The Illusion of Choice

Posted 3 July, 2008 in Bookselling | 1 comment

The last time I dropped into an Indigo bookstore, I was dismayed — although not entirely surprised — to find an entire A-frame in the “P” section of fiction devoted to the oeuvre of James Patterson (or, at least, James Patterson and his various co-authors/ghostwriters). This is distressing in part because so much space is being given over to such a dreadful writer, but in part because it signals the final demise of the one area in which Indigo was able to claim an advantage over its smaller, independent counterparts: breadth of selection.

When Chapters and Indigo first launched in the mid-’90s, one of their big selling points was their size: because of their “big box” natures, the claim went, they would be able to stock more titles than other stores, which would allow for a broader range of consumer choice in their selection of reading material. Whether you were a student looking for a book on a course syllabus, a businessperson searching for the latest marketing text, or a connoisseur of Uzbekistani literature in translation, you were supposed to be able to find it in stock, or available for special order within a matter of days.

We all know what happened: the vaunted choice gradually got eroded, ceding ever more shelf space to non-book related items such as candles, yoga mats, and vases. Today, when you walk into an Indigo store you can be assured of finding monolithic towers of the half-dozen or so bestsellers from the past six months, but you can never be certain of finding much else. Indigo is likely to carry an author’s most recent book, and perhaps one title from his or her backlist, but that’s about it.

Tyler Cowan of Marginal Revolution has noticed the same phenomenon taking place at Borders outlets in the States:

I’ve visited two Borders stores since my return and both have done away with their new books tables. In one case the table is still there but has about one-quarter as many books on it if that. The very best-selling books now get four to six piles on the table — or more — rather than leaving space for a greater number of titles with one stack a piece. The front of the store offers many more paperback books and many more bestsellers that have been doing well for months. Many bookshelves are gone altogether and replaced with non-book, non-CD, non-DVD items, such as expensive writing journals and gift cards. It’s much more like a Barnes and Noble.

At Indigo, this flattening of the literary landscape seems to derive from a kind of corporate fiat, or at least occurs with the tacit approval of the chain’s leader, or self-styled “chief booklover,” Heather Reisman. The one table that is always in evidence at the front of an Indigo location is the table featuring “Heather’s Picks,” which are frequently an exercise in depression. Rather than using her influence, and the hugely desirable front-of-store marketing space, to cast light on deserving but perhaps neglected books, Reisman’s choices run to the safe and already successful. She chose Late Nights on Air by Elizabeth Hay (but not, if memory serves, until it had already received the Giller jury’s imprimatur) and Barbara Walters’s recent memoir, Audition, and even went so far as to choose Dan Brown’s mega-bestseller The Da Vinci Code, as though that book needed any more promotion. I realize that Reisman’s choices reflect her own personal tastes, but it’s a shame that she refuses to use her position to try to broaden the spectrum of the public’s reading habits. Even Oprah selected William Faulkner for her book club.

Publishers are of course complicit in what gets featured prominently in Canada’s largest bookstore chain. Since so much of the display space is available for purchase or through co-op, publishers will naturally highlight the books they expect to do most well on their new lists. This immediately excludes most first-time authors and anything off the beaten track; the paradoxical marketing philosophy at most houses has the largest percentage of their budgets going to the books that least need it. Why spend the lion’s share of your marketing budget on the new Margaret Atwood or Michael Ondaatje, both of whom are going to sell regardless? All this accomplishes is relegating midlist authors or first timers (at least those lacking the kind of attention given a Vincent Lam or a Rawi Hage) to being spined on the shelves, usually in quantities of one or two copies, which will likely sit there for six months until they are inevitably returned.

The dilemma here is tautological. Indigo stocks disproportionately large numbers of bestselling titles because these are the ones that make the cash registers ring; people buy these titles because they are all that are available, or else the less splashy books fall through the cracks due to lack of publicity or for want of prime space in the bookstores.

This, it seems to me, is the flaw in Daniel Hall’s article on the Economist blog, in which he holds, rightly, that music has become an indie game, whereas books increasingly subscribe to the winner-take-all philosophy of a tournament. Hall writes:

One of my friends proposed a theory I find compelling: Our cultural consumption exists on a spectrum from “individual” to “collective”. Technology has shifted the balance for both books and music. Digital distrbitution and the iPod have made music consumption much more individualistic, while the internet and global branding have made book consumption increasingly collective.

But this, I think, is a case of mistaking the cause. It’s not the Internet that’s making book consumption increasingly collective; indeed, online sites such as Amazon and Powell’s provide readers with access to far more titles than would be available to them simply by walking through the doors of an Indigo location. Rather, Indigo is itself curtailing the number and variety of titles it carries, and increasingly giving prominence to those titles that have already proved themselves as stalwarts. By choosing what to spotlight and what to bury, Indigo is in a very real way deciding what many Canadians will and will not read. All the while providing the illusion of choice.