In today's online edition of Canada's National Post, there is a round-table discussion:
Culture Club: The end of bookstores?
The discussion includes the paper's Book Editor Mark Medley; Mark Leslie Lefebvre, president of Canadian Booksellers Association and a manager at McMaster University’s Titles Bookstore; Alana Wilcox, editorial director of Coach House Books, a "fabled" small press independent in Canada; and Becky Toyne, who works at Type Books in Toronto and is a regular contributor to Open Book Toronto and CBC Radio One.
Medley asked:
Can there be a healthy publishing industry without independent bookstores, or does the shift from print to digital books negate their importance?
Lefebvre trotted out the "only bookstores can help you find something good to read" argument and said he was suspicious of Amazon's claim to be selling more ebooks than pbooks.
Wilcox talked about indie stores "curating" collections and how wonderful it is to walk into her local store and run into "at least three people" she knows and how the idie stores host events and, as a regular, the staff know your tastes. She also claimed "accidental meetings on bookstore shelves" have led to her best book finds and this is nearly impossible in the ebook world.
Toyne was more circumspect thinking indies will evolve their own brands and survive creating their own publishing imprints like Daunt's in London.
Books stores becoming publishers? Sounds a bit like Amazon. Except the discussion turned out to be print on demand in the book store. It would also be driven by the indie book shops "intimate knowledege of the customer" and was great because it eliminates returns. It ended with promoting the idea that indie bookstores with their own imprints featuring extremely short-run titles where they could also skip things like editing and promotion ... and therefore wouldn't compete with traditional publishing.
You know ... these articles continue to underscore just how completely the industry is overwhelmed with people working in it who just haven't a clue about who their current and future customers are and can be. Even as book chains and indie stores are collapsing all around them, they still think niche printing of local titles is enough value add to bring in enough customers for the industry to thrive.
And what is with this complete blindness that services like Amazon for books and Netflix for videos don't do a ten fold better job than any bookstore or video store ever did in understanding each customer's tastes and delivering exactly the right content at exactly the moment it is to be consumed? And, just maybe, that's part of the value equation?
