The owner of Raven Bookstore in Lawrence wants to tell you all the ways the e-commerce giant "Amazon" is hurting American downtowns; Amazon can afford to lose money on books, while small independent bookstores cannot. 

In this report translated by Ahwal Al-Ma'rifa magazine from USA Today, is a story about the suffering of bookstores in the shadow of electronic encroachment, which has changed the rules of the game in the world of publishing and libraries. 

 If you know anything about Raven Bookstore in Lawrence, Kansas, you know it charges more for books than Amazon. Advertising higher prices is an unlikely strategy for any business, but Danny Caine, owner of Raven, has an MBA, and he speaks frankly with customers about why his books cost what they do. Two years a, he took that conversation to social media, using the store's Twitter account to explain why Raven was charging $26.99 for a hardcover book a customer saw online for $15.  

Caine wrote: "When we order directly from publishers, we get a 46% wholesale discount off the cover price." "The cost of that book from publishers would be $14.57.. If we sold it for $15, we would make a 43-cent profit." Caine estimated that with an inventory of about ten thousand books in the store, at profits of less than fifty cents a book, Raven could afford to stay open for no more than six days.

 Amazon has a much larger inventory – not only of books but of other ods with much higher profit margins – in addition to many other revenues, so the company can afford a loss on books. Caine wrote: "If you ever wonder why there are no more bookstores, or why retail businesses in your downtown continue to close, this is the case."  

The Raven cannot afford losses like Amazon, but almost every dollar the store makes stays in the library's city, i.e., in Kansas: after the publisher's cut, half of every book sold es directly to employee salaries; the other half es to rent, marketing, and other operating costs, including store and website maintenance, food, and veterinary care for Raven's most famous employees, cats Dashiell (as in Hammett) and Ngaio (as in Marsh).

 Caine's posts were heavily reposted by other bookstores, and praised by a number of booksellers. After being widely shared by readers, he compiled them into a clip called "How to Resist Amazon and Why," adding an open letter to Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, and directing readers to other articles and essays about Amazon's business practices. 

 Despite the pandemic, book sales are up from last year, but mostly at places like Amazon, while bookstore sales have fallen by more than twenty-eight percent. Even at stores where sales remained flat or increased, profits declined as customers migrated online, leading to increased shipping and delivery costs.  

More than one bookstore closed every week in 2020, and many of those that survived face deficits that could close them before the pandemic ends. Caine suggests in his book: Preserving small retail will likely require stronger antitrust enforcement. But, in the meantime, the fate of bookstores and many other small businesses depends on consumers' willingness to agree with Caine's broader argument: that cheap ods have higher costs than we realize, and that paying more is a better investment than we think.

 Sarah Young, who has worked at Raven for more than eighteen years, has the same unsettling feeling about the library's future. She has watched children grow up in the store, and she knows the literary tastes not only of some of her daily customers, but also of their extended families, from all the birthdays and holidays she has helped find the right book for.  

An English professor at Benedictine College in nearby Atchison, she started at Raven not long after finishing her PhD at the University of Kansas, impressing some of the staff by answering a customer's question while filling out her application: Describing a series of mysteries she knew well, so she shouted: "You're looking for Diane Mott Davidson".. and I was hired."  

The bookstore was a source of financial stability during Young's early years of adjunct teaching; and currently she works mostly on weekends. Her favorite shifts are Friday evenings, when couples come in after dinner, and live music and movie crowds sometimes drift into the store – including musician David Crosby who came once.  

Young says: "It's like that big, giant secret that everyone shares, the people who shop at Raven... they feel special, not in a self-aggrandizing way but in a way that means we're all connected to each other."