I won't try to deny the dark side of the big chains, but I just had a brief discussion with a reader who e-mailed me about the downside of independents. I remember the local independent bookstore that used to be near my house when I was growing up; it had maybe four bays of SF/fantasy, if that. Now I can go into a Borders or a B&N and find several rows of my genre, including manga and gaming books and comics and more. Honestly? My selection has gone up, not down, from what it used to be. I'm all in favor of the specialty stories like A Change of Hobbit (or my personal favorite, Pandemonium in Boston), but not all independent bookstores are (or were) like them. A lot were dinky little hole-in-the-wall places more akin to airport bookstores than cool specialty stores.

So yeah, there are problems with our current situation, no doubt about it. But -- dare I say it? -- some good has come with the bad, too.