What Publishing Can Do About Trump: Preserve the Independence of Our Bookstores and Libraries

Too many people in the book world have been acting as though nothing has changed since the election. They are launching a conservative imprint (as if we don’t already have enough of them) headed by someone from the Heritage Foundation with connections to Project 2025, a platform of policies so toxic, Trump distanced himself from it during the campaign. (For more on why we should deplatform the American right, read part one of this series here.) They are licensing their catalogs or striking other deals with AI companies. (See below.)

There are also too many people in the book world and the wider media who are still normalizing Trump himself, the clown car of grifters, quacks, and people accused of sexual assault that he’s surrounded himself with, and the policies they will try to enact.

I can’t look into the hearts of people writing headlines and framing narratives and practicing access journalism or the hearts of publishers continuing to fund the movement that is overtly trying to destroy the culture of reading in this country, but whether they believe in the policies they are normalizing, believe their collaboration will protect them, or imagine themselves playing some kind of political chess as the “adults in the room,” the result is the same: an empowered Trump administration.

Maybe they’re just at a different stage in the grieving process. I don’t know. But collaborating won’t protect you, normalizing something dangerous to yourself won’t protect anyone else, and if you think you’re playing that chess, you better be right, because a lot of people claimed to be adults in the room the last time… and then Trump almost pulled off a coup and was able to get re-elected. We can’t pretend we don’t have to do anything differently.

As with the first installment of this series, you are unlikely to encounter entirely new ideas here, though if enacted, they would be new policies to publishing. These will be ideas I—and many other people in the book world—have been talking about for years. The particular struggle we have against Trump today is part of the same struggle we’ve had with all the powers and forces and systems and individuals that sort humanity into castes, who believe all humans are supposed to live exactly the same way, and who prioritize their own wealth and power over every other possible consideration.

The first step is probably the easiest; knock if off with AI. Don’t use it. Don’t explore it. Don’t enable its use by making your catalog available to it.

Though the Trump administration poses new threats, that does not mean we must abandon the long project of a just world. In fact, the work of a just world is part of the struggle against the new threats of a Trump administration and we must do our best to honor the progress towards justice we inherited by continuing to push the world forward.

1.
Double Your Climate Change Mitigation Efforts
At best, we will have four years with no federal action to mitigate the climate crisis. At worst, the Trump administration will destroy what small progress we’ve made while gutting our ability to restart that progress when he’s gone. Already he has withdrawn the United States from the Paris Agreement (again) and issued a stop on all new offshore wind-farm licensing. The climate crisis was caused by policy decisions and it will only truly be solved by other, better policy decisions, but that doesn’t mean we must wait for the government to act.

Nothing I am suggesting in this series is going to save everyone or protect everything, a fact that might be starkest when thinking about the climate crisis. But climate scientists have been quite clear that every fraction of a degree matters. If all we can do is shave a fraction of a degree off global warming, we have a responsibility to do everything we can to do it.

The first step is probably the easiest; knock if off with AI. Don’t use it. Don’t explore it. Don’t enable its use by making your catalog available to it. Outside of any other ethical concerns around AI (and that puts a whole lot of stuff “outside”) the electricity and water use alone are reason enough to reject it. Coupled with the end of federal climate change policy, the environmental impact of AI goes from problematic to immoral.

If you own your building, put solar panels on it, especially while there are incentives to do so. Improve the insulation. Update your appliances. Audit your paper use. Your electricity use. Many states and cities allow you to choose a renewable power option, letting you get the majority of your power from a wind or solar farm. Occasionally, that can be a little more expensive than energy from a conventional power plant, but whatever the surcharge, it will be far less than what it will cost if all the subway systems on the East Coast end up under water. And if you’ve already done a bunch of this, set your goals higher and do more.

Whatever the coming fight will be, it will be easier with libraries. Whatever new world will follow this one, it will be easier to build with libraries.

As an industry, maybe we can finally reform the remainder system so fewer books get shipped back and forth between publishers, stores, remainders companies, and stores again. Maybe we can use the shift in expected time of delivery that started during the pandemic to help customers be comfortable with waiting a little longer for their books, so they can be shipped in the most efficient manner. Maybe we can stop sending like, five copies of the same galley to a single bookstore.

We, as citizens, will be responsible not just for reducing our own carbon footprints as much as possible, but for compensating, as much as we can, for the coming failure of the federal government. It will require work, spending, and inconvenience, but whatever that effort amounts to, will be a fraction of what we will have to do and endure if Boston ends up in the ocean.

2.
Pay Your Workers Livable Wages
It is already too hard to make a living working in books. And staying alive in the United States is about to get harder. And it will get hardest for those groups of people publishers have been saying they want to support. There are many methods for supporting your workers through the coming crisis, like mutual aid funds, housing stipends, healthcare stipends, and legal defense funds, and though these all may be necessary, they all need to be managed.

Rather than creating another job (managing these programs) and giving your employees more work to do (applying for them) it would be easier, perhaps even cheaper, to raise wages so your employees won’t need nearly as much supplemental support.

The same goes for other non-monetary programs, supports, and care you could consider. You could add more time off for workers to participate in protests and other activism. You could organize teach-ins, build resource libraries, host seminars. You could offer community building activities, like hosting crafting circles or book clubs or other social events during scheduled work time. You could make crisis counseling available or offer guided meditation or other wellness and self-care resources. But even if you did every other thing I’ve suggested here, their positive impacts will be muted if your workers have to choose between paying for medication or electricity.

3.
Support Libraries
Public libraries provide access to books and many, many other resources for personal and communal growth so that anyone, regardless of their race, religion, or economic class can be active citizens with the potential to grow in wealth and wisdom. Anyone can get a library card, and anyone with a library card can discover the world is much bigger with many more possibilities for how to live your life than what their parents, their teachers, their religious leaders, and Fox News have told them. No wonder conservatives hate libraries.

So many readers, people who go on to love, support, and buy books their entire lives, started their reading journeys at their libraries. So many of our best customers became our customers because of the connection they forged to books at their libraries as children. So much of the book world rests on the foundation built in local and school libraries that it’s hard to imagine what a book industry would look like without them. But you do need to imagine that world.

You need to put this image in your brain because you need to understand that it is possible. You need to feel in your bones the fact that many powerful people want to destroy the American library system so you can be ready to work at least as hard as they will to save it. Whatever the coming fight will be, it will be easier with libraries. Whatever new world will follow this one, it will be easier to build with libraries.

I am not a librarian, so I can’t offer specific suggestions for how the book industry should support libraries. But I don’t think you’ll have to do a whole lot of deep digging to find some answers. Librarians will be more than happy to tell you. You just need to ask.

4.
Support Independent Bookstores
To the best of my knowledge, no independent bookseller squashed an endorsement in a major national newspaper so an overtly corrupt candidate would meet with them about their rocket ship hobby. Lazy, angry Bezos-bashing aside, any one of Trump’s threatened policies, from mass deportation to Chinese tariffs to repealing the ACA, to halting procurement at a variety of federal agencies including the NIH, will cause a major disruption to our economy. If they all happen the disruption will be at least as big as the one caused by the pandemic.

The seeds of fascism need despair, discontent, disappointment to sprout. A just world starves fascism of the nutrients it needs to thrive.

There’s only so much anyone in the book world can do about that, but the coming crash will be deeper, faster, and harder to climb out of if hundreds or thousands of independent bookstores go out of business. Publishers will need to treat this next crash the exact same way they treated the economic turmoil of COVID-19. Extended credit. Better terms. Longer dating. It would be one thing if this entire support network had to be created from scratch, but we can build from the systems and programs we created during the pandemic. We have other structures too, like the Book Industry Charitable Foundation and the James Patterson Holiday Bonuses that can be adapted for this moment.

This support isn’t just about keeping the doors open. Indie booksellers are going to be on the front lines of the coming fight. We were leaders in the shop local movement that was slowly but surely rebuilding the American downtown. As individuals in our community, through the American Booksellers Association, and alongside the efforts of librarians we have been fighting book bans for years. We were part of the struggle against the first Trump administration. But we can only fight if we stay fed. Housed. Reasonably rested. As healthy as possible.

It is hard enough to call lawmakers, attend school board and city council meetings, write op eds for the local papers, go to protests and rallies, and build mutual aid networks as things are now, but with every level of insecurity that gets added—emotional, financial, physical—every single one of those actions is more difficult. Sometimes impossible. If you want as many activists as possible fighting now and the best chances to build a better world in the future, do everything you can to keep bookstores and libraries open.

Keeping bookstores and libraries open isn’t just about fighting authoritarianism. It is about giving people something to fight for. Yes, it is about providing support and resources for the grind ahead, but it is also about making sure people have something to grind for.

Every single one of us will wake up one day wanting to give up. And then we’ll find a reason not to. Our children, our family, our friends, all the innocent people who will be targeted by the administration. Some days, we’ll have to dig deep for reasons. And when some of us dig, we’ll find books.

The books we loved as children, the books that helped us grow into adulthood, the books we haven’t read yet. We’ll remember what it feels like to lose an afternoon to a book, to have our breath caught by a sentence, to mourn the death of person who can be brought back to life by starting the book over, to read our own amorphous thoughts and feelings that we struggle with perfectly articulated by someone who has never met us.

And then we don’t give up. We still need to write those books, publish those books, sell those books, so the fighters can lose an afternoon, catch their breath, feel deeply for someone who can’t die for real, see their thoughts written back to them by someone else. The book world needs to fight and be a reason to fight.

Yes, this is another set of actions the book world should already be taking. Should always have been taking because they help create and maintain a just world. A just world is a bulwark against fascism. The seeds of fascism need despair, discontent, disappointment to sprout. A just world starves fascism of the nutrients it needs to thrive. The absence of justice, the presence of wretchedness that we have allowed in our society simply to enrich the already rich is one of the reasons we have a citizenship capable of electing Donald Trump.

Building a just world also mitigates the harm being caused and through that mitigation peels away support for and reveals the lies inherent in authoritarianism. It shows people that there are other, better ways of doing things, that there are alternatives to the profit-above-all-else capitalism that created our contemporary vulnerability to fascism. Yes, this is also another set of ideas that won’t save everyone or everything. But adopting these ideas will save some people now in ways that set us up to build a better future then.