Shopping For Community

Most Thought Provoking Sentence: "Large corporations can additionally not be trusted to remain in a community, but could pull up stakes whenever it is profitable to do so. The independent [bookstore], on the other hand, is believed to have roots deep enough in a community to stay for the long haul" (Miller, 397).

Libraries and independent bookstores are not so different from one another in this way. Libraries are reflections of their communities. In a poor, socially conservative town, the library may not be so well-funded, and the collection may not be very large. Similarly, a given community may not want its librarians to host what would be considered to be controversial material on its shelves. The library and/or independent bookstore grows and reflects the nature of the community around it.

In contrast, the corporate bookstore plays the opposite role. In this case, a Borders Books and Music or a Barnes & Noble puts up shop in a town, and these stores serve to homogenize the entire country. The Barnes & Noble in Chicago, Illinois is not terribly different from the Barnes & Noble in rural South Carolina. I can tell you this, because I have been to both. They both sell reasonably priced books and perhaps unreasonably priced coffee.

While the super chain bookstore can attempt to become a center of community activity, the fact that any one of those stores could just pull up shop as mentioned in the quote above changes the matter. Even if the chain store invites the community in, the chain store does more to homogenize and shape the community than the community shapes the nature of the chain store.