Independent booksellers have long relied on “media mail” from the USPS as the most affordable way to ship books to customers and that has been a literal lifeline for many during the pandemic. Which makes the recent slowdown in processing an existential threat to booksellers as well as our democracy. An article in Fortune helps underscore the point with examples from three such booksellers — in Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Cambridge. Black-owned Reparations Club in LA went from rare shipping requests pre-Covid to delivering 99 percent of orders by mail. Recently, founder Jazzi McGilbert “says her store experienced many […]
