Quote:
Originally Posted by GtrsRGr8
Physical stores have basically become unnecessary.
For one thing, one of the purposes that many people had for going into them was to browse in books to see if they might be ones that they'd like to own. The Internet has made that all but unnecessary. You can get previews from Amazon, books.Google.com, various other places (wouldn't it be great if some website would collect links for books to as many preview sites for each book as possible?).
Secondly, there are great costs that brick-and-mortar stores have that virtual stores do not. Off the top of my head, there are utilities (electricity, natural gas, etc.), rent or financing of the building, maintenance, the expense of additional employees than virtual stores require . . . .
And for us budget-minded consumers, $5 for a cappuccino at the coffee bar is more than we want to pay, when we can make the same thing at home for far less, while we surf the bookstores on the web.
It's a business model that is destined to go the way of the dodo bird, except for a few specialized and/or boutique stores.
|
I agree that the "giant cathedral of literature" bookstore is an unsustainable business model in the 21st century...except for a few choice locations. I think there is room for a couple dozen in the big, heavily populated mega-cities. As destination stores or touristy atrractions in the biggest of malls. As you say, specialized booktiques.
The problem with the warehouse bookstores is they rely on people going to them and they need a *lot* of traffic just to stay open at a time when people are increasingly less inclined to go far for their shopping. So, at a time shoppers' "roaming" is declining (why visit ten stores looking for the right thing when a five minute online search will do?) bookstores are seeing their ability to draw buyers from afar decline and their traffic wither.
If you live with a few minutes of a B&M store you can still find some value in it.
If you live 20-30 miles away it gets iffy.
Further out (which is the majority) it stops makibg sense.
Back in the day I set aside a whole saturday several times a year to travel to a specialty SF&F bookstore in the region and dropped a couple hundred bucks on backlist and UK paperbacks you couldn't get anywhere else. Today I can do better in half an hour online shopping for ebooks. Way more convenient and sensible. Less milleage on the car and my back, more reading time.
Times change and it pays to adapt.
There might be room for a different kind of bookstore that leverages modern logistics and online for the impatient and the traditionalist or the drive-by impulse shoppers, but those are a much smaller customer base so the store needs to be smaller and/or efficient. And that is a tougher row to hoe.
Amusingly, Amazon is giving it a try.
They might yet show us a way forward but I suspect their stores will end up being more like the Microsoft and Apple stores, more marketing exercises than retailers.
Newstands and pharmacies can survive off casual readers looking for the current hot bestseller but bookstores need steady year-round traffic to sell midlist/backlist and that means heavy readers. Who have gone heavily into digital and online.
Edit: Even establishment apologists are waking up to the reality of the world Agency created:
http://www.idealog.com/blog/agency-p...-strengthened/
In the end it really comes down to the heavy readers, whether you're a B&M store or an online/digital retailer, and with ebooks having turned into a walled garden
business like gaming consoles there is little room for anybody but the big boys. And that means the dream of inter-operable epub remains just a dream and without it businesses like Shelfie stand no chance.