Rocket Bomber - article - business - retail - Unique Bookstore Experiences: Living Memory [case study 2 of 5]

The old book retail model doesn’t quite work anymore, not in a world with online, discounted sales of physical books and instant downloads of e-books. But some of us (myself included) aren’t ready to let go of the ‘bookstore’ quite yet, and there should be some way to make a bookstore work even as book retail [as we used to know it] is significantly marginalized and in large chunks replaced by online analogues and substitutes.

One merely [merely, as if it’s that easy] has to “rethink the box” and come up with a new way to run a bookstore.

Previously:
Study your History. Recognise your Motives. Location, Location, Location. Know your Customer Base, and your Staff. Hire folks who love books. Find your Niche. Consider your Product Lines, Stock Your Shelves, Set your main-aisle displays, consider Alternative display strategies, take a second look at What the Customers Want and Why Even Annoying Customers are Important. Answer for yourself whether raw dollars or customer service is more important to your store, and its future. Stare again in dismay at the Profit Margins. Try calculating your upper-limit affordable rent and affordable salaries along with revenue from inventory (with a side of coffee) and compare your numbers to average industry per-storefront sales.

Unique Bookstore Experiences: Zero – Intro – 1 –

Chronologically: 1 – 2 – 3 – 4 – 5 – 6 – 7 – 8 – 9 – 10 – 11 – 12 – 13 – 14 – 15 – 16 – 17 – 18 – 19 – 20 – 21 – 22 – 23 – 24 – 25 – 26 – 27 – 28

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The New Model Bookstore

What we want is The Landmark, Destination Bookstore — like Powell’s City of Books, The Strand, or Shakespeare & Co. — but since that’s not enough anymore, we also need a “hook” — hopefully the hook also involves another revenue stream [20 years ago, adding a café was the “hook”; coffee was enough] but in a post-internet age you have to bring more than that: not just a Bookstore, but a Unique Experience.

criteria: multi-use space, multiple revenue streams, destination shopping, curated collections, weekly events and big-name, newsworthy Capital-Letter-E-Events — along with something extra

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Case Study #2: Living Memory

Let me start with an extended aside: the media we sell at retail is different from the sale of “content”.

We often conflate the two, but the sale of books [and also CDs, DVDs, computer games] via retail channels is still not quite the same as the sale of content. Oh, sure, in the 1950s there was no other way to sell content; it was intimately conjoined with the media on which it was recorded. As a result, many [most] [all?] content producers focused on the media-of-delivery, and assumed that the media equalled the message, and poured resources into the production of physical artefacts, as opposed to the production of content. The sale of music, or books, or [eventually] movies as a commodity, rather than a work of art. But that only works for so long as that one technological model applies; when the underlying game changes, the physical artefact that holds the content becomes nothing more than a curiousity, a footnote.

If one merely wants the content of a book [the e-book file, under current models] and one assigns no value to the physical artefact [the “books” I’ve been selling for years] then retail is already dead. This was the primary failure of the record stores — now all but extinct — as we saw almost the entirety of their business move online, both through piracy but more importantly through iTunes and other internet retail channels. No one needs a disc to listen to music.

Past that: retail sales of media competes not just with other goods but with itself — free broadcast and subscription cable TV, radio, and satellite offerings (both TV and Sirius XM), not to mention (but I’m going to mention) streaming video and music over the internet (free and otherwise) — the difference between “retail” and “broadcast” has disappeared. One consumes media like we consume water and air. Yes, we have to pay someone for it, but it is rare that we actually think of the infrastructure that provides our lifeblood; much of our casual, informal, personal consumption of media is done via subscription: we pay the cable bill, and that’s it.

Netflix & Cable are betting on subscription models; Apple, Microsoft, and Sony already own a substantial base of consumers through iTunes, XBox, and PSN, respectively; The Cable Co. (whichever your local happens to be) is itching to expand it’s offerings (with significant hits to your monthly bill) and the last thing any corporation wants is a free and open internet — one that could potentially spit-up the next Napster or YouTube. Yes, it’s all about movies and music now — but how long before even your choice of books is an extension of which bookstore you subscribe to?

Seems unlikely? really? Well, Kindle owners/users only get their “books” from Amazon; they don’t have the choice of other sales outlets. The e-pub format is “open”, but with 75% of the market tied up by Amazon [to date; things will change] how “open” is a format that is intentionally snubbed by the near-monopoly that claims to own the market?

Plenty of blame to go around, but I’m going to mound most of it on Amazon for being a dick. And let me expand on that: Amazon, darling, what do you lose by letting your books be read on other devices, or enabling e-pub support (used by current library systems for e-book lending) on the Kindle?

What, increased sales of Kindles is abhorrent to you? You don’t want the tacit concession of the e-reader market of Kindle as the ‘default’ e-reader device? Is monopolistic control of e-books so important that you shoot yourself in the foot (or the head) in a vain attempt to attain it? Or are you so insecure in your hardware and marketplace that you refuse to open your Kindle ecosystem to even the option of sales of competing units, and of a universe of content, because what, it will make Kindle ownership even more appealing for the vast majority of readers?

Monopolies went out of style in the 1890s (in fact are now illegal) and the current model is to put out a product that is so good imitators and late-comers just can’t compete. You can insist on a MaBell-USSteel-StandardOil model, but it only makes you look bad. Apple is in direct competition with several competitors, in a number of fields, but they don’t resort to dirty tricks – or insist on market dominance. Apple makes billions off of 15% of the market – and constantly looks for new markets to get into, and new technology that invents new markets.

The Kindle will always be an “almost” technology for as long as Amazon insists on direct control.

If nothing else, pirates will release ebooks as pdf files; readable on a kindle – or on anything else.

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Y’all can take that and write your own editorials.

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The point I’d like to make in this much larger debate is: It may eventually be the case that the only reason to buy entertainment on physical media is because you want to own it. Archivists, rights advocates, and fans may be the market of last resort, and the media companies who still want to sell discs (of whatever sort, type, or technology) need to engage them.

Case Study #2: Living Memory

Concept: A used record store, with used DVDs, and on top of that: a bookstore. At least when we open, it would be mostly a new book store, but also rapidly moving toward a used book store model. We all know e-bay and other secondary markets are strong and growing stronger; why not embrace the trend with both arms and a change in focus?

Related: Rare Books. Collectibles. Anything on the secondary market might be of use; we’d scour ebay and pick up anything that makes economic sense. Astoundingly, some customers still can’t be bothered to do their own internet searches and orders, and someone should capture those sales.
Relevance: Old. Treasured. Childhood memories, the comfort of the familiar, the joy of rediscovery. Not just old music and used books, but the vast selection of DVD releases that hit shelves in the past 5 years then just as quickly slipped into obscurity. If one is committed to accepting near anything & returning nothing – and populating increasingly growing shelves with the ever-growing backstock — then the only limiting factor is the amount of shelf & floor space one enjoys.

Here, Let me sell it to you: Vinyl records and old DVDs, CDs, and whatever other discs we eventually employ — sure, it could be that there is a new digital version to download and no one wants the actual physical media. But [to pull from my anime roots] say a licensor no longer permits a local-language version of a TV series to be streamed, but which also was previously released on DVD. So long as the physical media exists, there should be a storefront that offers the same for sale.

That Something Extra: Tables full of boxes full of vinyl.

Killer App: The Prisoner on DVD – or [choose your cult favorite] available [on the media of choice]

Alternate Profit Centers: One could try and work this like a bookstore, with a coffee shop and the rest, but it might be easier to go the comic-shop, gamers-nexus, used-CD-Store route. Embrace the media of the last century, and wallow in it.