Quote:
Originally Posted by JMikeD
Thier claim is that for every 100 books that Amazon sells, they could sell 1,000 through independent sellers, but the indies won't stock his books since Amazon (or Borders, B&N, etc) sells them for less. I can't reject this out of hand. My own experience is that I end up at Amazon (and abebooks.com) because the chain stores don't have the books I want, the nearest indie store for mysteries is 200 miles away and gasoline is $4.00 a gallon.
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I can't agree with the conclusion that independent bookstores won't stock the titles because Amazon will undercut them on price. Amazon can undercut them on price, regardless.
The small independent bookstore
is in trouble. Booksellers compete on price among other things, and the independents can't match the pricing offered by Barnes and Noble, Borders, and the like. And
those chains are under heavy pressure from "warehouse" retailers like CostCo and Sam's Club. (You don't normally think of places like CostCo as major booksellers, but they are.
Very major.)
The independent bookstores I know of that still exist are specialty stores serving niche markets, like travel and children's literature. And the independent bookstore survives by understanding who their customers are and what they want to read, and making sure they carry it.
The problem the independent faces, beyond price competition, is simple space. Shelf space is finite, and a small independent bookstore simply doesn't have enough space to stock everything. I saw numbers years back, before the big chains were dominant, indicating that the average bookstore could stock 5,000 to 8,000 titles, and there were 50,000 tiles being published per year.
A larger problem for the book industry is less known. What titles to stock in the stores controlled by a chain tends to be a headquarters decision. As the industry consolidates, purchasing decisions are in far fewer hands.
An old friend managed a bookstore at one point. Her store was part of a small chain, and she was in near tears from frustration. Purchasing decisions for her chain were made by the buyer at the main store, based on the demographics and buying patterns of that store's customers. Her store had different demographics and buying patterns, but getting that across to HQ was an uphill task. One hopes the big chains are sophisticated enough to account for regional variations when buying, but I wouldn't bet large amounts on it.
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Dennis