From: Maia Cheli-Colando <maia>
Date: Wed, 13 Oct 2004 17:02:57 -0700

I do. As I noted, I order mostly through the local bookstore or through Powells. (Why Powells? Used books, out of print books, all kinds of books I can't get here and/or aren't carried by Ingram.)

More often when we lived in Eugene than here in rural northern California, I would hit all of the bookstores before I gave up and went online. This included Borders and B&N. Why? I wanted to see the books... not just make a guess based on what I read in an online blurb.

As far as "independent bookstores who really have a handle on children..." Uh, well, the local new bookstore here does well enough, but frankly, I know more than any of the sellers I've met here about children's books. There is no local children's store; we live five hours from the nearest large City, and three and a half from something of even moderate size. In the local new bookstore, I'm more often to know the answer to a customer inquiry about childlit than the staff are. That's not their fault; they do well in carrying the new, well-done, polished children's and YA... certainly a better selection than you would find at a chain. But we're talking maybe 24 x 5 feet of total shelf space here, and much of it picture book face outs. The earth science book selection is maybe fifteen books. We own two or three times what they sell, just in earth science /picture books/.

I support, praise, and spend my money at local bookstores whenever possible. I don't, for example, shop at amazon, and I try to encourage the university students I meet to order through our (one) local new bookstore. But -- and I say this as someone who used to work at an indie bookstore -- I sometimes find the perspective that "indie booksellers know all" kind of funny. Especially with a small indie, you may have half a dozen employees at maximum. How many genres is each employee expected to know well? When I was hired to work at bookstores
(three), yes, we surely were hired because of what genre expertise we carried. But it wasn't as though any of the bookstores' collective brains knew every genre in depth. Simply wasn't possible. (And, usually, all staff are not working at once!)

Back to my previous post -- I and everyone on this list has expertise in children's literature. We know what is possible, whether or not our local/chain bookstores, school/college/university libraries or Santa make them available for us to see. We can find what we want. But what about kids? Do they go online to find their reading material that is outside the limited range of most bookstores/libraries/family Santa Claus? Or take just whatever the local options are available?

Maia

Mark and Diane Betz wrote:
Received on Wed 13 Oct 2004 07:02:57 PM CDT