TeleRead: Bring the E-Books Home

Rx for future bookstores: E/P synergies, sample reading, cross promos and partnerships galore

By Joanna

The e-book is going to nuke the neighborhood bookstore and ruin literature, the publishing industry and the economy, at least for English majors.

Or is it? Bookstores are good for books. E-book readers are good for books too. And a smart future publishing model can make it tempting and easy for loyal customers to buy both E and P, separately or together.

Here is how I envision the bookstore of the future, with or without flying cars around to get us there.

A mix of e-books and p-books

The bookstore I’ve seen that most resembles my future vision was the sole bookstore that existed in a small country town I lived in while overseas. It was tiny, and admittedly had a poor selection. But what did that selection consist of? Stationery products, children’s books, DIY books and best-sellers. Plop in a coffee shop and a print-on-demand machine, and you’d pretty much have my bookstore of the future.

From a “print” standpoint, genre fiction will pretty much migrate to only e-books, and the retail shelf space will be devoted to stationery products, merchandise branded to certain best-sellers (for example, Martha Stewart’s cooking products) and books not suited for a paperback-sized screen such as cookbooks, art books and children’s picture books.

We’ll all be on one standard format by then, just as MP3 has taken over the music world, so people won’t need to worry about compatibility anymore. They can just buy, and read.

You could browse the best-seller list “demo” copies, and if you want to buy, just download your purchase directly onto a phone, netbook, tablet, ebook reader or other device using the in-store wi-fi—all stores will have it, and all devices will be able to hook in for free.

If you don’t have a device with you, prefer a print copy, want to buy a paper copy as a gift, etc., you can head on over to the print-on-demand machine and make yourself a print copy or save the digital copy to your virtual bookshelf and download it at home.

In-store content, cross-promotion and other smart publisher tricks

Here is where there is such potential for the publishers, though. Let’s say I am buying a book that is part of a series. As soon as I click the “buy” button, a window will pop up offering me a discount coupon if I immediately buy the other ones. Or, better yet, a freebie—Kelley Armstrong and Janet Evanovich are two authors I read who routinely write short stories, either as freebies on their websites or to contribute to anthologies. Why not package these as e-book bonuses? “Buy the latest Kelley Armstrong—now, today, in store—and get a free short story.”

I’ve seen some screenshots of the in-store Barnes & Noble content that has me hoping our Canadian chain, Indigo (partners in the Kobo store) may come out with a branded device. I think in-store content will be a key part of the new marketing strategy.

Paul Biba posted earlier about ZDnet’s Matthew Miller, whose Nook offered him a free cookie from the in-store Starbucks. But why stop there? Why can’t the Nook e-mail you at home to tell you about the cookie, so that you’ll come into the store and buy things?

Or what if the cookie was a branded cookie—for example, based on a Martha Stewart recipe from a newly released cookbook? Suppose that when you came into the store to redeem your coupon, you could enjoy it while reading a free excerpt of said book—which of course, you might want to buy now that you’ve seen it.

You get a free cookie and a free e-book sampler, and while you are enjoying those, the store is hooking you into wanting the beautiful, expensive print book with all the glossy pictures…

Take advantage, too, of partnerships with other content providers. For example, Google Books has a trove of badly formatted, poorly proofed but nonetheless potential-filled public domain books. Why not clean some of them up package them as freebies with related content? For example, I just bought a mystery novel in which the detective character is Jane Austen. Why not give me a free Jane Austen e-book if I buy this title while I’m in the store?

Sure, I could go home and download it myself off Project Gutenberg, but it may not be formatted nicely for my device. A smart publisher could invest minimal time and effort in cleaning up the freebie from their content partner at Google Books, perhaps add some nice illustrations, then sell it for $0.99 (every e-book store will have a $0.99 section!). $0.99, that is, for the regular people. Special people like me who bought the Jane Austen mystery today, in store, right now, would get it for free.

And if I like it (which you’ll know once I finish it and go back to the social community on your website to rate it) then you can plug your other $0.99 Jane Austen books, which are pure profit for you since these books have no royalty costs and no costs to print, store, ship and manufacture.

Travel books are very suited for this sort of cross-promotion. If I buy the travel book on, say, Australia, why not use the in-store content software to offer me suggestions for books which are set there? Make one of the books part of a series, throw in a discount coupon to get me to buy the whole series at once, and you can sell half a dozen books in one shot, easy. Then, as a thank you to your lovely loyal customer, a great Australia-related freebie, cleaned up and formatted for their device by you. Normally, it’s $0.99 but they get it for free. People love the free stuff, right?

And it works the other way too. Say, I buy the great Australian novel and enjoy it. Next time I log in, try and sell me the travel book to go and visit there. Maybe even partner up with a travel agency and offer me a coupon for a trip-related discount!
The Nook sample content I saw was a little on the anemic side. New content once a month would not do it for me, given how often I go to bookstores. I think they should pair up with Wikipedia, Project Gutenberg and other emporiums of free content to offer me something new at least weekly.

Christmas is near? A free download of the Dickens classic ‘A Christmas Carol’ while I am browsing at the bookstore coffee shop. Valentine’s Day? How about a free short story from project Gutenberg on a  love-related theme, and a discount coupon to buy some greeting cards at the in-store stationary area?

Remember, too, that we are on a universal format by this point and both e-book purchases and in-store content networks are cross-compatible. If I go on a trip to visit my sister in the U.S. and she takes me to Barnes & Noble, my device will hook into their network and recognize that I am a visitor who normally frequents another network. So why not take advantage of my visit to sell me some local authors I can’t get at home? Coupon, of course, if I buy them in-store, on the spot. And now that I have signed up and have an account with you, you have my email address. So if one of these local authors comes out with a new book later, you can email me once I am back in Canada again and lure me to the website to buy it there. Every e-book from everywhere will work on my handy reader, so why wouldn’t I?

Even smarter, my local network can offer to transfer the books when I get home, to the bookshelf I already have with them. Advantage to me, because I can keep all my stuff in one central area. An advantage to them because I can use their POD machine to print gift copies for my friends back home, giving both my local store and the book’s author/publisher back there a cut of future purchases. And I have now added the book to the website’s social network, where others back home can now be exposed to this emerging non-local author. Perhaps there could even be a discount code that only my ‘friends’ on the network can access, should they decide they want the book too…

The bottom line: A community meeting place

I remember a newspaper article about a local library branch that underwent renovations. The head librarian talked about how the library is not a “repository for books” so much as a community meeting place. Bookstores can definitely fill this function too. What they should be doing is focusing on the higher-margin items people will still want to buy in paper (art books, children’s books, gift books, stationery products, products branded to books, and yes, the in-store coffee shops) and using their e-book infrastructure to get people a) into the store to buy those things and b) hooked into the network, where they can buy e-books to their heart’s content for books which don’t need to be so pretty.

So let’s take our coffee shop customers with the free cookie coupons as an example. Today they might go in to buy a book and walk out with just that book. In the future? They go in with the cookie coupon (which you’ve mailed them at home via the reader in order to get them into the store) and settle down in your cafe with the weekly store newsletter (which gets delivered to them over wi-fi as soon as they set foot in the store) and the cookbook sampler which they got when they redeemed the cookie coupon. They purchase a coffee to go with the cookie (purchase #1) and read both the newsletter and the sampler while they enjoy their treats.

In the newsletter, they read about the new Jane Austen mystery. They read a sample chapter in-store (you’ll have this option with every book) and decide they like it. They add it to their cart and, a pop-up box comes up  informing them that if they buy it right now, in-store, they’ll get a free Jane Austen novel. They buy it (purchase #2) and congratulate themselves on getting a free book to boot (never mind that they could get it on the Internet for free themselves; this way is much easier, and minimal work for the publishers).

But wait! Before you go, do you want to buy a gift copy of this book? We’ll give you 5% off if you buy it now. Now that your customer thinks about it, they do, especially with a sweet deal like this. Their mother would enjoy this book. Alas, Mom is stuck in the stone ages and prefers her books on paper. No problem. We can send it to the print-on-demand machine for you and you can pick it up on your way out. So we’re at a purchase #3 now…and that’s before they throw away the cookie wrapper, remember the beautiful cookbook and decide they want that too.

So they pick that up too, grab the gift they’ve printed at the POD, make a quick stop to pay for those, and away they go. They will be pleased with the free cookie, free Jane Austen novel and discount you gave them on the gift for Mom. The publisher gets to sell two Jane Austen-themed books, one in E and one in paper, and a high-margin cookbook. The bookstore gets a cut of those, plus the profits from a highly marked-up coffee. Everyone wins, and all it took was a free cookie, and some bonus content that nobody really had to pay for.

Personally, I am not opposed to paying for books or giving those who make them a fair price for them. Right now though, those in charge are making it much harder than it has to be and locking down their books with DRM, geographical restrictions and other idiotic moves designed to alienate customers because they are scared of the future and don’t know what to do.

But does my vision of the future sound so scary? Customers who buy books, and a myriad of easy ways to market to them and to reach them and to get then buying, both on-line and in-store? Embrace the future, publishers! It will be fun, I promise.