Indy Bookstores: A Casualty in the West End?

[dewline]

News of some shock and surprise to me while I was at the Pen and Paper workshop tonight:

http://www.cbc.ca/canada/ottawa/story/2010/09/14/ottawa-leishmans-books.html

And here I was trying to make a new habit of visiting at least once or twice a month since Linda Wiken joined the staff there! Can-Con's relaunch had helped make that easier to do, and there's a few books that I still want to lay hands on as time and funds permit!

Comments

[deakat]

The Westgate shopping centre has been gradually declining for years, so I think it was just a question of time, particularly after the grocery store moved out.

If you want to support another indie I highly recommend Collected Works on Wellington at Holland.

Collected Works?

[dewline.livejournal.com]

By coincidence, that's exactly where I learned the news tonight.

About eight of us, including ms_danson and kallisti, were there for the weekly Pen and Paper workshop tonight. A CBC camera crew came in as we were kicking the session into gear to talk to the management about that very news, and the web provided the news itself for me right about that point.

We kept on with the session, not asking questions about the reason for the camera crew until the meet had broken up for the night.

As for myself, I've been funnelling a lot of my business in book-reading towards Perfect Books (http://perfectbooks.ca/) operated by Pat Caven the last few years, with exceptions made for specialty stuff from the now-defunct Prime Crime Books(which used to be run by the above-mentioned Linda Wiken) and the assorted comics shops of the region.

I plan to keep doing so as much as possible.

[radargrrl.livejournal.com]

Wow. I remember when Leishman Books had a location downtown, Slater and Metcalfe, I believe. I still have some of the books that were bought for me from there. Sad to see them go.

[dewline.livejournal.com]

Very.

Even when you see a bookstore closure coming, it's still not a good thing.

[radargrrl.livejournal.com]

This is the fruit of the big box stored moving in. Very reminiscent of 'You've Got Mail'.

[dewline.livejournal.com]

Except that we don't know what's waiting in the wings for the indy story owners in this story. And I'm not sure that they do either.

[radargrrl.livejournal.com]

Yes we do. The shop will close. They will be forced to find new jobs, maybe even selling books at the big box place that killed them. How very WalMart.

[duncanmac.livejournal.com]

While I had heard this predicted, I was -- and am -- definitely sad to see them go.

Unless some stores there are very lucky, I suspect that we are soon going to see whole shopping malls fold up the same way. Both Herongate Mall (Heron & Walkley) and this mall are likely to go belly-up soon.

It's possible that an independent bookstore could be set up with an online website (only), but even that would be a hard slog. Even Indigo/Chapters is now under pressure from Amazon these days; their recent acquisition of ABEbooks (which sells second-hand books online) has not helped.

[dewline.livejournal.com]

As you'll recall, I'm of a mind more favourable to "bricks and mortar" operations at this point. Perhaps irrational on my part, but it's what I've grown up with - what most of us here grew up with - and I'd prefer to go on in that way for as long as I can get away with it.

As to Herongate and Westgate's future...you paint a more disturbing picture there.

[duncanmac.livejournal.com]

Herongate mall lost its most important paying customer back in April, when Convergys closed a call center there and laid off 800 people all at once. The news article after the closure paints a picture of a mall in very deep financial trouble. :-(

[dewline.livejournal.com]

I remember hearing about Convergys/Herongate back in April. Was it Transglobe who owned Herongate at the time?