Comment by derefr | Hacker News Reader

Comment by derefr | Hacker News Reader

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> I'm not confident that we'd see a renaissance of indie booksellers should BN close.

Why not?

Here's a pretty standard progression:

1. there used to be a bakery a few blocks away--medium-scale, medium-convenience. Six or seven of them in your district.

2. Then a supermarket came. It was just a bit further away than the nearest bakery, but it included a bakery and a bunch of other things. The bakeries went out of business. One supermarket per district was all you needed.

3. But supermarkets aren't something you pop into for an "experience"--you don't visit one on a date. So, someone trimmed down the bakery idea to the most consumer-focused essentials, giving people only what they wanted and none of what they needed (the supermarket covers what they need, after all), and launched... a cupcake shop. Maybe just one to start. But then, suddenly, they're on every street corner.

I could see the "cupcake shop" equivalent to a bookstore: not a big pile of unsorted old tomes, but rather an exquisite presentation for a small, heavily-curated collection of books. A showroom for books, if you will. The clerk would have read everything on sale, and be able to talk at length about all of them. You'd be matched to a book in the same way an Apple Store employee guides you to a piece of consumer electronics. Etc.

This is how that "standard progression" actually happened in my town:

1. There was no bakery a few blocks away. Maybe there was in 1850, but not in my lifetime.

2. There were two grocery stores, both of which sucked. one sucked way worse than the other, though.

3. The crap grocery store went out of business.

4. Walmart opened up.

5. A coffee shop, bakery, fro-yo place, hockey arena, sports bar, hair salon, tire store, Dollar Tree, AT&T store, and J.P. Edwards mortgage lending place opened up in a cluster around the new Walmart.

You won't ever see the small bookshop version of this story because for the most part, nobody reads books.

The one thing you might see more of is Bookman's style used book shops next to the Walmart. In low reading zones they will sell other used stuff.

Not quite the same comparison. BN's (and Best Buy's, and other retailers') problem is Amazon; Amazon is a problem because those types of physical goods don't have an expiration date and they're the same regardless of which shop you buy them at, so if it's cheaper and more convenient to buy online, brick and mortar stores have zero advantage. They end up as showrooms. Even if you add "serendipitous discovery" into the mix, people will just write the name of the book down and buy it cheaper at Amazon when they get home.

A small, curated, general-purpose bookstore with a knowledgeable clerk will still be just a showroom if people can buy it cheaper on Amazon. Baked goods (and other sorts of things like that) on the other hand vary from store to store, have a built-in expiration date, and lend themselves poorly to shipping by mail.

Maybe a super-niche showroom or specialized bookstore (like antiques or first editions) might be able to turn a hair of a profit, but I suspect not enough to make it more than a labor of love for a retiree owner or some other kind of person not concerned with profit.

I think the important difference in customer experience is fresh edibles require a local real estate presence. I've already switched from the local bookstore, which was pure mass market and had no scifi or technical books, to B+N, to amazon, now if B+N closes why would I ever switch back from amazon prime to brick and mortar?

The other killer is amazon prime. I'm paying $70 or whatever it is, to get free shipping and no sales tax. Anytime I pay spend a penny at B+M even long after I saved my $70 from amazon, I'm still thinking... I fronted amazon $70 and I need to make it back on free shipping, and its cheaper online anyway, and I won't have time to read it until after two-day shipping anyway... so why go brick and mortar?

The other problem is, I'm pretty well read, interested in certain specialties, and 50% of salespeople are below the median anyway, so a local store is useless to me. I have special ordered books at local bookstores in the distant past; I believe they used USPS media mail and it took about three weeks plus two trips to the store. I already have amazon prime and it takes two days not three weeks. So I'll probably never buy a new book at a B+M book store again, at least not for myself. I don't know if they can survive off gift sales.

There are five interesting options going forward for bookstores:

1) Gift store that happens to sell books.

2) I donno what to call it, but the sales pitch would be "Don't pay for amazon shipping when we can get it next day air no extra charge". Of course the base price would be MSRP not amazon discount, to pay for the logistics.

3) "We print your book on demand in less than 15 minutes while you drink a complimentary coffee and its still hot when we put it in your hands"

4) "We only stock the (insert authority name)'s top 100 titles... but we know all about those 100 titles, and we never run out of copies". AKA the midnight harry potter store, more or less. Also hosts wild midnight release parties.

5) Dead street in a dead town with no customers but the rent is cheap and the owner sees it as a lifestyle business or bragging rights. Also a front for money laundering, seeing as its a cash business. Being a front and a laundry for regional weed distribution is how our local candle store kept in operation a couple years back.

How about the radio-station model?

6) "We don't sell books, or make money from customers. Instead, your eyeballs are the product, and we sell chain-wide coverage of recently-released titles (including a guarantee our clerks will read+familiarize themselves with your book) to publishing houses. We want people to come in and read the book for 30 minutes and be itching to buy it on Amazon by the time they leave; that's what the publisher is paying us for."

Sort of neatens up the incentive structure, doesn't it?

(This also means they don't have to have any storage; they only need two or three pristine copies of each book to put on display. And it can even work for books that are otherwise digital-only: the only physical copies are one-offs created solely for display purposes, printed by the author's marketing agency using a service like Lulu and delivered directly to each participating book-gallery. In other words, the "books" become part of the PR kit for a book launch, rather than the goods being sold.)

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