Buying Books in the Jungle

Erin Doom

Oct 2

7 min read

On Independent Bookstores, Household Budgets, and Getting the Book into Someone's Hands

Protection of our Most Holy Lady the Mother of God and Ever-Virgin Mary

Commemoration of the Holy Apostle Ananias of the Seventy

Commemoration of St. Romanos the Melodist

Anno Domini 2026, October 1

Eighth Day Books in Wichita, Kansas—the place Warren Farha built and a home for encounters among books.

Warren called Amazon “The Jungle.”

It was exactly the kind of nickname Warren coined: funny enough to stick, pointed enough that you knew exactly what he meant. Warren spent his life building something altogether different: a real bookstore, in a real place, filled with real books chosen by real people who knew why they mattered.

Eighth Day Books is not a warehouse or an algorithm. It’s a home full of rooms, and it’s a place for encounters. You enter looking for one thing and can’t help but leave carrying something you didn’t even know you needed. You encounter Warren, members of the staff, fellow bibliophiles and learners, and pilgrims who have traveled from across the country to enter this little house full of books. You encounter the books themselves and, through them, their authors. Conversations begin between the shelves. Friendships form. A book passes from a bookseller’s hand into yours, and something that began centuries ago or halfway around the world becomes part of your life.

I believe in that kind of bookstore. I have spent most of my adult life supporting independent booksellers, working alongside one of the best of them, and putting books into people’s hands. I know what is preserved when someone buys a book from a place like Eighth Day. The purchase helps keep the doors open, certainly, but it also sustains a particular ecology of attention. It keeps alive the possibility that a bookseller might recognize something in you and say, “You need to read this.”

An algorithm can tell you what people like you also bought. A bookseller can tell you what might change your life. And yet, I have also bought a great many books from the jungle. That is the truth.

Admiration Does Not Eliminate Arithmetic

I have a wife, four children, a household budget, and a lifelong inability to stop wanting books. Sometimes the book I need is substantially less expensive on Amazon. Sometimes the only affordable copy is used. Sometimes a book is out of print, nearly impossible to locate, or sitting online at a price that makes purchasing it anywhere else unrealistic. Sometimes supporting the institution I admire collides with providing responsibly for the people I love.

There have been years when I just couldn’t ignore a ten-, twenty-, or thirty-dollar difference in price. There are still books I want—and books I believe I need for the work I am trying to do—that I cannot purchase without thinking carefully about what that purchase means for the Doom family. So I’ve gone into the jungle.

This is not a defense of convenience as the highest good. Convenience is one of the great formative powers of our age, precisely because it so often allows us to receive what we want without asking what kind of world our receiving is helping to create.

Every purchase supports something. Every habit builds a world.

Against Amazon, from Amazon

I have on my shelves not one but two books arguing that I should resist the very company whose packages I now deliver.

Jorge Carrión’s Against Amazon and Other Essays grew from a short manifesto into a larger collection of essays defending bookstores, libraries, booksellers, and the physical places in which books become part of a human culture. It’s not merely an argument about where we spend our money. It’s an argument about what kinds of places, and therefore what kinds of human relationships, we want our money to help preserve.

Then there is Danny Caine’s How to Resist Amazon and Why. Caine owns the Raven Book Store in Lawrence, Kansas. His book also began small, as a sixteen-page zine that he printed, folded, and stapled by hand, before becoming a fuller examination of Amazon’s power and a practical summons to resist it.

Carrión gives the argument an international literary breadth. Caine brings it uncomfortably close to home. The Raven is not an imaginary bookstore standing against an abstract threat. It’s a Kansas bookstore trying to remain alive within the same economy in which Eighth Day Books must survive.

I own both books because I believe them, and I will recommend both through Podvig because I think other people should read them. I will also offer two ways of purchasing each one: through Bookshop.org and through Amazon itself.

There it is: the contradiction made almost perfect. Buy Against Amazon from Amazon. Buy How to Resist Amazon from Amazon. Allow Amazon to send a few cents from the transaction toward Podvig and the Doom family.

It would be easy to treat that as hypocrisy. Perhaps some will. I'd rather name the contradiction plainly and accept the critique than pretend I stand outside it. It may also be a more honest picture of life inside the modern economy. I can see what the jungle destroys and still find myself entering it. I can work to preserve the bookstore while living within a household budget. I can resist a system without pretending that I’ve managed to stand completely outside it.

Perhaps resisting the jungle does not always mean never entering it. Perhaps it begins by refusing to forget that it is a jungle, even while we are inside.

There May Be No Pure Place

Household stewardship is real. A man can become so devoted to an ideal that he makes everyone around him pay for it. There is no virtue in preserving one good by carelessly neglecting another. My obligation to support the places I value doesn’t erase my obligation to Christiane and our children.

The question, then, is not simply, “Where is the pure place to buy this book?” There may be no pure place. The better questions are: What am I supporting? What can my family responsibly afford? Is this a book worth carrying into our home? And how can I help place it into the hands of someone else?

That last question matters to me more and more. Podvig will recommend books. It will eventually publish and sell some of them directly through Podvig Press. I’m also working on ways for Podvig to support Eighth Day Books, the store Warren built and the place that formed so much of my own life among books.

But readers do not all live under the same circumstances, and no single doorway will serve everyone. I would rather help someone find the book than shame him for the path he had to take to reach it.

The distinctions still matter. Buying from Eighth Day helps preserve a singular place and its bookselling vocation. Buying through Bookshop.org supports a larger community of independent bookstores. Buying through Amazon may make a needed book affordable or an elusive used copy possible. Each purchase carries consequences, but each can also place a worthy book into someone’s hands.

So buy directly from a good independent bookstore when you can. Let a bookseller know you. Support the places in which books are still selected, shelved, discussed, and handed from one person to another.

Use Podvig’s Bookshop.org link when you want your purchase to support independent bookstores. When cost, scarcity, or household necessity sends you into the jungle, go without pretending that the jungle is something else. Find the used copy. Take the discount. Use the Podvig Amazon link if you are willing. Either affiliate path also helps sustain Podvig and the Doom family.

Bring the book home. Read it. Mark it. Practice what it teaches. And then put it into another person’s hands when the time comes.

The Purpose Is Encounter

The purpose, after all, is not merely to possess the book. The purpose is encounter.

Most of the books that have most deeply formed me came through Warren Farha and Eighth Day Books. Others arrived from the jungle in cardboard boxes on my porch.

Grace has never been fastidious about its delivery systems.

Perhaps this is one more lesson Warren handed on to me. He believed in books too much to treat them as mere merchandise. He knew that they were still working long after they left the store. They entered homes, conversations, classrooms, churches, friendships, marriages, and lives. Their real work began after the transaction was over.

Now I spend some mornings delivering boxes for the jungle Warren named, and the irony is not lost on me. But somewhere among all those packages, there may be a book. Somewhere a person may open a box and encounter a voice that rearranges his world. I still want Eighth Day Books, and bookstores like it, to survive. I also want that person to receive the book.

We live within compromises we did not entirely choose. The answer is neither moral purity nor thoughtless surrender. It is attention: knowing what we are doing, choosing as faithfully as we can, and refusing to let imperfect means obscure a worthy end.

Buy the book where you can. When possible, buy it from someone who knows why it matters. Then open it. Let it work. And when the time comes, hand it on.

Books Worth Peddling

Against Amazon and Other Essays

Jorge Carrión, translated by Peter Bush

A literary defense of bookstores, libraries, booksellers, and the human places threatened by a culture of frictionless consumption.

Buy through Bookshop.org

Find it on Amazon

How to Resist Amazon and Why

Danny Caine

A Kansas bookseller’s concise, practical account of Amazon’s costs and an invitation to help build a different economic and cultural world.

Buy through Bookshop.org

Find it on Amazon

Purchases made through Podvig’s affiliate links help support Podvig and the Doom family at no additional cost to you. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.