[Cross-Posted at Wild Wild Left]
Huffington Post is running with the Laredo story, in which the last book store closes.
With a population of nearly a quarter-million people, this city could soon be the largest in the nation without a single bookseller.
The situation is so grim that schoolchildren have pleaded for a reprieve from next month's planned shutdown of the B. Dalton bookstore. After that, the nearest store will be 150 miles away in San Antonio.
I think Huffington Post has missed the story.
The B. Dalton store was never a community destination with comfy couches and an espresso bar, but its closing will create a literary void in a city with a high illiteracy rate. Industry analysts and book associations could not name a larger American city without a single bookseller.
"Corporate America considers Laredo kind of the backwater," said the city's most prolific author, Jerry Thompson, a professor at Texas A&M University International who has written more than 20 books.
The world will probably be laughing at Texas for having so few book stores that they could get into this position. Or, just as likely, chiding Corporate America for abandoning Texans to illiteracy (or, god forbid, the library).
But I say there are two bigger stories here. The first one is the Huffington Post itself, which shamefully buried in the ninth paragraph this devastating tidbit:
The company believes a bookstore is viable in Laredo and has identified a location for a large-format Barnes & Noble, but the space will not be available for at least 18 months, said David Deason, Barnes & Noble vice president of development.
In other words, Barnes & Noble is not contracting by closing its B.Dalton store, but preparing to expand. But that story isn't sensational enough, so Huffington Post reverted to the kind of disingenuous journalism that is the main reason we have a blogosphere.
The biggest story of all, though, in my mind, is that we Americans are passively accepting the idea that if Corporations do not provide us with a local book store, then we don't get to have one.
People open book stores all the time, and someone in Laredo can do so. We will not end the Rule of Big Corporations if we subconsciously believe that we need them and want them.
Instead of vilifying Laredo or Barnes & Noble, and describing their situation as "grim," we should be envious of Laredo: they have an economic opening for good local businesses.
And let's hope for our friends in Texas that Barnes & Noble doesn't carry through on its threat to return in 18 months with a category killer.