I am grateful to Michael Grant for his comment and his heartfelt wish that an old-fashioned independent bookstore would blossom and flourish in Croton. The latter is a wish that I have long shared—although I now recognize it as an impossible dream.

I take exception, however, to his characterization of my recital of the cold, hard facts of book publishing and bookselling today as “gloom and doom.” I am an investigative reporter and report facts as I find them. My piece explaining with statistics why a traditional bookstore would have little chance of survival is long on facts and short on personal opinion. Would Mr. Grant use the term “gloom and doom” about a reporter’s factual story on the continuing rise in home foreclosures despite attempts to stanch the outflow or on the frightening national debt we are bequeathing to our children? I think not.

I suggest that Mr. Grant ask our estimable mayor, Leo Wiegman, for his opinion of my screed on the chances of bookstore survival in Croton. Until comparatively recently, Mr. Wiegman was actively employed in book publishing and is even more familiar with current conditions than I am.

As for my own expertise, after the war, I bucketed around in the far corners of the Middle East, Africa and Europe as an exploration geologist in the oil business. When children’s education became a problem, I decided to return to the States and pursue my love of books. I took a job briefly as a clerk in a bookstore (at a salary of one dollar an hour) to learn about the bookselling end of the book business. Following that, I was successively an associate editor of a hardcover magazine for automobile buffs and a book editor. Starting as a lowly copywriter for the Macmillan book clubs, I worked my way up to become editorial director. Finally. I became a book publisher in my own right. (One of my books, the “Shooter’s Bible,” sold hundreds of thousands of copies yet never made the bestseller lists.)

For too long a time, book publishing and bookselling have been mired in archaic practices going back to the 1920s. In my day, all booksellers sold books at list prices and a retailer could order books from publishers at discounts ranging from 42% to 50%—even more if they were bought on a non-returnable basis. Booksellers thrived under such an arrangement until the advent of deep discounting drastically changed the picture.

Allow me to cite as an example one of my recent book purchases. Alfred A. Knopf published a book entitled “The First Tycoon: The Epic Life of Cornelius Vanderbilt” at a cover price of $37.50. I bought it from Amazon for $24.75, a discount of 34%. But Amazon would have happily sold me an electronic version of the book, complete with footnotes, illustrations and index, for $9.99—a whopping discount of 73%. Moreover, for that low price they would have delivered it to me electronically in a matter of seconds. I ask Mr. Grant how long he thinks an independent bookseller could survive faced with numbers like that.

Out of loyalty, for a long time my family and I patronized Books ‘n Things, the prototypical independent bookstore operated by Charles and Diane Newman in Briarcliff Manor, although we could have paid much less at one of the chain bookstores. Well, the chains drove the Newmans out and won that contest. Now Internet super-discounters and electronic delivery of books to devices like Amazon’s Kindle threaten the chains.

Because Croton lacks a single concentrated shopping area, perhaps Mr. Grant will disclose in which of Croton’s five marketing nodes he would locate his idealized “cosy bookstore.” The very word “cosy” implies the ability of a customer to make a leisurely choice of a book to buy or merely to peruse in the comfort of the bookstore. Mr. Grant knows only too well the problems of running a cozy café like the Black Cow when the Village has imposed ridiculously short parking restrictions and harasses overtime parkers.