This is how it starts: one of your favorite sales reps comes by for an appointment and brings a few ARCs, most of which come with the highest recommendation. You snag one or two to take home and put the rest on a shelf for the staff to look through. A few more reps come by: wash, rinse, repeat. The ABA White Box mailing comes, and you snag three or four more ARCs. Several envelopes a week come from publishers, all with heartfelt letters tucked inside--a few are interesting, you snag one, put the rest to the side. The White Box kids' mailing. More rep visits. More heartfelt letters and more highest recommendations. The books pile up.
"Enough!" you cry. The ARC pile has gotten out of hand! (Again!) And so you and your staff winnow away, making a donation pile or maybe a recycling pile, until after several hours you are left with--well, a smaller ARC pile that has only books you really think you'll read someday, maybe when the book comes out in paperback.
You go home, feeling very accomplished. But when you close your front door, the carefully stacked pile of ARCs in the front hall collapses. A chain reaction starts and as ARCs tumble to the ground, you hear the crash of dishes and what might have been a muffled meow.
"After this happened last month," you mutter, "I swore I would never let the ARCs get so out of hand again!"
It's the blessing and the curse of the indie bookseller: the advanced readers copy. Although we could not be more grateful to have free reading material thrust in our direction--one of the best side benefits of the job--our enthusiasm for reading combined with the enthusiasm of those sending the books to have us read usually leads to stacks of fire hazards in store and home.
There are other problems with ARCs. Despite being printed on cheaper paper, they're more expensive to produce than "real books." From an environmental standpoint, the waste is overwhelming--both the books themselves and the resources it takes to ship them. Also there seems to be little communication at some publishers about ARCs, so that a store can get multiple copies of a book only one person wants to read, but no copies of a book five people want to read.
And yet, they're indispensible to what we do. It's how we fall in love with books, how we spread the love around our community, and by doing so, to more readers. They help with buying decisions and they help with buzz. They help with personal budgeting--I know few booksellers who could afford to buy as many books as they read every month.
So if we can't live without them, is there a way to make living with them less hazardous, less costly and less wasteful? Much as e-books have been touted as a potential solution to the environmental and cost issues of physical books, e-ARCs are an answer that more parts of the book industry are beginning to consider.
The industry has already made a few steps towards this end. NetGalley, for example, is a site where "professional readers," a term that thankfully includes booksellers, can register for free and browse a public catalogue of books to download from participating publishers. On my first browse, I requested Last Night in Montreal from Unbridled Books and The Winter Harvest Handbook from Chelsea Green Publishing. Less than 24 hours later, I had Last Night in Montreal.
But I can read it only on my laptop, which is not comfortable for reading for long stretches. There are multiple e-readers, which would work well, but none in the price range of your average bookseller. (Or even in the price range of the above-average bookseller.)
Enter advanced.reader (aka Jenn Northington of the King's English, Salt Lake City, Utah) and her "modest proposal": that publishers, through an intermediary, subsidize the cost of e-readers for booksellers, with the understanding that booksellers would primarily use the e-readers for reading ARCs.
This would definitely save money for publishers. It is also potentially greener than paper ARCs, although the paper and shipping resources saved would have to be weighed against using more devices that need to be electrically charged on a regular basis. (A side benefit to such a program could be to increase interest on the part of customers in e-readers that aren't the Kindle--booksellers have already noticed some of their best customers are switching some reading to the Kindle because it's the reader that's most familiar to them right now.)
Of course, there are drawbacks to a switchover. Physical objects often carry an importance that electronic ones cannot. All booksellers have at least one favorite title that they never would have read if it hadn't been for the ARC showing up at the store at just the right time--much like the browsing experience is irreplaceable for finished books, it may well be for ARCs. And though many of us have had ARC overflow, a lot of stores have solved the problem by re-distributing the books to libraries, schools, shelters and other book-hungry places. By eliminating paper ARCs, indie booksellers could not only be depriving parts of the community of books, but also lessening the relationships we have with the community who receives with whom we share them.
Many other parts of the book world are making a partial electronic switch with their reading. A significant number of agents are exclusively or primarily reading requested manuscripts in electronic form as are some sales reps. Reviewers and book bloggers have been talking about the possibilities.
Right now, it seems to me that e-books and e-ARCs are things independent booksellers should continue to explore. We need to decide certain things for ourselves by trying them out, not just by reading articles and blog entries. Are e-readers the next step in our line of work? Should we bother to get involved? Is reading on a screen a different enough experience that certain types of book will be more common in e-book form, and others more common as "real books"? There are a lot of things to consider, and an e-ARC program could be a good way for both booksellers and publishers to figure out the answers by playing around with the technology and discovering its potential, or lack thereof.
The conversation will continue, among other places, on Twitter; you can follow the discussions by searching the hashtags #ARCreader (for talk about publisher-sponsored readers) or #digiARCs (for talk about increasing availability of ARCs in electronic format).
I expect that wherever there are five booksellers discussing e-ARCs, there will be six opinions. What do you think? E-mail me at stephanie AT wordbrooklyn DOT com.