AB Bookman's Weekly went out of business in late 1999, an early Internet casualty. There are now half a dozen major Internet search engines that specialize in books. On one of them, AbeBooks.com, there are 44 copies of "The Yellow-Lighted Bookshop."
It's hard for any single used bookstore to compete against this bounty, just as it's impossible for any shop carrying new books to rival the electronic plenitude of Amazon. Because the Internet retailer doesn't have to pay rent for display space or charge sales tax, its books are almost invariably cheaper too.
"I'd be really hard pressed to come up with a single social or demographic trend that is in favor of bookstores," said Tom Haydon, whose Wessex Books in Menlo Park was for decades the best secondhand store in the 50-mile stretch between San Francisco and San Jose.
Unable to find a buyer, Haydon closed Wessex in June 2005.
"It's a lost cause," he said.
During the 1990s, when the biggest threat facing independents was the Barnes & Noble and Borders chains, there was outrage and action. In Capitola, a full-size Borders store was voted down by the City Council in 1999. When a Borders opened a few miles away in Santa Cruz the next year, it was greeted by demonstrators and hecklers.
But in the last year or two, as the menace from the Internet became palpable, the chains lost their position as No. 1 villain. Borders and Barnes & Noble reported that sales in stores open for more than a year slipped over the Christmas holidays, despite the healthy economy.
Meanwhile, Amazon reported "media" sales (which include books) in North America of $1.25 billion for the last three months of 2006, a 21% increase over the same period a year earlier.
"The purpose of a business is to satisfy the needs and wants of a customer," said book industry consultant Albert Greco. "That's what the online world has done."
MAYBE that's why passions among literary folk now seem so muted.
When sliding sales forced Cody's to close its store next to the UC Berkeley campus, the poet Ron Silliman wrote on his blog that it was once the anchor of "the best book-buying block in North America." But in the discussion that followed, the attitude was one of resignation if not indifference.
"Why would anyone want to perpetuate small independents by paying higher prices?" wondered Curtis Faville, a poet who sells rare books on the Internet. "Most of these proud little independents were poorly run anyway."
