From FedWeek:
In a sign of the times, the GPO is closing the venerable bookstore at its headquarters, saying a review “determined that the bookstore is no longer financially viable due to changes in customer behavior which have resulted in sustained losses over the last five years.”
The store just north of the Capitol Building opened in the 1920s and served for decades as Washington’s main access point for documents ranging from reports of obscure study commissions to the annual White House budget proposal. It was the setting for annual news photos of the budget being released, even in recent years as the budget also is released online.
Before online distribution of the budget began, lines stretched down the street well in advance on the morning of the release. Similarly, before the Congressional Record and Federal Register became available online each morning, the store often was a first stop of the day by federal officials and congressional staffers for those publications.
Using language similar to that used in private sector bookstore closings of recent times, the GPO said that as more free information has been posted and for-sale information can be purchased online, “the business case for maintaining a separate physical bookstore evaporated.”
Link to the rest at FedWeek and thanks to DM for the tip.
I’m sad to see it go. I was a monthly-or-more-often “customer” in the early 1990s, when I was replenishing a government library that had been neglected for a decade and a half.
The largest US publisher has closed its “flagship” store. Think about that for a moment. And the GPO is largest by either “number of titles published” or “gross revenues.” It’s largest by “gross revenues” even when considering that it sells its products much closer to cost basis. Here’s an example:
• United States Reports vol. 573 — the definitive text of a third of a year’s Supreme Court opinions and orders — costs $90.00 for a hand-sewn 916-page casebound volume designed to last for decades. That this is the most-recent one available, and was just published in the last couple of months with material from seven years ago, is not the GPO’s fault. (It’s Congress’s fault, but that’s a complicated story, and revealing details would be telling.)
• West’s Federal Reporter, 3d series vol. 976 — which, despite being rife with errors (many introduced by the publisher) and paying no royalties to the “authors” — costs $1,282.00 for a mechanically glue-bound case-bound volume of about the same heft that falls apart in four to six years. Since these come out between two and four times a month, you can begin to understand the outrageous cost of lawyers (and no, electronic versions are not much more economical, since access is rented on a monthly basis… and the search system is, to put it charitably, infected by the errors introduced by the publisher, and I’m encouraging/allowing PG to cringe at the moment for Reasons).
And there are some real gems in the GPO collection/catalog, too; not just “official government documents,” but a yuuuuuuge variety of other Stuff.