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Seattle: book city, U.S.A.?

Last weekend The New York Times ran a piece putting forth Seattle as the new hub of literary culture. Writer Julie Bick pointed to the city’s star librarian Nancy Pearl, but also to a confluence of corporate behemoths:

In many ways, Ms. Pearl’s rise in the book world parallels Seattle’s rise in the publishing world. Though the big publishing houses are still ensconced in New York, the Seattle area is the home of Amazon, Starbucks and Costco, three companies that increasingly influence what America reads.

Very late in the piece, Bick concedes, “The flip side of the success of the big Seattle booksellers is the gradual decrease in the number of small independent stores, which have struggled as a result of a variety of factors.” That theme has now been picked up by one Seattle observer. In a reader blog run by the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, Michael Lieberman writes:

There is no doubting the merits of Seattle as a literary town, books and book culture have played a significant role in the city’s rise from an outpost to a leading 21st century city but there is doubt as to whether these new business models are actually helping the literary cause.

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