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Sunday, July 8, 2012

Complaining Again!

We spent an hour or two looking around Barnes & Noble at Arrowhead Mall in Glendale, AZ, and purchased some fine books for the great-grandsons, ages 9 and 8. But I must complain again over the lack of Western novels represented by the small section set aside for Westerns. Louis L'Amour and William C. Johnstone each took up a shelf, leaving only three or four shelves for everyone else. There were some Elmer Keltons, Robert B. Parkers,  Charles Wests, and three or four other authors, but that was all.  I know it doesn't do any good to complain, and when I mentioned it to the clerk, he just shook his head.

We need to complain more to the management. They don't do anything when only one person bitches about it, but if two or three hundred said something, it might make a difference.

Anyway, I had to order the three or four books I wanted and now I'm waiting for the phone call to go pick 'em up.

10 comments:

  1. It is a sad state of affairs for sure. Sales are down in those stores because if you like westerns you've already got all the ones they sell and they have nothing new or different.

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    1. They only carry a few of the top-selling authors and neglect all the rest.

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  2. If that's the state of affairs in the land of the Wild West, then I have no hope out here in India. The only westerns we get in new bookstores are bad reprints of Louis L'Amour. Fortunately, a lot of near-mint secondhand paperbacks, including western, are making their way to India by the shiploads, priced at less than 50 cents each. I owe my small collection of westerns to used bookstalls.

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    1. The used book stores around here are the lifeblood of the Westerns. Are those shiploads of books all in English or various languages?

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  3. I have had some luck in small indy bookstores finding local writers but share your story with the big box ones. I only read westerns and mysteries (fiction) huge selection in mystery - some not so good, very little in Western.

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    1. B&N has a fairly good selection of mysteries with more space allotted.

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  4. Mainly in English. The books include pulp-noir which not many people here read. Popular fiction of the Jeffrey Archer-Robert Ludlum kind are, well, still popular and are quite expensive. Eating into the sales of new bookstores is the vast illegal market for pirated books which, perversely, has revived the habit of reading in urban India. I have picked up quite a few secondhand near-mint crime, detective and western paperbacks (my area of interest among other genres) from the 1940-1980 period at throwaway prices.

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    1. Prashant, sounds like you have a good deal. Are any of these shiploads reprinted by China and sold as new editions? The revival of urban reading sounds like an unintended consequence of the illegal trade, but is a good thing at the expense of the bookstores.

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  5. Oscar, the shipload of books including original paperbacks, I am told, come directly from the US and possibly the UK. These are stored in warehouses from where they are sent out to different parts of the country, mainly to the metros like Bombay and Delhi. I suppose American book dealers have large inventories of early paperbacks whose sales might have reached saturation point at your end.

    Luckily for me, these books are not in demand here. To give you an idea, I picked up Dan Marlowe, Jory Sherman, Erle Stanley Gardener, Ed McBain, Loren D. Estleman, Harry Patterson (aka Jack Higgins), Nevil Shute, A.J. Cronin, Elmore Leonard, and Edgar Rice Burroughs, to name a few, for Rs.10 to 20 each — books that other buyers merely flipped through and put back. I could make out they didn't have the slightest clue who most of these authors were. All these books are in very good condition. Secondhand bookstores buy these in bulk and cheap which explains the hefty discount.

    As far as pirated books go, I remember, the price of original Harry Potter books (hardback) after the customary 20-25% discount was Rs.500-600 ($10-12) but cheap paperbacks of these very books were sold for less than Rs.100 ($2) on the roadside. Yes, more people are reading books but at the expense of both the authors and booksellers.

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    1. Thanks for the explanation. You have a great selection of authors at a good price. I remember seeing some of the small bookstands, but I didn't notice any books in English being displayed. At that time I wasn't too interested in buying books since I had no place to put them to keep them from being taken by another swabby.

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