Today we’re discussing recent news about Covid-19’s impact on the Strand bookstore. The New York City institution received an outpouring of support after its owner, Nancy Bass Wyden, took to social media, detailing the 93-year-old store’s dire financial situation and asking the public for help. The Strand’s story has a happy ending, but many others have not been so lucky: according to the American Booksellers Association, more than one independent bookshop has closed for good each week since the start of the pandemic in March. We’ll talk about why this crisis is especially hard on smaller book stores, many of which rely on city foot traffic and in-store events, and have already been weakened by years of competition with online giants like Amazon. While the Brattle isn’t going anywhere, it functions best as part of a thriving community of fellow booksellers, the diminishment of which is a real loss to literary culture and to the fabrics of our cities and towns.
Brattlecast #98 - Buy the Book
It’s something that many of us have a bit more time for these days: buying books online (and, ideally, reading them). In this episode we’ll look into some of the quirks and peculiarities that shoppers might encounter on the internet, like books that are priced way too high, or the same book being sold in a really wild range of prices (do I want the $6 copy, or the $2000 copy?). It turns out that usually the culprit behind these discrepancies is a confused computer algorithm, rather than an ambitious human bookseller. We’ll also reveal some book buying tips and tricks, plus the Brattle’s famous haggling secret (“ask nicely”).
Bonus Brattlecast - The Impact of Covid-19
On this special episode we talk about how Ken and the Brattle are coping with the Covid-19 crisis. It’s a situation now sadly familiar to most of us: uncertainty and dread, financial apprehension, the feeling that one had strayed into an episode of The Twilight Zone. But, although the shop is temporarily closed to the public, and the city of Boston feels eerily deserted, we find some cause for optimism: the Brattle has weathered many calamities over its long history. For now, all we can do is stay healthy, be patient, and, sometimes, escape into the pages of a good book.
