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Standing up for the big guy

In a column on Slate, author and economics professor Tyler Cowan argues that many bookbuyers’ adherence to the “indie: good, chainstore: bad” paradigm is really just an obsolete form of cultural snobbery. Cowan’s column is a response to Laura J. Miller’s recent book, Reluctant Capitalists: Bookselling and the Culture of Consumption, a call for readers to view their book-buying habits in a more political light, in which buying from an indie store means sticking it to the Man.

Pish posh, says Cowan. “Our attachment to independent bookshops is, in part, affectation,” he writes, “a self-conscious desire to belong to a particular community (or to seem to). Patronizing indies helps us think we are more literary or more offbeat than is often the case.”

Cowan also argues that the real threat to literary culture is not chain bookstores, but “the reader’s greater impatience, a symptom of our amazing literary (and televisual) plenitude [...] Long, serious novels are less culturally central than they were 100 years ago. Blogs are on the rise, and most readers prefer the ones with the shorter posts.”

Cowan has more to say about all this, but frankly, the article’s a long one. We at In Other Media printed it up to read later; right now, we want to check out the new online trailer for Superman Returns….

Related links:
Read Tyler Cowan’s column on Slate

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