Independent Bookstores on Remainder.

• Author: Nowak, Mark
• Position: Essay

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From where I sit in a bookstore caf, I can see an Olive Garden through the floor-to-ceiling glass windows--though a large vinyl poster advertising "Riveting Thriller! from writer of Prison Break and Law & Order " obscures one corner of my view. Next door, last minute morning commuters file into and out of Krispy Kreme as the K-Mart directly behind it opens its doors.

Where am I? And, more importantly, does it matter?

If you answered America to the first question, anywhere in America, chances are you'd be right. But I'm actually in a Borders in suburban Buffalo, New York. And it should matter.

I grew up here during the economic crises of the Reagan years, when the Bethlehem steel plant where my grandfather worked closed, as did the Westinghouse factory where my dad put in forty-one years. I recently returned to western New York for an event at Hallwalls Contemporary Arts Center around my essay, "'To commit suicide in Buffalo is redundant': Music and death in Zero City, 1982-1984," that was published in Goth: Undead Subculture . The event is co-sponsored by the longstanding Buffalo independent bookstore, Talking Leaves, that will be selling books at the event, advertised at the top of the store's webpage. But here at Borders in my former hometown, just a mile or so from where my dad's old Westinghouse plant once stood, the self-serve computer informs me that Goth isn't in stock in the 25,000-square-foot store.

Welcome home.

Half the independent bookstores in America have closed their doors in the last decade, as Borders has become a Leviathan. This is precisely the subject of Jacob Bricca's moving new documentary, Indies Under Fire: The Battle far the American Bookstore . The storyline tracks the rise of a people's coalition to fight alongside independent bookstores in Palo Alto (Printer's Inc), Santa Cruz (Bookshop Santa Cruz), and Capitola, California (Capitola Bookshop Caf) against the incursion of big-box stores, particularly Borders.

In the shadow of these once-thriving independents, Bricca's film outlines the rise of Borders, once a 500-square-foot bookstore founded by Tom and Louis Borders in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Acquired by Kmart in 1992, and then spun off three years later, it has grown to more than 500 stores. Borders needs to rigorously defend its 25,000-square-foot colonies in myriad ways. Those with Internet access are frequenting the territories of e-commerce bookstore giant Amazon.com. And even the...