Quote:
Originally Posted by theducks
Pre marked prices is a bad idea when the costs (rent and wages) are so varying across the land. Retail rents in the city are over $10 a foot. Some places, they are under a dollar
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Ditto with other costs: the cost of living in SF is about double that of Nashville (for one) and Manhattan is almost triple. A lot of the resurgent Indie bookstores are surviving based on cost control; choosing affordable sites, better inventory and floorspace management, and even part-time employees.
I hope they survive, though those memberships sound a wee bit pricey.
I fear they face a grim challenge, though: about half of SF book sales these days are ebook. That brings a double whammy in that, as we all know, ebook buyers tend to shift their purchases from pbook to ebook very strongly--reducing the effective pool of potential buyers--and, worse, a lot of the newer SF releases are ebook first or ebook only, which reduces the appeal of the specialty shops.
Back in the day, my favorite bookstore was an SF&F specialty store packed floor to ceiling with "everything" in print in the genre, including a large assortment of foreign editions of titles not readily available in local editions. That amounted to a few thousand titles. Today, Amazon stocks over 100K titles in Kindle SF alone. That is a tough act to follow...