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A bookstore without books – makes sense
July 23, 2009 | 9:28 am
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By Paul Biba
As a matter of fact it makes so much sense that there it almost no chance that the ossified book industry would adopt it. Moriah Jovan has a proposal that makes so much sense I’m truly surprised that nobody has done it yet. Take a look.
A way to be inventory-free, using the just-in-time inventory system that half the rest of the retail industry in the world has been using for going on 15 years now.
You, Random Reader, are a book lover. You want a book you can hold in your hands. You go to Quaint Bookstore and they do not have what you want in their meager stock. NO PROBLEM! You sit down at one of the book stations. You browse the computer catalog (probably Ingram or Baker & Taylor). You pick your book. You punch in your credit card number (tied to the store’s point-of-sale system). The order goes directly to one of the Espresso machines behind you. You wait 10 or 15 minutes (by which time you’ve probably already ordered another 3 books), and out pops your book. You are GOOD TO GO.
Or hey! Maybe you don’t want to wait the 10 to 15 minutes, so you tap into your Quaint Bookstore account from home or work or school and order the book that way. You can pick up your Espresso when you pick up your espresso on the way to or from work or school.
And say you want an e-reading device, but you don’t want to get burned. You go to Quaint Bookstore and you pick up one of their demo devices loaded up with ebooks. You sit go upstairs to get an espresso (heh) and read for a while to see if you like it. If not, go back, pick up another one, and make sure you like what you’re getting. Then you buy it and boom, healthy profit for Quaint Bookstore on an e-reading device (which will probably get the customer back to buy at least 1 print book for every 10 ebooks they read—okay, I made up that number, but still!).
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Comments:
Moriah Jovan presents a wondrous dream. Many have shared the reverie of media (audio, video, books) on-demand. Why not build an elastically capacious, inventory-free, eclectically diverse, frictionless agora for all? Here is an embryonic example of this idea from 1993:
The project was a grand failure. The entertainment conglomerates refused to license content to the system, and the retailers were obdurate. One can trace the idea of media-on-demand further back to the age of audiocassettes:
Here is an example of books-on-demand from 1990 courtesy of rogue professors:
Steward Brand said “information wants to be expensive”, but people prefer to quote his companion aphorism that “information wants to be free”.
The problem with the concept is that it requires the buyer to know what book/books the buyer wants. One of the pleasures of a bookstore is the ability to browse and make that spur-of-the-moment book purchase. I suggest a different idea. The Quaint Bookstore would carry 1 copy of numerous books that a purchaser could browse. The purchaser, finding a book they would like, would take a preprinted ticket to the Espresso machine and order their own copy of the book. Prefer the ebook version, not a problem; it, too, could be purchased in ePub format on the spot.
The original concept of having virtually no inventory and looking through the Baker & Taylor/Ingram catalog fails, in my mind, because it is little different from ordering over the Internet, except that I have to go to the Quaint Bookstore. It is the rare book that I cannot wait a couple of days for it to arrive from B&N.com.
I think where the independent bookstores fail are in their efforts to compete directly with Amazon and B&N (I’m not sure that Borders or Books-a-Million count very much anymore). Instead they need to change their focus and introduce readers to the unknown authors — the POD/self-published/small press lists. Let the James Patterson books be sold at Amazon and B&N because they will sell them at prices the independent can’t match (they should be available, however, via the Espresso-type and ebook options in the Quaint Bookstore).
I will add that the idea of having a variety of ebook devices for sale is a good one. How about renting them out with a couple of rented books on them? Kind of like becoming the Blockbuster/Netflix of books.
Check out this similar imagining from Gabe Barber of Reading Local Potland
http://portland.readinglocal.com/2009/07/09/reading-local-essay-indie-bookstores-of-the-future/#more-3384
Another idea: bookstores as a hotspot for read dating .
Here’s an article by Lisa Scott about the British version of read dating .
How about a compromise? I love going to bookstores and getting to browse, look and touch. However, the big bookstores that used to carry computer and other reference books have largely gone bye-bye where I live, leaving a few small independent bookstores and some lackluster chains (some of which are failing too). I love going to the indies, but they don’t stock computer books, and who can blame them – they go out of date so fast. But with a print-on-demand system, I could look at a sample copy, and if I decide I want to buy it, I’d happily hang around and look at the other books while I’m waiting for my print-on-demand order.
Ha! Didn’t know this would get so much play. That was just me brainstorming one Sunday morning when I had a rogue purple Sharpie and a ruler.
However, if you want the real genius ideas, scroll down into the comments of the post itself (hint, they’re not my ideas). I’m not dismissing the idea of an old-fashioned bookstore (which I clearly stated would be on the second floor). I’m saying that the bookstore would PURCHASE their inventory outright (MMP/HB), thereby curating according to its customers’ tastes.
On Twitter this morning, Kat Meyer said something to the effect that with my (admittedly, very rough) model, the bookseller would become a “book concierge,” which I see as a small but affordable luxury.
Also in the comments just today, there was an interesting variation on the concept of reinventing the bookstore: A Fantasia.
The opportunity for integrating bookshelves with print books, ebooks, e-reading devices, and POD (you are somewhere; you whip out your iPhone and make an order direct to the local Espresso machine, then pick it up), and food/drink and baubles/shiny things, so a bookstore can become more than a place to sit all day and read a book is just too seductive an idea for me to let go of. It has the possibility of making a local bookshop the community’s Place To Go (especially for casual e-book consumers).
I am NOT dissing bookstores. I want them to thrive and grow, and I think the way to do that is to exploit every possible area of bookdom.
How could you forget the coffee bar with delicious rolls and bits of crumpet? And the comfy chairs, tables, and Wifi-access whilst waiting?
Not only that — how about we become less genteel and a bit more crass, and fill the walls of the place with video screens looping lurid ads and trailers for books? With clips of authors reading from their works?
I think this idea is viable, but only in the concierge/bookstall (like those that specialized in particular kinds of books in early printing) sense. It would make a great ground floor of a paper bookstore.
The design makes sense as a place to WAIT, but not to browse. Bookstores are places to browse, cafes are places to wait — indeed, that’s all Starbucks and other coffee places think about in the design of their stores, in terms of making it pleasant to wait for a drink.
I don’t think on-demand bookstores are as practical as Moriah believes they will be. The estimates of wait times for a POD book always assume optimal performance and perfect demand (no more orders than the book machine can make in any given time), when retail is a highly inefficient setting characterized by long waits whenever business improves. See: http://booksahead.com/?p=329. It’s never “GOOD TO GO,” but usually “you’ll need to wait a bit longer.”
The question not addressed here is the cost of the space and technology for selecting the book one would like printed. If all the espresso seats have a screen, each sharing one-fourth of a workstation and there is a need for more than two POD machines, the upfront cost of the design would run somewhere north of $45,000, with ongoing costs for leasing the machines, point-of-sale systems and so forth. I’m not sure that is going to make sense to a retailer.
Nolan Bushnell gave a speech about the future of retailing at DIgital World in 1994 that anticipated this scenario. It assumed people would go to places to browse, then order for home delivery. That model didn’t come to pass, because there was no link between browsing costs assumed locally and the potential revenue from actual sales (one could go online and order from someone else for a better price). The bookstore of screens ONLY doesn’t really enable browsing — which I think will take place from home.
Here’s the post Moriah was talking about, something I wrote called “Wunderkammer Seeds: A Fantasia”:
http://www.fictioncircus.com/news.php?id=407&mode=one
I’ve been thinking about the Espresso Book Machine primarily from a writing and publishing perspective for months now, and I think they are an exciting extension of (and correction to) the purely ebook publishing model:
http://fictioncircus.com/news.php?id=365&mode=one
I like the design, except for one thing: Take out the expresso machines, and it would be perfect.
Printing of books on paper is inefficient enough now, and just environmentally speaking, it is a practice we should be curtailing as much as possible, now that there is a viable (and more environmentally benign) alternative. And the expresso machines, though convenient, do not have efficiency on their side: In the long run, printing books one-at-a-time is less efficient than printing them en masse. (Of course, there’s a lot of waste in en masse printing, but this is industry-supported and capable of being cut back.)
So, keep the browsing kiosks. Add a few shelves for the books du jour for people to peruse. But sell them as e-books, and leave the paper on the trees.