The Written Nerd

"And can you imagine 50 people a day, I said 50 people a day walking into an indie bookstore, buying a book and walking out? Friends, they may think it’s a movement." Robert Gray's column in Shelf Awareness today about Buy Indie Day (that's today, May 1, folks!) made me choke up a little. With Arlo Guthrie on NPR this morning (singing a very old song about an auto bailout...), the reference to "Alice's Restaurant" is even more prescient, and it seems like everything old is new again. We've regained our skepticism of The Man, and we've got a new strategy for fighting 'em (supporting local, sustainable economies) and we've got some new tools: Twitter (#buyindieday) and Facebook (International "Buy Indie Day) . I suspect that telling readers of this blog to buy books at an indie bookstore is something like preaching to the choir. But if you possibly can, do find your local indie bookstore, go there, and buy a book today. Even if y...

Okay, I'm back from zombie sick land, and not a moment too soon. There's so much going on around shopping at indie stores, AND the brilliance of buying books for the holidays, that I'm going to have to do link madness on a Friday. Shopping Local First, do not fail to remember that tomorrow, Saturday November 22, is America Unchained ! Communities across the country will be encouraged to shop only at independent locally-owned stores -- just for one day. If you care about the economic health of your community, the statistics are persuasive: Studies in Maine and Austin , Texas demonstrate that locally-owned businesses generate 3.5 times the local economic activity as chains. A study of 10 independent businesses and 10 chains in retail, restaurant and service in Andersonville , Illinois demonstrates independent businesses generate about 70 percent greater local economic activity per square foot and slightly more sales per square foot as chains. A study in San Francisco d...

Read through for some random interesting links, or scroll to the end for a special invitation for NYC booksellers... * The L.A. Times has a cool article on the future of physical/electronic books , from the perspective of some rare books librarians, with some ideas after my own heart: "Our library is very heavily used," said director Judith Nadler. "The digital and the print-based will continue to coexist. We don't want the electronic instead of the book. We want the electronic and the book." * The New York Observer has taken on the ambitious task of picking the Brooklyn Literary 100 : the most important figures in the Brooklyn literary community, including authors, publishers, editors, etc. (What I like about the map is that it also points out the bookish places in Brooklyn, including bookstores and coffee shops). It's obviously a tad arbitrary, but not enough so for New York Magazine , which has taken the Observer 's list and edited it down to the ...