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Originally Posted by wizwor
At the same time, these small stores have brought in products and services to attract consumers.
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The aspect that has been most neglected in the disruption of trade publishing is the return of local focus. For the past few decades corporate publishing has been enforcing a steadily homogenized centralized distribution model predicated on the assumption that readers are (essentially) interchangeable and local tastes don't vary enough to matter.
Indie bookstores are not only free to address local customer needs with more precision than the big chains, they've learned to leverage that ability to add value to their customers' experience. This is an important part of their ability to survive in this new era.
Submitted for consideration:
http://www.thebookseller.com/blogs/tough-deal.html
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Ten years ago, I walked into a bookshop on the Charing Cross Road, with a rucksack full of Smoke: A London Peculiar, the magazine that I'd made with my friend, Matt Haynes. I went up to the front counter, found a nice man called Mike Atherton, and explained to him what it was: a magazine of words and images inspired by London.
Mike took 20 of them for Foyles. They sold out in a week. We took along some more. We did similar elsewhere. By issue 3 of Smoke: A London Peculiar, our two-person distribution network was selling 5,000 copies per issue in over 80 London shops, thanks to the relationships we had built with individual booksellers.
That world has gone. Ten years later, Matt and I are launching our first Smoke book, From the Slopes of Olympus to the Banks of the Lea, into a very different marketplace. Now, centralised distribution and buying are king, and the personal approach has little power. In many cases, it's not even allowed—and this position fails booksellers as well as independent publishers.
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