An American Lion

Elliot Bay Book Store, Seattle, Washington

This article just speaks to one particular book store in Seattle, Washington, but, really, it’s a metaphor for what’s happened to hundreds of very popular, high quality book and record stores all over the country:

Amid the blues bars and rescue missions of Pioneer Square, Seattle’s storied intersection of sports and booze, art and vagrancy, the Elliott Bay Book Co. has stood as a symbol of comfortable, old-world erudition.

For years, it has been one of the West’s few destination bookstores, a place tourists and locals alike visit for the sake of spending a couple of hours getting lost in its 140,000-some neatly stacked titles. When the last actual book downloads onto Kindle (at Amazon.com on the other side of town), Elliott Bay, one feels sure, will still be selling its musty, hard-bound predecessors, perused with a tangy cup of espresso in the basement cafe.

So it is with no small degree of anguish that Seattle has reacted to the news that Elliott Bay is facing the likely choice of either moving across town or closing altogether when its lease is up Jan. 31.

In some ways it is the familiar story of an independent bookstore getting hammered by book chains, online retailers and big-store discounters. But there are peculiar Seattle wrinkles.

The city’s two downtown sports stadiums are bringing crowds of often-tipsy revelers through Pioneer Square, scaring the tourists and competing with locals for the ever-dwindling supply of parking.

And during last year’s holiday season, any shoppers who might have been willing to jack up their credit cards during the recession stayed home anyway when an unusually heavy snowstorm paralyzed the hilly downtown streets for days.

Technology is killing these stores, to put not too fine a point on it. Now that you can get any book or musical recording you want just by going online, that’s exactly what people have started to do. Their new behavior is to buy what they want online, and they do it for less because the saturation of options have lowered prices.

Elliott Bay realized that a long time ago and added online shopping to the website that promotes the store. The problem is, they have to compete with thousands of small stores all over the country, and all over the world. Anyone willing to sell books online can create their own “store” and retail their own stock online, via portals like Amazon.com or E-bay. Instead of having to compete with stores in the vicinity, the vicinity becomes the entire world, especially for people who can navigate websites in other languages. Google translation solves that problem now—the web has now become universally understandable. And, with that, the reality that Google has put all the books online anyway—well, what’s a retailer to do?

Go out of business, actually. Go out of business.