This comes from a post on Christian bookstore chains, but it probably applies to booksellers accross the board.
If the customer’s chief concern is going to be price, the store’s chief concern is going to be cost. It’s a horrendous cycle, really. Customers want cheap books but stores can’t provide cheap books if they’re specializing in the books only a minority of people want, and publishers are only producing fluff because consumers have demonstrated they only want fluff but they can’t demonstrate they don’t want fluff if publishers and stores aren’t cooperating to provide them non-fluff. It’s complicated. Certainly more complicated than “The Corporations Want You Dumb.” Some of these conspiracy theories about what Christian publishers are doing remind me of the marionette Tim Robbins’s unfocused speech in Team America — “See, um, the corporations, they just sit up in their big corporations buildings, and they’re all, um, corporation-y.”
