I was wondering lately about the distribution of books. How it strikes me as funny that you have to print at least five thousand copies of a book or no copies of that book. I know, print-on-demand has given us other options. But I’m talking about the open distribution of books that can be explored. Nobody prints an on-demand book in order to browse through it.

Suppose Ron Currie’s next novel were only available at an indie bookstore in Portland, Maine. And Jonathan Evison’s new novel were only available at Powell’s in Portland, Oregon. That’s just an experiment in thought. These are both nationally recognized writers who need to earn a supporting income.

But would there be any justification for writers who were only distributed locally? Suppose you would have to travel to Russia in order to read Dostoevsky. Or you could only read Mark Twain in Missouri. How would this affect our attitude toward these writers?

Should anyone really care if the next Dan Brown mega bestseller survives into the twenty second century? Is there a model of book survival that would consist of only 500 copies of a book being printed but lovingly preserved by one local community of bibliophiles? I can imagine that community holding commemorative events to honor “their” author, with regular public readings of their work. Our current book distribution model, where every published book has to be available everywhere makes less and less sense to me. Suppose I had to travel to London in order to read Shakespeare?

I know. These are crazy thoughts. But I’m thinking of the rise of the mega bookstores of the 1970’s. When it was considered an exciting innovation to have a giant bookstore which provided its customers with shopping carts as if they were in a supermarket. The theory was that if you give the customer a bigger basket, then they will buy more. If you discount books the customers will buy more. And it doesn’t even matter what the discount is as long as there is one. Tables and tables of remaindered books, bought for a song but sold for much more. You need to have that nineteen dollar book about the Ocean. Just looking at the sea isn’t good enough somehow.

I worked in one of the earliest models of such a store. And the best section in it was the capacious used paperback book section. You couldn’t find a book about the Ocean in that section, but you could explore an ocean of story both fiction and nonfiction for just a couple of bucks.

I was leading a customer down to that section once and decided to lament the homogeneity of the store because I recognized that the woman was Susan Sontag. She surprised me by offering a rebuke. She liked the place.

These days our giant box retailer is on the internet. I’m reminded of Anton Chekhov’s dream that wouldn’t it be wonderful if there were public libraries everywhere so the people could have access to literature. What a dream, Anton! How unrealistic writers can be!

Our aspirations for book distribution keep evolving over the years. The last century’s big innovation now seems like an unwelcome dinosaur. I still love my old books the best. The ones that have been owned by someone else, written by writers that not many people are reading nowadays. With their musty smells and beat-up paper or cloth bindings. “This book is the property of X. X.” Who on earth was that?