People of the Book turn into People of the Bestseller

In the past 20 years, the rise of bookstore chains has had a massive impact on Israeli literary tastes. As chains such as Steimatzky's 150-branch colossus have grown - much at the expense of small bookshops of which only 100 remain - some say Israeli readers have gotten dumber.

"It was a different world [back then]," Avner Chen, the owner of the family-run Lotus bookstore on Tel Aviv's Allenby Street, reflected on the time before the rise of the chains. "Books used to have value; they were treated with reverence. Now the purchasing experience has surpassed the reading experience."

Resting under the shade of Allenby's massive ficus trees, Chen's bookstore opened some 50 years ago. He is no longer angry at the changes, but sad.

"A lot has changed," he said, leaning on the store's wooden counter. "We try to keep books that elsewhere are hidden, gotten rid of. It isn't out of a sense of mission but more out of sympathy with anti-consumerism. At the big bookstore chains Tzomet Sfarim and Steimatzky, economic reasoning is stronger than any other consideration. They don't care what people read," he says as he wipes his brow.

"They only care how much is sold and it really doesn't hurt if best sellers are sold - they buy them here too - but it does hurt when good books go to oblivion and people who walk into a bookstore cannot make up their own minds what to read or not."

Two-hundred meters separate Lotus and a Steimatzky branch on Rothschild Avenue. The Steimatzky chain has come a long way since its founder Ari Steimatzky took over the Israeli book market some 20 years ago. Steimatzky inherited four stores from his father in the 1980s and managed to turn them into Israel's biggest bookstore chain. He recently resigned after selling his shares in the company for NIS 60 million. In interviews, Steimatzky, who brought the U.S.-style book-shopping experience to Israel, has likened selling books to selling tomatoes.

Only one book is currently on display in the Rothschild Steimatzky's window: Hanna Goldberg's new novel "Defamation." A customer leaving the store carrying two bags admitted buying "mostly best sellers." She explained: "I bought books I heard about: Cookbooks and two novels. One of them is a present; I don't want to get it wrong so I played it safe."

In contrast, Chen's store has decided to display a Hebrew translation of Charles Bukowski's poems that came out in 2002 and Jean Paul-Sartre's "What Is Literature?"

Professor Menahem Perry of the Hebrew Literature Department at Tel Aviv University says booksellers are dictating tastes and instigating changes in literary norms.

"Bookstores have a huge influence on our reading and nowadays most book sales are done at Steimatzky and Tzomet Sfarim. I don't see how that will change. The problem is that these chains have interests that consumers are unaware of. They exercise tremendous power over the consumers. The phenomenon that one enters a bookstore and finds a variety of classics like in Europe and America does not exist here," he says.

"A reader entering a bookstore cannot find early books by Amos Oz, not to mention [Yosef] Brenner and [Shmuel] Agnon. Bookstores in Rome and London have a larger variety of books by Oz and A. B. Yehoshua."

In Perry's opinion, standard intellectual norms are under attack.

"Readers' tastes have deteriorated. I'm not sure people could read books considered to be the pinnacle of Hebrew literature. Yaakov Shabtai's 'Past Continuous' would not sell more than 200 copies if it came out today; neither would Yehoshua's 'Mr. Mani' or [David] Grossman's 'See Under: Love.' The new generation of readers is characterized by its reading concentration and has grown accustomed to easy reads. The public may think it's free to choose books as it likes, but it is more like a herd. They are given few choices, and that's what they read."