National Post: The end of bookstores?

[SensualPoet]

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?

[wyndslash]

i kind of feel bad for the independent bookstores. i don't remember where i read/heard it, but someone did say that all developed countries will eventually look alike xP because the big chain stores will have toppled the small niche stores. or something along that line.

and speaking of amazon recommendations, i don't really abide by it. i need to fix the way it recommends stuff to me, but i don't know how. i usually browse goodreads and talk to people here xP

[susan_cassidy]

If you go to Recommendation on Amazon, and click on See All Recommendations, each book will have options for you to click "I own it", "Not interested", "Rate this item", and "Recommended because you bought xxx - Fix this". Click on "Fix this", and you can specify not to use that book for future recommendations. I use it all the time when it recommends stupid stuff because their database entries (or something) are messed up, and it thinks "The Bobbsey Twins" is science fiction, or it is from a book I bought for someone else.

[SensualPoet]

I've played with the reco tool from time to time and I guess that's why the suggestions are worth browsing. Certainly communities like Mobileread and Goodreads provide suggestions, as do newspaper reviews and online ebook collections in libraries; and for me, the random guided browsing on Amazon is also very helpful and frankly more useful to me than wandering around the bargain tables or the shelves of the mystery section at my local big box bookstore. I certainly don't get any assistance in these stores that guides selection the way the online browsing does.

[lunixer]

I don't like the Amazon recommendation engine. I always find my next book by going to the reviews of my current book, finding a decent review that gave the book the same number of stars as I gave it, and then seeing what that reader compares the book to. Eg, this book is almost as good as X author! Something along those lines.

[OtterBooks]

"But most of my best book finds have been accidental meetings on bookstore shelves, which is nearly possible in the ebook world if you don’t have a search term."

Who are these people who have apparently never shopped at a large online book retailer? The "customers who bought this, also bought this" aspect of online book shopping, along with the review system, has resulted in ridiculously more discoveries for me than any bookstore.

I recently came across Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell on Amazon due to following a link from another book I liked. I had been searching for a book similar to the one I had just read and written a review for, and Norrell wound up fitting the bill perfectly. I was out to dinner with a friend recently, and I recommended it. He doesn't have an ereader, and there was a Barnes and Noble nearby. They didn't have it. Out of stock. It was a huge NYT bestseller, not some obscure book. Aside from the obvious lack means of discovering books at a b&m store by seeing a list of books other people liked similarly, there was the lack of it being on the shelves at all. I wouldn't have discovered it there.

"We can order it for you."

"Yeah, so can I, and not for the $27.95 cover price you'll charge me."

Actually I said "No thank you," because I'm not a jerk. but still.

[outlander78]

I feel badly, because book stores are fun to hang out in, and employee people, but if their best value is making good recommendations, then they are in trouble. If you trust recommendation engines, then Amazon is just as good; if you don't, then this site is just as good. A book store owner cannot have read every book out there, or know you well enough to make brilliant suggestions, while sites like this one and models like Amazon's aggregate enough data to possibly get it right.

The most expensive way for me to buy a book is to drive to the book store on my way home. The cheapest way to get a physical book is to wait, order a few at once (free shipping), and take advantage of Amazon or Chapter's online discounts. The cheapest and fastest way to get the content, however, is to buy the ebook and start reading in seconds. If ebooks win out, the combination of fastest and cheapest will be a big part of the reason why.

[jbcohen]

I can recall quite clearly the "mall book" book stores and the tiny neighborhood book stores that existed many moons ago. Yes they were fun to hang out in ocassionaly but they all had one thing in common what ever you wanted they did not have it, what ever you did not want they had it. Customers were forced to buy what ever the store decided to stock or wait a long time for their choices to be delivered to the store. Yes, it was nice meeting old friends there ocassionally and yes it was nice walking into the book store. Unfortunately the business model of those stores never did suit me, I never found what I came for. Ocassionally would meet friends at the book store, however not enough times to make it worth my while to go down to the store. Yes the stores were good at the book recommendations however the electronic book stores are much better at this then any of the enighborhood stores ever were. Electronic stores are always there with what I want (something the neghborhood stores could never do), and introduced competition into the equation (something that the neighborhood stores to pains to eliminate), and electronic stores always seem to know what I want to read next. I always look at the recommendations for the book that I have just finnished and always seem to find the next book in the list, something neighborhood book stores tried to do but never seemed to be able to accomplish.

I love what 21st century can do for me and my family and I am very fustrated at what technology simply can not do for me as yet. I refuse to run about town gathering the things that my family needs each week, as my father did when I was young. Instead I preferr to allow the stores to come to me "they always have what you need" my pop recognized one day, and yes its true the electronic stores always have what my family needs.

I'm a book worm myself and you should see the library that I have in my basement that I accumulated before discovering electronic books. If you saw my library you would understand that I have gone electronic with the book out of necessity, the library is massing for a take over of the whole house.

[anamardoll]

Originally Posted by OtterBooks

"But most of my best book finds have been accidental meetings on bookstore shelves, which is nearly impossible in the ebook world if you don’t have a search term."

Once again, this article makes me think, If you haven't ever used Amazon, you probably shouldn't write an article about Amazon.

The idea... the suggestion that the only way people find books online is by directly drilling to them with a precision search engine and then they buy the book and go offline without ever seeing book recommendations online is laughable.

And that meme needs to be killed dead. Now.

[jgaiser]

I love my local Indie bookstore. They have a good selection of new and used. I love browsing the aisles. I still buy a lot of DTB. But...

Times are changing and whether the booksellers of the world like it or not, they're not going to be able to turn back the clock. The online bookstores are not going away. Ebooks are not going away. Adapt or die. See: Buggy Whips

[anamardoll]

And I know this was supposed to be Indie bookstores, but if B&N wants me to stop into their store more often, then could bring back those soft easy chairs they used to have scattered through the stores.

I totally made a weekly "B&N Day" on my calendar when I bought my Nook. I was gonna go in, buy me some expensive beverage, snuggle into one of the sofas I remembered from my youth, and browse their catalog with my Nook.

OH WAIT YOU CAN'T.

And I can't sit in those stupid cafe chairs - they hurt your back and your butt in a matter of seconds. Way to NOT sell me on the importance of buying my reader from a single-source book seller, B&N. Guess I'll just go back to my PocketBook 360.

[wyndslash]

Originally Posted by jbcohen

I refuse to run about town gathering the things that my family needs each week, as my father did when I was young. Instead I preferr to allow the stores to come to me "they always have what you need" my pop recognized one day, and yes its true the electronic stores always have what my family needs.

you mean that thing called exercise? o_o;

[ficbot]

When I lived in New Zealand, the only local bricks and mortar bookstore was a tiny little mall store with exactly four things:

- a wall with 50 shelves each containing, in order, one of the 50 best books as voted on by readers of the major newspaper

- a wall of popular new releases and best-sellers, which at the time included Harry Potter, Stephen King, Jodi Picoult and little else

- a wall of authors of local interest---this seemed to be dominated by the works of a children's author who had a very prolific series of picture books about a spotted dog

- a wall of general fiction and miscellanea which mostly seemed to consist of the backlist of the local authors, best-sellers and 50 best books authors.

- scattered throughout the interior, racks of stationary products and school supplies.

So, tell me how the loss of a such a store would strike a big cultural blow to the community and make it hard for them to discover new authors?

[wyndslash]

Originally Posted by ficbot

When I lived in New Zealand, the only local bricks and mortar bookstore was a tiny little mall store with exactly four things:

- a wall with 50 shelves each containing, in order, one of the 50 best books as voted on by readers of the major newspaper

- a wall of popular new releases and best-sellers, which at the time included Harry Potter, Stephen King, Jodi Picoult and little else

- a wall of authors of local interest---this seemed to be dominated by the works of a children's author who had a very prolific series of picture books about a spotted dog

- a wall of general fiction and miscellanea which mostly seemed to consist of the backlist of the local authors, best-sellers and 50 best books authors.

- scattered throughout the interior, racks of stationary products and school supplies.

So, tell me how the loss of a such a store would strike a big cultural blow to the community and make it hard for them to discover new authors?

i think for me, from a tourist's point of view, it would mean the lack of colorful shops or interesting sights, but there's the possibility it could be replaced with something equally interesting to entice shoppers to browse. i'm all for the cheapest and best selection of books, but i can't help but wonder sometimes if we are trampling over other people. *frustrated* i'm sorry, i'm not sure if i explained it very well.

[SeaBookGuy]

I vacationed in Key West several years ago (pre-ebooks), striking up a conversation with the local bookshop owner. I asked about local reading reading habits, receiving the reply: "What local reading? My sales are almost entirely to tourists." Amazon existed at the time, but wasn't quite the phenomenon it is these days.