I don't know if this guy is an authority on indie booksellers, but he's full of it on the subject of music.

[T]he indie label is a deliberate marketing ploy to segregate, often artificially, one part of the market from the rest.

One often hears the claims that large indie labels have no better ethics than the majors, or that they've sold out if they're working with one of the large distributor. But I'm not sure I've previously seen someone suggest that, for example, Matador Records would be functionally equivalent if they'd been bought by Atlantic, except that they would have sold FEWER records.

Cowen's whole analogy to music is fucked on a deeper level, though: his parallels are broken. He equates indie labels (who are essentially publishers) with small booksellers, and top 40 (which is a genre, or at the very least a trans-corporate group of products) with Barnes & Noble.

Also, if people now have less patience with the books they consider buying, shouldn't that lead them to prefer physical stores, where you can flip through lots of books in a short time for free?

Yo, Happy B-Day, A-Rod. Making pithy remarks even on the day of birth and mirth, I see.

I think you've got the wrong guy, flea. Unless I have two birthdays every year, in which case I'm 61, so I'd better stop hanging out with you kids on your "internets" and your "blobs".

Yeah, I mean, for those who know me this is entirely predicatble of me, but I just fundamentally disagree with the writer. First of all, that the author he cites wants the bookstore to become a political arena, that patrons want to believe that they're part of some specific community... How are bookstores not political arenas? And why is that an invalid, fantasy-driven wish for community? And yeah, Aaron, I agree, no real parallel on the music front- unless you want to talk about music retailers as well- and you're damn right I want my indie shops to stick around, as their stock is entirely different from what Tower's got, and they sure as shit employ an entirely different set, those who can talk about records and surprise me with a recommendation. The parallel to be drawn between these different cultural zones really though is on the level of distribution, where the battle was won with the growth of the franchise- and if that's not fundamentally political, then I live in a different universe. I basically agree that most big independent record labels tend more in the direction of the majors in terms of business practices, essentially because to gain real visibility in big music retailers across the country, they've got to cut deals with major label distribution, which entails a good deal more than just signing a contract and shipping some boxes, obviously.

Are we looking for community in our indie stores, or looking to evade it? The author can't seem to decide which.

I think that the amazon lists and recommendations amount to a nice bag of tricks but they are no substitute for the real, tangible thing. Just something different. As Jesse rightly mentions, with human contact you get a feel for whether you should trust a person's judgment, rather than a shallow "I like A, this person likes A+B so I'll buy B also."

Another missing point in the author's argument is that megastores don't just supply "what people want," they dictate it, too. The political arena Jesse mentions holds up here. We're never better served with fewer choices and voices, and fewer people up top deciding what's best. In books and records as in all else.