The shame of ‘showrooming’ bookshops

I am one of them. I am scum. A scoundrel. Rude, obnoxious, miserly, cheap. 

I confess: I have gone into an independent bookstore with my phone or laptop, browsed, then purchased the books I wanted on my Apple device — inside the bookstore. 

I did not carry the books to the cashier and buy them. No. With withering impudence, I hit the Amazon app, clicked twice and bought the books online, saving on average $8 per title. It was disgusting. It was exhilarating.

And it was wrong. No matter it was a decade ago, that cute little caper still reeks to high heaven. What I hate is that it’s probably worse than, if not equal to, what small bookshops are now dealing with: the tacky phenomenon of “showrooming,” explained here by The Guardian:

“Of all the insults that booksellers stomach, the most awful is the newest. Gone are the days when it was someone shoving a book down their pants … Now it is ‘showrooming’: when customers go to physical shops only to research purchases they will make online. This is a bugbear of the booksellers who have been engaged in a David and Goliath battle with online retailers for the past decade.”

Adds Keith Edmunds, a former bookstore owner, at Mental Floss: “They’ll come in and use their phone to take a picture of the cover and barcode and just use the bookstore as the Amazon showroom. It’s awful.”

It is awful. It’s gauche and sneaky. It gives one’s moral relativism a mighty workout.

As mentioned, I showroomed. Some 10 years ago at my local indie bookshop, I scanned the shelves for Vietnam travel guides, plucked three or four volumes, went to the bookshop cafe, cracked my laptop and bought the best titles — online, at huge discounts.

Back then, I thought this was hand-rubbingly clever, cutthroat capitalism in action: Screw you, full-priced bookstore. I found a real deal!

Even now I don’t like paying $18 for a new paperback that I’m not sure I’ll like and that I can usually get in used condition for $4 at Amazon (one penny, plus $3.99 shipping). And I admit, guiltlessly, that I shop Amazon a lot, though I’m more inclined to use the library these days, saving cash and trees.

On occasion I will haunt our local indie bookstores, used and new, but my fealty to them isn’t ironclad. I feel more spiritually crushed paying $27 for a book at the store than paying $16 for the same product online. It’s a virtue vs. Visa smackdown.

I want to support the local shops, yes, but it comes at a literal high price. I have philosophical quibbles with Amazon, even if many authors do not (word is they profit more from high-volume discount sites than full-price brick-and-mortar outfits).

What’s not cool is showrooming. If you’re going to drop cash at Amazon or Barnes & Noble, do it at home. Looking at books in a store helps you shop with accuracy, and asking staff questions about titles is invaluable. And why you’re there, you might actually buy a book from the indie shop, a move that could abet its fragile longevity.

A great tweet from the owner of Fountain Books in Richmond, VA, recently went viral:

“We had a lot of ‘showrooming’ today: people taking pictures of books and buying them from #Amazon in the store and even bragging about it. This is not ok, people.

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