Mark Thwaite on The Book Depository blog contests an assertion made by Scott Pack that bookshops will drift away from the high street to supermarkets and the internet. I?m with Scott on this one, in the sense that I suspect the only high street bookstores to survive will be independents specialising in some key genres (let’s guess at mind body spirit, god stuff, railways, cars, hobbies involving wool and little plastic knobs, Nazi memorabilia and war porn, gang violence and, hmm, serial killers).
As the independent bookshops (sadly) continue to go to the wall, driven by the seemingly inexhaustible desire to discount to death elsewhere in the trade, a few publishers, intent on selling at 60+% discount through bookstores, may join them. Let?s watch for that switch in mentality, that bass note of recognition. While RandomHouse and HarperCollins shift to selling online, perhaps even Faber will drift its independent alliance towards some innovative online offer, and then we?ll all be hearing the death knell of Bingham?s Belting Book Emporium, in favour of the increasingly ubiquitous if often anodyne online catalogue. But maybe this is the future of all consumer purchasing. If our carbon footprint has an impact, it’s certainly going to push book consumption further online.
MUST, the new fragrance for bookstores
Maybe Amazon will sell ?MUST ? the new fragrance for bookstores? so we can all inhale the smell of the stock, but it?ll be discounted. Double discounted, natch. The difficulty here is that Amazon are to be celebrated as a truly superb business which has saved many publishers with its wide range of models and opportunities to collaborate, sharing software and endless innovations and of course offering readers a wide range of browsing experiences and bloody good deals. Many publishers welcome this, and there?s an irony that many chains have failed to collaborate in reaching customers and instead focussed on price, limited range, and charging publishers for display, ranking, promotion, offers, and just about everything in fact; I wonder if book chains ever considered billing publishers for providing toilets to their high street customers buying their books? But that seemingly endless tussle of interdependence betwixt publisher and bookstore does seem to be entering its endgame.
So, who will weep when Borders goes? If it goes. Personally, I bet it lingers before meeting its death in some further consolidation with Blob Books ? Your Ubiquitous Shed with Some Cheapish Stuff (But Not Much Else). Or perhaps it will merge with The Returns Factory. Still, what will be lost? Maybe a bit of personal passion and diversity will be lost, though I suspect this lies, in the main, in the governance of the independent bookstore, or perhaps it is just less hidden there. I mean, sure, discounts, offers, deals do matter for customers, but what really sells books is the least commercial component in the sales mix, belief and community. You see, books are the means by which human beings adhere to their communities, even if they’re virtual communities. If bookstores are to survive and thrive, they have to maintain their involvement in the soft skills of gossip, recommendation, eclecticism and relationships. The stuff the internet is rather good at.
Here?s a question for you, as bookstore chains have rushed towards improved retail techniques, better systems and procedures, forecasting, modelling, did they leave behind the thing consumers really want: a community of readerships?
Of course, publishers have been secretly planning for the demise of the bookshop for some years, and many have war chests to develop a surge of online activity and more direct mail than BT can muster announcing a price increase. Yes, some of us are taking bets on the precise end date of bookstores, it’s measured in years, not decades, and the changing odds are glanced at with a faint tinge of regret, and a wistful sense of the inevitable. Like talking of coal merchants, rag and bone men, milkmen, the Avon lady, Whitsun walks, pier walks and promenading, CND, The Left, Butlins and Aztec chocolate bars, bookshops now feel like something slightly nostalgic, out of time, quaint even. Will the glistening wire integument of the Net, girdling the earth, offer a better place to find our communities of readers? Well, as Larkin says in his prayer to geriatrics, “We shall find out.”
