Thursday News: Hugo Awards online, Barnes & Noble v. homeless readers(?), Romance Writers of Australia conference, and suing illegal downloaders
Publishing NewsBarnes & Noble / class / Hugo Awards / literacy / piracy / poverty / reading / Romance Writers of Australia / SFF / writer's conferences14 Comments
2015 Hugo Awards Ceremony – Missed the Hugo Awards ceremony? You can catch it (in four parts) on Livestream. I hear that Laura Mixon’s acceptance speech for Best Fan Writer was particularly moving. –Livestream
Viewpoint: Changes at Barnes & Noble may indicate a privilege problem – Nick Norton of Wayne State University found something disconcerting at his local Barnes and Noble: the reading chairs had been removed. What the store associate told Norton is pretty horrifying, and came down to a campaign to deterring the poor and homeless Norton’s great podcast investigates the issue further and talks about the conflicting information he got about the missing chairs. But even more important, he talks about the privilege inherent in neighborhood bookstores, along with the ways in which SES is linked with literacy rates, and the societal costs of limiting access to resources like books.
The employees – albeit not overtly — said Barnes & Noble chose to get rid of its big, cozy chairs to prevent the homeless from loitering in its stores. While they never used the term “homeless,” the employees instead referred to these loiterers as “undesirables,” or even “smelly people.–USA Today
RAZER ON ROMANCE WRITERS: THESE BROADS HAVE NO TIME FOR NONSENSE – Ostensibly a summary of the recent Romance Writers of Australia conference in Melbourne. I have it on good authority that Helen Razer has quite the, well, razor tongue about nearly everything, so despite the overt sarcasm and arid wit of this article, that it’s really quite complimentary about Romance. And I can see that among some of the backhanded compliments is a genuine understanding that Romance is, indeed, a business, and that the women who succeed do so being able to negotiate both sentiment and business savvy.
If you don’t know love, you have no business here or elsewhere in an industry, however much it is mediated by market need, than runs on emotion. A cynic cannot write romance for cash — I’ve tried and, like many arrogant writers tempted by the thought of “easy money”, I’ve failed. It’s not enough to be a postmodern business-minded girl to succeed. You need to be truly sentimental.
This is a weekend of workshops on matters so practical and budgetary, it even draws experienced writers from other genres. I spot forensic medicine best-seller, Kathryn Fox whose heroines are less likely to wear a bodice than they are a blood-spattered lab coat. These women — and they are nearly all women, notably excepting a small group of men referred to as “the husbands” who keep the pitch sessions running to time — may write to a fantasy but they don’t write from within one.–Daily Review
Village Roadshow threat to sue pirates and block downloading websites – Speaking of Australia, they been very aggressive toward illegal downloading. Now Village Roadshow, the Australian company that has distributed films like The Lego Movie and Mad Max: Fury Road, is trying to block “illegal sites” and is threatening to sue anyone who has illegally downloaded a movie. Because suing is easier than simply making content available affordably and legally accessible???
Tom Godfrey, of consumer advocacy group Choice, told news.com.au that blocking sites would almost be useless in the fight against piracy.
“Anyone who has access to Google will be able to get around Australia’s internet filter,” he said. “This whole exercise has purely been about some very, very big players trying to prop up their business models and take out competitors.”
He also believes that blocking sites would hurt competition international companies have stimulated, rather than actually stop pirates.
“Fair enough if they want to wipe out The Pirate Bay and the like, but they’re using the pirating issue to also limit Australians access to international competition,” Mr Godfrey said.–The Advertiser
Honestly, the Barnes and Noble decision kinda makes sense. Who really wants homeless people spending hours ( or even sleeping ) in his bookstore?
One summer I worked in Boston and we had a man who looked homeless come in. He was always trying to get us to show him deli goods that he could touch with a grimy finger so we’d give them to him. An odor often wafted from him. The caked-on grime on his hands suggested he hadn’t washed his hands in weeks. Yet, there was no shortage of public restrooms. Soup kitchens and shower facilities were available. He could have been clean, had it been important to him.
I think it’s not unreasonable for a bookstore to decline to serve as a day-time shelter for the homeless.
@SAO:
In addition, my bet it was the grime and odor the bookstore objected to. Poor people who looked like they’d showered and washed their clothes in the not-too-distant path were probably welcome.
I’m so glad I’m not the only one who thinks the BN decision is not out of line. There comes a point in your business where you have to decide whether you want to encourage or discourage customers. They chose to remain a bookstore rather than a shelter and that’s not a bad thing. Detroit has many, many shelters available 24/7 for their homeless population.
The town I used to live in has put more and more resources into library branches at a remove from downtown. The central downtown location has administrative staff, a bank of computers, and spinners of genre paperbacks. The main library is functionally a drop in shelter with some library offices in the back. It’s easy to see how it happened – it’s a large temperature controlled building with bathrooms, seating and water in a largely non-residential area that’s within easy walking distance of three day programs and four meal programs, as well as a number of social service agencies. Most of the actual shelters are on the outskirts of town and bus people back and forth between downtown, where the food programs and social service agencies are and the shelters themselves. The reference books, children’s section, historical and regional collections, foreign language collections have all been relocated to outlying neighborhoods, inaccessible without a car. I can understand B&N pulling out chairs – I have mixed feelings about it, but I can understand it, especially from a business perspective. The parks used for lunch programs are not used by neighborhood residents and a dog park that adjoins one of the lunch program parks is also unused.
My local B&N removed chairs in the book stacks at least five years ago, if not longer. I don’t know the business reasons behind it. Removing the chairs may prevent homeless people from lingering (I’m not sure I ever noticed that), but it doesn’t stop people from picking out books and settling down on the floor to read. Nor does it prevent people from setting up in the café for hours and using books as reference material without ever buying a book or food/drink from the café.
I have a vague memory of a story years ago that B&N was removing the chairs because they harbored bedbugs. Did the chairs come back and are being removed again or is this just all part of the slow death of B&N? In a certain light “We’re snobs about who is in our store” probably looks better than “we’re too broke to replace broken chairs.”
I have worked for BN for almost ten years and I can tell you the reason my store got rid of our chairs was because we were constantly being given new fixtures for books, toys, accessories and ran out of room for the chairs. We have kept our wooden chairs at the ends of aisles b/c they still leave us ADA compliant, but the big, oversize chairs went away when we couldn’t squeeze around them anymore.
BTW – we have always been a really “clean” BN store – like, noted for that locally and even we couldn’t keep those chairs in good condition. Ever since the first time I had to move them around to vacuum underneath the cushions and under the chairs, I have refused to sit in cloth-upholstered furniture in public spaces. I will sit on vinyl, leather, whatever, but not cloth-upholstered furniture.
I assumed that my B&N got rid of their chairs a couple years ago because it was so obvious that people were using the books as if in a library. I would see a book I want, but it would look so blatantly used already that I had to let it go. Of course, the only remaining B&N close to me doesn’t have a homeless problem since it’s basically in the middle of nowhere (only accessible by a car).
I worked in a major chain bookstore (that was not B&N) for several years and while people certainly camped out in the chairs we provided, it definitely wasn’t just “homeless” people — we had retirees, people who lived above the bookstore, students studying for the GMATs or MCATs, all kinds of people we saw on a daily basis. Our policy was never to remove anyone from a chair (or the store) unless they were harassing other patrons, even if they fell asleep in them (there was a gentleman in his 90s who fell asleep by 11am like clockwork in his chair, or one of the benches outside if it was a nice day). We didn’t grump at people to buy books, we didn’t tell people there was a time limit, all we asked was that people not put their coffee cups on top of a precarious stack of books they had balanced beside their chair.
All people were absolutely welcome to use the facilities (more than one spongebath has been taken in the family washroom, and that’s FINE), enjoy the books, and so on. Some folks who came into the store definitely didn’t fit your usual expectations of societal norms (we had a regular customer with fingernails that were easily 10 inches long, and he was just as entitled to a book as anyone else), but the only folks we had to ask to leave or occasionally have security remove were people yelling at staff, yelling at other customers, or otherwise causing a serious problem and a safety concern. Due to our location, we denied service far, FAR more often to extremely wealthy “homed” people than “homeless”, and the issues were generally much more that of entitled jerks than people who didn’t have reliable income.
We had to move a lot of the chairs into storage during the holidays to make room for pallets of books, which always caused an uproar (and occasionally started a fight over the remaining chairs), we often had to rescue the cafe chairs from the other side of the store, but it was better than people sitting on the floor (or on the tables of books, or on displays, or…). The chairs were wicker-looking plastic and hosed down on a regular basis, and the beanbags in the kids department were also sterilized regularly, but that’s because we had more code yellows and browns from kids and dogs (it was a dog-friendly store) than adults with or without homes.
Basically, it rubbed the staff the wrong way if someone complained about another customer who was just sitting and reading, because nobody is more entitled to reading books for free than anyone else, even if it was a really snobby neighbourhood.
On the B&N thing, I see something else going on. My mother calls it: “It’s easy to offer other people’s time and services.” Podcaster and a lot of people get to feel good about themselves by whining about B&N, without doing ANYTHING that actually helps people. Any business can choose to be a shelter, just like a doctor can choose to volunteer his work, but an “SJW” demanding they do so is just….
I finally found something that helps less then a Facebook Like to a teenager’s “I’m with the victims of (insert natural disaster) (insert faraway country teenager can’t place on a map)”
Silly me, I thought a bookstore was, like, a store. Y’know, a place where people trade currency for goods and/or services and the store owner hopes to make a profit on the transaction. And I thought because we as a society do believe access to books and literacy are highly beneficial social goods, we spend public and private money on libraries and literacy programs.
I’m all for supporting our libraries and literacy programs, increasing their presence in underprivileged neighborhoods, upping funding and supporting staff.
But B&N is not a library. And the podcaster appears motivated to shake the shame stick at this store mostly because by removing chairs, it inconvenienced him. Poor baby, he couldn’t sit to read his “prospective purchase.” He might have even needed to stand. My heart breaks.
Yet another example of why we can’t have nice things.
I never noticed a problem with homeless people camping out in any of the bookstores I used to frequent. I say “used to” because I almost never go into bricks and mortar stores anymore–and part (but only a part) of the reason is lack of seating. Even when there is seating, it always seems to be taken up by (non-homeless) people who have hunkered in for the long haul. Lots of folks on laptops surrounded by mountains of books, obviously using them as reference material for papers/homework with no intention of ever actually buying them. And, as someone else mentioned, who wants to come along after them and pay good money for obviously shopworn, pawed-over books? Having your store filled with non-paying loiterers who are squeezing out potential paying customers is obviously bad for business. Since I physically cannot stand for any length of time–yeah, poor baby–it’s just more convenient for me to shop online in comfort for pristine paper books or ebooks that get delivered directly to my home.
It’s at odds with Nook’s Read in Store perk. The last time I tried to sit for a bit and take advantage of that, in a store with nowhere to sit other than the café, the staff chased me away after a few minutes for not buying a snack or drink. Last time I gave that B&N any of my business.