Ventura Bookstore Joins Antitrust Lawsuit Against 2 Large Chains

For Ed Elrod, the emergence of warehouse-sized bookstores represents a textbook case of unfair competition.

The manager of the Ventura Bookstore has seen sales slide every year since 1993--the year Barnes & Noble opened its massive outlet in the city. Before that, he said, revenues had grown annually.

Today, the 60-year-old downtown institution employs four people, half the staff it had five years ago.

So this week, Elrod fought back.

Ventura Bookstore became one of 24 independent retailers nationwide that joined in filing an antitrust lawsuit against both Barnes & Noble and Borders, alleging illegal business practices.

The suit alleges the chains use their economic clout with publishers to obtain lower prices and preferential treatment that puts independent bookstores at a competitive disadvantage, posing a threat to their survival.

Yet, Elrod insists the suit is about loftier values than mere money.

“If we were only interested in the bottom line, we would have quit bookselling years ago,” he said. “We’re concerned that this type of activity--this focusing on the bottom line instead of focusing on books and writers--is going to have a squelching effect on the independent writer. . . . For us, it’s a freedom-of-speech issue.”

Corporate dictums are increasingly deciding not only what books are purchased but what material is written, he said.

One publisher recently decided against moving forward with a planned biography of pop composer Jerry Leiber after receiving word from large chain stores that they would stock relatively few copies of such a volume, Elrod said.

“The average John Doe and Jane Doe on the street are probably unaware their tastes are being dictated by corporate dividends,” he said. “Should they care? Only if they are concerned about Big Brother telling them what they are going to read.”

The suit alleges that when national chains become dominant in local markets, they stop the discounting that drew many consumers to them initially and stop stocking books that don’t turn over quickly.

Barnes & Noble officials did not return calls seeking comment, and Borders declined to comment specifically on the suit, saying its attorneys had not had an opportunity to review the action.

But the Ann Arbor-based Borders--founded as an independent bookstore on the University of Michigan campus in 1971--issued a statement asserting the company has thrived precisely by providing a “massive assortment” of 200,000 books, music, videos and periodicals in a typical store.

“We have a direct relationship with more than 12,000 suppliers, many of whom are small and independent presses,” spokeswoman Jody Kohn said. “We give customers access to books that have never before been available in many markets.”

Rebecca Bard, an Ojai resident shopping in the Ventura Bookstore on Wednesday afternoon, was not buying that logic.

“When you come into a store like this, you realize it’s not just the standard books society has told us to read,” she said. “Barnes & Noble--I go in and it’s too categorized, it’s too limited. Here the unusual can come in, and the sad thing is there’s a lot of bookstores that have disappeared that have that too.”

Indeed, independent bookstores offering new books are all but extinct in affluent eastern Ventura County.

Mysteries To Die For on Thousand Oaks Boulevard thrives because it has found the market niche its name suggests, owner Audrey Moore said.

“Could I survive as a general bookstore here?” she said. “Absolutely not. I am surrounded by three big [chain] bookstores here. . . . The Ventura Bookstore down there--my hat is off to them. I’m happy that they are there. Without some of these independents, people will wind up with no choices.”

But surviving is becoming more problematic, Elrod said.

Last month, in a desperate effort to reverse declining sales, the owners of the East Main Street store in Ventura purchased Ojai’s Table of Contents. That independent bookstore--situated in a far smaller community with only one-fifth the inventory of its Ventura counterpart--nevertheless does half its business, Elrod said. Not coincidentally, Ojai does not boast a large discount book retailer, he added.

It’s a strategy Elrod hopes will enable him to continue taking orders for that single copy of that one eclectic title. Or suggesting a title he suspects will fit a regular customer’s tastes.

But the suit is not about monetary damages, he said. All he wants is for the large chains to play by the same rules played by his store, he said.

If the legal action fails, the loser would not be just the few remaining independent bookstores, he said. The loser would be readers who value the diversity of literature that is in peril of succumbing to what amounts to economic censorship, he said.

“It’s the $4-billion tail wagging the dog,” Elrod said, referring to the combined gross sales of Barnes & Noble, Borders and subsidiaries that include Waldenbooks and B. Dalton. “We’re not selling bricks. We’re selling ideas. We’re selling discourse.”

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