Photo of Shakespeare & Company by Alexandre Duret-Lutz via a Creative Commons License
As you may be able to tell from the references to rice farming in my bio, I grew up in a really small town: 5,000 people, a handful of restaurants, two grocery stores, a one-screen movie theater, and two stoplights that only operated during school hours (after I moved away they put in one that operates 24 hours – you don’t know the excitement). And it’s not like this was a suburb. The nearest town, seven miles away, had a whopping 700 people. My hometown is the biggest town in a county that’s 3/4 the size of Rhode Island.
And because it was such a small town we didn’t have a bookstore. The closest one was a tiny mall store in a town 30 miles away that was invariably staffed by surly teenagers and very rarely had what young Nathan was looking for. I got by on the books my parents had bought for my older siblings, the armfuls I’d grab when the book fair came to town, and whatever they had at the local library.
Combine this with a generally pro-future attitude and I think you’ll see why my mind continues to be blown that, thanks to the wonders of the Internet, we now have access to pretty much every book you could ever want to read. You don’t even have to talk to a bored teenager to get them.
But don’t get me wrong – I love bookstores!! Love love love. I’m eternally grateful to Bloomsbury Books in Ashland, OR for introducing me to David Eddings, I loved my pilgrimage to Elliott Bay in Seattle, and I always stop by Borderlands in San Francisco whenever I’m looking for science fiction (especially if Ripley the hairless alien cat is in). Bookstores are hugely important, and I don’t want them to go away.
Much as Mike Shatzkin recently expressed in a recent post, I’m a bit torn between my love of e-books and my love of bookstores. Selfishly, I want the best of both worlds. I want the convenience of e-books without inadvertently killing off the places that host author readings, who nurture local talent, serve as community centers, and introduce readers to authors they might not have heard about otherwise.
Opinions vary on the extent to which we can have both worlds. Shatzkin sees the conflict between e-books and bookstores as essentially zero sum, in a comment on Shatzkin’s post Kassia Krozser of Booksquare says it’s not zero sum and they can coexist provided bookstores embrace both print and digital, and independent booksellers Christin Evans and Praveen Madan recently chided the press for treating the demise of bookstores as an inevitability rather than taking a hard look at the fact that, among other things, after 15 years independent booksellers combined have a digital market share of 0.1%.
There are definitely independent stores who have embraced the Internet (Powell’s comes to mind), and if publishers are able to control uniform pricing via the agency model, bookstores may be back to competing on consumer experience rather than pricing. Is this a digital environment in which physical stores could thrive if they embraced the Internet? Or do e-books just further erode the necessity of brick and mortar stores?
I don’t pretend to know for sure. Like any consumer, I want it all. I just hope I can get it. Right now I have my feet (and put my dollars) in both worlds. I wonder if that’s enough.
Anonymous said, "But I don't see it happening in the mainstream. And in order to own a viable business that makes a profit, large or small, you need the mainstream consumer to survive, because the artistic types, who are not the biggest spenders, aren't going to put food on the table."
This goes along with my point. Just because it's fun to get a coffee and look at piles of books for free doesn't pay the rent for these stores.
Also, I know I prefer to buy online via Amazon and other sites because at this point there is often free shipping and no sales tax. Oklahoma's sales tax is over 8%.
I would think in turn storefront owners have to charge more because they have to consider the amount of money spent to have items shipped to the store and pay all overhead.
In the end would you choose to get something for less and have it delivered for free to your door or electronic device?
"This goes along with my point. Just because it's fun to get a coffee and look at piles of books for free doesn't pay the rent for these stores."
Thanks for supporting my comment. I speak from knowing someone who owned a small bookstore and tried to make it work. The literary types would gather in his shop, sip their mocha lattes, and waste his time. They never spent any money and he went into debt trying to make them happy.
This is such a hard tension to live in. I value local bookstores and the experiences that they can offer, but there is a sacrifice that comes along with that in price. I love the price of Amazon, but the sacrifice is the loss of author control and, I believe, integrity of business practices as we just saw with the Macmillan incident.
It really feels like we're on the brink of something huge, where you can fight it (the revolution to e-books), but it's going to happen one way or another. I genuinelly believe that it will be a good thing if handled correctly. However, I deeply want to be able to continue to hold the majority of my books in my hand, smell the pages, write notes in the margin, and visit stores to hear authors speak. It's a hard tension, but I think we can have both/and.
I also grew up in a town without a bookstore (although it did/does have a Ronald Reagan museum–he grew up there, too (meh)). Our bookstore was an hour drive away to the nearest mall.
Thankfully, now, it does have a little bookstore/coffeeshop and whenever I visit my parents I make a point of buying books there (along with my usual soy vanilla latte). It's a great place! Kinda like Cheers in that everybody knows your name. And they know mine too! I'm pro-future too, though, so while I love the bookstore and everything it represents to authors and communities, I'm also salivating over an iPad.
All I can say is, I hope a balance can be struck. Somehow.
If the theater, cinema, television and radio can co-exist, so can bookstores and ebooks.
🙂
G.
I work in an indie bookstore, and the surge of "buy local" campaigns have definitely been a help. If this philosophy of supporting your local businesses continues we may well have a chance. Also, I think we'll find more bookstores selling things other than books to find security in diversification. For instance, we're also an art gallery, and selling art on consignment has no upfront costs. Depending on the time of the month/year, the art and the books alternate carrying us.
I've been in the conversation on Mike's blog. Let me repeat, slightly rewritten, something I said there.
I indicated that a couple of points mentioned in other comments, plus a couple of my own observations might "converge to a ray of hope"
The other folks' comments:
Guy LeCharles Gonzalez: (referring to a recently closed B % N)
"As for the B&N in Hoboken, I'd argue that has more to do with the cost of real estate in an affluent city…"
andyross797: (referring to indie bookstores still making it)
"….very small niche-y neighborhood stores with minimal overhead."
And my own observations:
I'm fond of saying that TV didn't kill movies. However, that does NOT mean no theaters closed. I vividly remember the closed theaters of the mid-sixties. Where? In central cities where rents and taxes were high and traffic was declining. The counter-trend? Mall theaters and Super-plexes. This is niche migration, like when climate change forces species migration.
For whatever it's worth, commercial real estate values appear to be in a decline from a high point in 2007Q3. I had heard this anecdotally, so I Googled it and found this cute chart for retail based on the Moodys/REAL Commercial Property Price Index (CPPI)
https://mit.edu/cre/research/credl/rca/national/…
I would expect opportunities for entrepreneurial spirits to pioneer a niche migration to low-overhead zones.
-Steve
I love ebooks. The only paper books I can read need to be brand new, and even then, I get asthma attacks. I load up on pills and inhalers and spend one day a week in the bookstore, which I LOVE.
I make sure to spend a fortune in the cafe. I hope that helps. I still buy about a paper book a month or so, and often donate it to the little campground library.
So yeah, I want both worlds.
Since I am not a book store owner, let me tell them how they should run their business:) I think it will be very tough, on one hand I would love to run a bookstore, but the realistic part of me says its likely that they will go the way of the music store. I think it will be much more difficult to run a book store of the future. (As if it weren't tough enough now.) Obviously you need plenty of events, signings, openings, teaming up with movie theaters for movies that originated in books, etc.) I think another venue could be to go where people are. If indie bookstores can set up selling e-books, then they can get their entire inventory with a laptop. – Set up a table at a farmer's market and promote organic food books, go to festivals, go to anything where people are. Someone above mentioned bookmobiles, I think that that should be explored – you are not limited by the size of the van, you can sell as much as Amazon can but you can go where people are better than Amazon can.
Another idea could be to look at the model of Gamestop stores. I assumed that Gamestop would go out of business when computer games became much easier to download, yet they seem to be doing fine. Maybe this entails have a used book section (buy a used book for $1.00 credit, and sell it for $5.00 – you can't beat that margin.) Gamestop also sells gift certificates to online games (which I would think directly sends people away from their store, but again they are still in business.) Maybe this entails selling Kindles or Amazon gift certificates even, but at a minimum it means selling ebooks. On the positive side it may mean that you do not need large retail space, (but large enough to hold events.)
I think it will take more planning, much more outreach, but hopefully it can be done. Unfortunately, it may mean more work for declining income – until it turns into larger and larger deficits. For those who say that they love the feel and smell of books, I'm sorry, I really don't think that's going to cut it. The fact is you can download a book for less, no shipping, no tax, and the ebook readers look good with the e-ink technology. You need to draw people to your store or go where the people are. Good luck.