Tuesday’s New York Times featured an op-ed piece by novelist/screenwriter Richard Russo about Amazon’s latest drive-by on traditional bookstores:

I FIRST heard of Amazon’s new “promotion” from my bookseller daughter, Emily, in an e-mail with the subject line “Can You Hear Me Screaming in Brooklyn?” According to a link Emily supplied, Amazon was encouraging customers to go into brick-and-mortar bookstores on Saturday, and use its price-check app (which allows shoppers in physical stores to see, by scanning a bar code, if they can get a better price online) to earn a 5 percent credit on Amazon purchases (up to $5 per item, and up to three items).

Equally alarmed, Russo polled his literary friends from Dennis Lehane (“scorched-earth capitalism”) to Scott Turow (“it’s worth wondering whether it’s lawful for Amazon to encourage people to enter a store for the purpose of gathering pricing information for Amazon”) to author and Nashville bookstore owner Ann Patchett (“There is no point in fighting them or explaining to them that we should be able to coexist civilly in the marketplace. I don’t think they care.”).

Coincidentally, Tuesday’s Times also featured a piece headlined “E-Books, Shmee-Books: Readers Return to the Stores.”

Lede:

Facing economic gloom and competition from cheap e-readers, brick-and-mortar booksellers entered this holiday season with the humblest of expectations.

But the initial weeks of Christmas shopping, a boom time for the book business, have yielded surprisingly strong sales for many bookstores, which report that they have been lifted by an unusually vibrant selection; customers who seem undeterred by pricier titles; and new business from people who used to shop at Borders, the chain that went out of business this year.

(Barnes & Noble: up 10.9%. Independent booksellers: up 16%.)

Not coincidentally, Brookline Booksmith sent this out in its latest BMail:

Before we get started, a word about tax fairness and empty promises, from the head of the American Booksellers Association. And if you’ll stay with me for one more moment, you can read Richard Russo’s response to Amazon.com’s recent controversial 5% off deal. Here’s the passage that struck me most:
‘A few miles down the road from where I live on the coast of Maine, a talented young bookseller named Lacy Simons recently opened a small bookshop called Hello Hello, and in her blog she wrote eloquently about her relationship to “everyone who comes in my store. If you let me, I’ll get to know you through your reading life and strive to find books that resonate with you. Amazon asks you to take advantage of my knowledge & my education (which I’m still paying for) and treat the space I rent, the heat & light I pay for, the insurance policies I need to be here, the sales tax I gather for the state, the gathering place I offer, the books and book culture I believe in so much that I’ve wagered everything on it” as if it were “a showroom for goods you can just get more cheaply through them.”’

Richard Russo thinks the Amazon effort is “bizarrely clumsy and wrong-footed.” Let’s hope he’s right.