Ross announced his intentions in early May. His revelation spurred fierce debates, like an endless grown-up game of Clue: What killed Cody's? Chain stores, some said. Changing times, others surmised. Cultural illiteracy. Greed. The Internet. Panhandlers. That missing parking lot. George W. Bush.

The fingers have continued to jab left and right, zeroing in on this or that obvious culprit. But it appears more likely that, rather than falling under the lead pipe of some dastardly lone slayer, Cody's died the death of a thousand cuts, from a thousand blades: disparate and even largely inadvertent but ineluctable. Telegraph Avenue ... slash. Parking ... slash. Chain stores ... slash slash. The remaining perps have thus far eluded detection: transformations in Cal's student body, for instance, and the ebbing of radical chic. Perhaps the hardest cut to endure is that books as we know them are fading, bit by bit, from ubiquity. We can no longer presume they'll always be here. Actual books, with covers and pages and bindings and type, are increasingly artifacts, relics -- old school, silverfish food, without hyperlinks. How long before that $24.95 best-seller, bought on Amazon yesterday, is displayed in a museum alongside rotary phones, cyclamates, and bustles? That's why the death of Cody's hurts: For all those who used to sneak-read as children under the covers with flashlights and books, it presages our own obsolescence.

And thus those to whom such matters matter mourned. Some spoke of an apocalypse. Some nursed a spark of schadenfreude. They asked hair-tearing, dear-God-what-have-we-done questions that no one would ask were this moribund business, say, a locksmith or a Laundromat. After all, family-owned Radstons office supply in downtown Berkeley closed in July after 98 years with barely a whisper and no trace of hagiography.

But Cody's was different. Cody's was a bookstore. In Berkeley. On Telegraph Avenue. In the midst of that five-block span that was, as Andy Ross would tell the crowd that day, "the heart and soul of '60s counterculture."

The crowd ate it up. When Berkeley looks in the mirror, it perceives a book town, a lit-cred Lourdes linked with so many bards and rebels and laureates alive and dead that reciting their bibliographies would take all day. Not just uninflected authors but, to a large part, activist authors with a cause. Rare is any city so spellbound by its own legacy. For better or worse, Berkeley is a living theme park, forever conjuring a heyday that Cody's crystallized.

"Tie-dyed Tears," one blogger proclaimed.

Yet even as the closing of a popular store after fifty years is history in the making, it's also business as usual. And while Cody's closure might tempt some to conclude the retail book trade is dead, that's simply not the case -- at least not yet.

It is true that we have an astounding illiteracy rate: 14 percent of American adults fall below basic reading comprehension, according to a 2003 report from the National Center for Education Statistics. But economic data suggest there's more at play in this case. Bookstore sales -- which include general, college, and specialty stores -- have increased slowly but steadily for most of the past dozen years, rising from $8.3 billion in 1992 to $16.3 billion in 2005, according to US Census Bureau figures. And while these numbers reflect flat bookstore revenues since 2004, they don't include online sales, which have grown enormously. What's more, even as bookstores in general face a slowdown, independents and small chains have fared relatively well: Publishing-industry analyst Ipsos BookTrends reported last year that indies and small chains were actually increasing their market shares, and that these stores had both sold more books and brought in more money in each of the preceding three years. In the meantime, publishers report significant 2004-2005 sales increases in just about every category, with continued gains projected this year, according to Book Industry Trends 2006, a recent report by the Book Industry Study Group. For instance, sales in the "trade" category, which includes general fiction and nonfiction, jumped five percent in 2005.

Yet all the favorable stats in the world can't save a sinking ship. As apocalypse-spotters point out, Cody's Telegraph was only the latest in a sad parade of local independents going dark over the past several years: Shambhala and the Book Zoo, also on Telegraph; Black Oak in North Beach in San Francisco; and A Clean Well-Lighted Place for Books, whose Larkspur and Cupertino branches have long since closed and whose San Francisco Opera Plaza site closed in July.

Anneli Rufus is the author of several books, including "Party of One: The Loners' Manifesto."

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