Michele Lee has a solid bit of common sense up at her blog. It seems people somewhere are debating boycotting Borders for not stocking certain titles. She suggests Amazon, or special-ordering. I agree.

I have never personally dealt with Borders. I don’t think we have that up here, but we do have Chapters/Indigo and McNally Robinson, etc. Not to mention the occasional small business bookstore… (I desperately miss our local. Desperately.) However, they’re big-box bookers with staff that are trained to type orders into computers. Yes, that means buyers will have to speak to a human being to have the book they’re looking for special-ordered. The world won’t end, trust me.

OR, as Michele points out, order it from Amazon. If you can’t for whatever reason, try one of the smaller booksellers online. Still – how hard would it be to ask a damn sales clerk to special-order it???

My local was small, and I think I bought a book from the shelf maybe three times. Every other title I wanted, I had to special order – and they got each and every one in for me. Each. And. Every. One.

Even the out-of-print really special order.

I believe, if I pre-pay orders I make, I can get McNally’s to mail them out to me, since I don’t live in the city.