The historic Playhouse suffered financial problems compounded by the challenging economic climate earlier this year (take a look at my original post on the subject), but apparently neither of those problems stopped supporters of the arts from donating. In addition to many charitable contributions, the Playhouse received a matching donation of $1 million, jump-starting their financial efforts to get back on their feet.

Look forward to  new productions, which they should start staging soon! Congratulations, Pasadena Playhouse!

Vroman’s is working with the Pasadena Playhouse, as well – take a look at our event with Artemis Fowl author Eoin Colfer on August 4th. Come support two of your favorite independent organizations at the same time!

As a reader of this blog, you’ve no doubt heard all the rhetoric of “buy local” that you’ll ever care to hear.  Yes, it keeps more money in the local economy.  Yes, it supports the tax base.  But what I’d like to focus on today, Buy Indie Day, is the idea of uniqueness.  To me, this is what the buy local movement is all about.  Vroman’s is a Pasadena institution (We were founded four years after the Rose Bowl).  People associate us with this area and with this city, and that, I think, is worth preserving.

When I was seventeen, I drove all around the country with my family, visiting distant relatives, researching colleges, and seeing sites like the Grand Canyon.  What sticks out the most to me about that trip, though, are the little places that are unique to their locales.  The restaurants we ate in, like The Rendezvous in Memphis (best ribs in the world).  The coffee shops, like the weird, quirky one my cousin took me to in San Francisco.  The book stores and record shops (things I didn’t really have access to growing up in a small town in Upstate New York).  It was during that trip that I realized that I wanted to live in a city, and it was those businesses that convinced me of that fact.  But even looking back on my youth, the things I associate with home are Cosmos Pizza, Dinosaur Barbecue, the Carrier Dome, Happy Endings coffee shop (no longer in existence), Soundgarden Records, etc.

The sad thing is, such an experience might not be available to my kids.  I heard this segment of Marketplace yesterday afternoon, and I thought it was appropriate for Buy Indie Day.  It features Jeff Tweedy, of the rock band Wilco, talking about Woody Guthrie and what Woody would notice about the country today.  This quote jumped out at me:

“The fact that everywhere he went looked a little bit more alike than it did when he was traveling around the country.  I notice that even from the twenty years that I’ve been on the road.  There are places that used to feel like you were in a unique place in the world and a place that was different from the last place you were and it doesn’t feel as much like that these days.”

I don’t want to preach.  I know that you won’t frequent these stores if they don’t provide value to you, and that’s fine.  But take today to look around you, at the place you live.  Why do you live there?  What makes it special?  What do you remember most about the place you grew up?  What would you hate to lose about the place you live?  Feel free to leave your favorites in the comments.

(On a semi-related note:  Tomorrow is Free Comic Book Day.  Head down to your local comics shop to pick up some free comics.  I recommed Comics Factory, which also happens to be an indie store.)

Don’t.

This is more important than that, and now is the perfect time to think about whether you want to trust one company to dominate the book market, or any market, for that matter.  The benefit of having  a rich, diverse ecosystem of vendors and suppliers has never been more obvious:  many sources of information equals choice, and choice equals freedom.  It’s actually your freedom that’s at stake here, and putting things back the way they were, fixing the notorious “glitch,” won’t change that.  Because your freedom was at stake long before this recent de-listing experiment. Anytime you limit yourself to fewer suppliers, especially of something as vital as information (and if you purchase a Kindle, you’re effectively doing just that, limiting yourself to a single information provider), you’re putting yourself at the mercy of that provider.

And what kind of a provider is Amazon, anyway?  They’re not the most transparent of companies.  In fact, they’re among the least transparent.  They give jack to charity, they don’t pay state sales tax despite doing much business in every state, and they aim to be nothing less than the sole provider of media on the planet.

Do you want that much power in the hands of one company?  Even those among you who believe in the benevolent dictator model must be worried about this.  Think for a second about what Amazon did here.  In the world of ecommerce, the search is king.  Almost everybody who shops online visits a site to find a specific product.  By intentionally obscuring and manipulating the search results of your site, you are making a clear statement:  We don’t want you to read these books.  I can tell you from experience that if something is difficult to find through a search, it will not sell.  Not only was this a suspicious action on Amazon’s part, it had the potential to be very “successful” (ie, it would’ve greatly decreased the sales of those titles).

I know you think I’m overreacting.  You say, “So what?  They’ll list the books again, and surely they won’t be stupid enough to try something like this again.  After all, we caught them, didn’t we?”  True…this time.  My point still stands.  Concentration of power is a dangerous thing.  “But what if it was a hacker?”  I think the point still stands.  This is the proverbial putting of eggs in too few baskets.  I think independent publisher sales rep John Mesjak put it best when he tweeted this statement: “I haven’t read all of #amazonfail, so I am likely repeating, but my takeaway: this S#!T happens with monoculture gatekeepers. Go IndieBound!”

It’s worth noting that Mesjak uses the word “monoculture” here, a word derived from agriculture.  It’s taken us some thirty years (since the passage of  Earl Butz’s “Get Big or Get Out” Farm Bill in the 1970s) to realize that having a few corporations control our food supply was a really bad idea.  What have we seen as a response to this?  A rise in small, local farms, increased urban farming efforts, and a locavore movement that allows people to opt out of a corporate food culture that is destroying our bodies, our country and our planet with alarming speed.  The small, local farm, something that was all but extinct ten years ago, is beginning to make a comeback, as communities realize the value of growing their own food.  As we see small, independent, locally-minded bookstores closing every day, ask yourself whether you want a future where certain books are unavailable to you because of corporate fiat or whether you want the freedom to choose.  It might cost you a dollar or two more, but isn’t it worth it?

Click here to view the embedded video.