IndieBound Launches Materials for e-Free Day Celebrations

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Beginning this week, IndieBound offers an array of materials in the Bookseller DIY for the first annual celebration of e-Free Day, on Saturday, April 17. ABA announced the new marketing promotion, which highlights the importance of indie bookstores as an antidote to consumers' digital overload, at the Winter Institute.

"We're hoping booksellers will use these creative, fun materials to encourage customers to take a day devoted only to 'Eat Sleep Read' -- just one day without cell phones, computers, video games, or personal electronic devices of any kind," said ABA Marketing and Membership Officer Meg Smith. "We think it will be an illuminating, and certainly beneficial, experience for both booksellers and their customers."

John Freeman, Granta editor, book critic, and author of The Tyranny of E-mail: The Four-Thousand-Year Journey to Your Inbox (Scribner), recently noted that as we spend more and more time in virtual worlds, "the real world -- its shape, and organization -- suffers. Small businesses are replaced by chains; real face-to-face friendships are eclipsed by virtual relationships that don't satisfy."

Freeman believes, however, that third place locations, like indie bookstores, can offer a solution. "In many ways independent booksellers are the community gathering places that can satisfy people's need for a real connection," he said. "You can go to a reading and start a conversation. Talk to a bookseller about a book that meant something to you. Meet in the store's coffee shop with a friend. There's no algorithm that can replace real human understanding, and passion, which to me are the things that make independent booksellers so beloved."

Richard Howorth, the owner of Square Books in Oxford, Mississippi, pointed to some important statistics in The Tyranny of E-mail that he thinks we should all consider: "Sixty-five percent of North Americans spend more time with their computer than with their spouse," he noted, and in 2006 "the average office worker sent and received 126 emails per day. If it took this busy bee only a minute to read and respond to each and every message, simply keeping up with correspondence would take up a quarter of his day."

e-Free day celebrates indie bookstores' unique place in the community for genuine, face-to-face connections. No one's suggesting that booksellers and their customers become Luddites, however. "I see the independent bookstore in the 21st century as taking advantage of technology while, at the same time, serving as something of an antidote to its ill effects," Howorth said.

Booksellers with questions about e-Free Day, and any to the materials in the Booksellers DIY – and those who use the promotion in their store -- are encouraged to contact Paige Poe, ABA marketing manager. --Karen Schechner