Amazon, All Consuming, Jill, and Mark
Well, I’ve been emailing with Jill Walker a bit on the same topic as my post about All Consuming. It looks like she recently posted to her blog on this topic, but before she got the most recent email from yours truly - so I guess we can take the conversation out in public (where it probably belongs). The following paragraphs are an adaptation of my email to Jill:
When I was a kid, we used to drive long stretches of California (between the San Francisco area and the Los Angeles area) several times a year to visit family. At first we would stop at places with names like “Burger Pit” where the ingredients were often local (I remember some of the ice cream fondly) and the people seemed pretty happy. Those places are all gone now - were gone some years ago - completely swallowed by the fast food franchises. (I understand there’s a relatively-recent book about how this happened, that I haven’t read, called Fast Food Nation. [or non-U.S. link]) Anyway, the arguments for Amazon often seem to me like the arguments for McDonald’s: it’s cheap, it’s convenient, it’s the future. But what about how McDonald’s changed agriculture? What about the jobs people end up with at McDonald’s as opposed to local, independent restaurants?
Anyway, the McDonald’s battle is lost. And we look to be losing the Wal-Mart one as well (the final end of the old downtowns of much of the U.S.). And maybe we’ll lose it for bookstores too. But convenience, price, and seeming to be the future can’t be the only criteria by which we decide how to live, where to link.
All that said, my perspective is very much shaped by having spent most of the last decade in New York City, where the great independent bookstores were dying one by one. Each time another one went it created this sick-to-my-stomach feeling. Now there are just a handful left. Jill, on the other hand, has been living somewhere without great independent bookstores to die. Very different. (Or so I wrote to Jill before her post and Mark’s. Has Mark also been living somewhere without great independent bookstores, or did they just never matter much to him?)
It seems like there are three issues:
- Can people like me point link-followers to a place that will help the bookstores I care about stay around - and still get included in aggregation efforts like All Consuming?
- Can people like Jill (and Mark) point link-followers to whatever online bookstore(s) they prefer, chosen by whatever criteria they please (how well stores treat their workers, how they interact with small publishers, how much information they give on their pages, whether they have an affiliate program the linker likes, etc.) - and still get included in aggregation efforts like All Consuming?
- If we think the answer is yes to the questions above (and I think it certainly is on a technical level) then how do we start to work toward this multiplicity (and deliberate, rather than default, choice on this topic)? I think talking about these issues explicitly and publicly is one step.
And so ended my email to Jill. And here we are having that explicit, public conversation - which makes me happy. And it’s already spread a bit. I just saw in the comments for Jill’s post a link to Elizabeth Lane Lawley’s extension of the conversation.