An American Editor

July 19, 2010

Repurposing Brick-and-Mortar Bookstores in the eBook Age

The consensus among the ebook seers is that in not too many years brick-and-mortar (B&M) bookstores will cease to exist — all book sales will be online or wireless.

If B&M bookstores continue to look and act as they currently do, I think the seers may eventually be proved right. To save B&M bookstores, and possibly even traditional publishers, the bookstores need to be repurposed in the eBook Age. They not only need to be repurposed, but they need to change how they generate revenue.

I think it is safe to say that we are several decades away from an ebook-only world, assuming we ever reach that point. I believe we will never see a truly ebook-only world; pbooks will always be around, even if just as antiquarian throwbacks for social trendsetters. As I’ve noted before (see The Death of “Personality” in the eBook Age), I think pbooks will retain significant value to a significant segment of the book-buying and -reading public, especially among scholars (see, e.g., eBooks and the Never-Ending Rewrite and Can eBooks Save University Presses?).

There is also another consideration. When the next Stephen King novel is about to be published, everyone knows about it — the B&M store is simply a conduit for getting the book to the reader. But the same isn’t true when the next Shayne Parkinson novel becomes available (see On Books: The Promises to Keep Quartet and On Books: Promises to Keep are Promises Kept for a review of her excellent series) nor is there an easy way to keep up with new releases of university press books, and these books — university press and independent authors — deserve the same exposure as the James Patterson books and need that exposure more than James Patterson books.

Repurposing of the B&M bookstore may be the way to aid independent authors, university presses, and small traditional publishers in the eBook Age.

Today’s B&M bookstores are blockbuster oriented and oriented toward the major traditional publishers. Except for local independent authors, indie authors and presses are not heavily stocked, and for good economic reason: they simply do not sell well enough to support the expenses of the B&M store. Perhaps instead of being corporate America bookstores, a cooperative of indie authors, indie presses, university presses, and smaller traditional publishers who currently struggle for bookstore shelving should be created to run B&M bookstores.

But if the Barnes & Nobles and the Borders chains are struggling, how can such a cooperative succeed? One way would be to act as fronts for print-on-demand (POD) pbooks and as a gateway to ebooks.

Yet this doesn’t address the new thinking that is required for indie bookstores to remain alive in the Internet age. Perhaps the answer lies in the creativity being shown by BookPeople, an independent bookstore in Austin, TX (see “At Camp, Make-Believe Worlds Spring Off Page”) and imitated by indie bookstores in Decatur, GA, and Brooklyn, NY. Although the idea focuses on a camping experience that involves using imagination and role-playing based on popular children’s books, there is no reason the options can’t be expanded. BookPeople’s Camp Half-Blood (based on the Percy Jackson and the Olympians series) had 450 available slots — and all slots were sold out within 90 minutes. Brownstone Books’ (Brooklyn, NY) Camp Half-Blood charges $375 per week for its Camp Half-Blood.

Using imagination is only a start. Perhaps indie bookstores could also become afterschool care centers for children or run tutorial programs. Let books become a partner in the enterprise rather than the dominant purpose of the enterprise. Doing so would give indie bookstores a new life and make them relevant again in the eBook Age.

If the indie bookstores banded together under a single associative umbrella, they could easily tap the creative talent of hundreds of bookstore owners and employees across the country and develop these competitive models that would repurpose the B&M bookstore and extend their lives significantly. But closer cooperation, which is the key, I think, to survival is tough to come by: people own their own businesses because they want to be wholly independent and it is difficult to think about giving up some control. I do not think another trade association is the answer; I think what is needed is a mix between the rigid top-down governance enforced by say a B&N corporate-structure chain and a franchisee relationship. Indie bookstores need to maintain individual character yet they also need to band more closely together if they intend to survive the eBook Age.

The true test will be whether indie bookstores, indie authors, and indie/university presses are willing to band together and whether they will cede some control in exchange for a future. If they are so willing, it will be beneficial to all book lovers as well as to the indies themselves. Although the creative ideas of indie bookstores like BookPeople can provide a small shot in the arm, I think there is a need to broaden the creativity pool. One idea — no matter how good it is — will not save the indies.

4 Comments

  1. When I saw “repurposing” in your headline, I thought the post would be about reusing one’s work in different ways, as opposed to bookstores figuring out how to repurpose themselves for survival these days – which I agree they will have to do, and some are already doing.

    I’m thinking about how to repurpose some work I’ve done in the past few weeks – an onsite conference newsletter for one of my favorite clients (well, I like ’em all, so maybe I should say “one of my longest-standing clients”!) and a batch of short pieces for an online encyclopedia-type project. We shall see.

    Like

    Comment by Ruth E. Thaler-Carter — July 19, 2010 @ 9:07 am

  2. […] This post was mentioned on Twitter by Simplicissimus, sell ebooks. sell ebooks said: Repurposing Brick-and-Mortar Bookstores in the eBook Age: The consensus among the ebook seers is that in not too m… http://bit.ly/btFVpS […]

    Like

    Pingback by Tweets that mention Repurposing Brick-and-Mortar Bookstores in the eBook Age « An American Editor -- Topsy.com — July 19, 2010 @ 9:07 am

  3. Interesting. These places you speak of may not even be called “bookstores.” Do you perhaps see today’s libraries and bookstores becoming one, under a completely different name? (Or perhaps that of “library”?)

    Like

    Comment by Benjamin Lukoff — July 19, 2010 @ 12:13 pm

  4. […] How can brick & mortar bookstores be repurposed in the digital age? […]

    Like

    Pingback by Stumbling Over Chaos :: What linkity through yonder window breaks? — July 23, 2010 @ 2:04 am


RSS feed for comments on this post.

Create a free website or blog at WordPress.com.

%d bloggers like this:
https://americaneditor.wordpress.com/2010/07/19/repurposing-brick-and-mortar-bookstores-in-the-ebook-age/?like_comment=1015&_wpnonce=35314f8a76
americaneditor.wordpress.com
crawl=CC-MAIN-2020-34
78865
application/http; msgtype=response
sha1:O6WSRTGJ46YTRDWZTTTOBZ7M3MVPUBFN
<urn:uuid:c09b5242-9de7-40e9-ae71-c4a6e220141b>
2020-08-10T19:40:35Z
192.0.78.12
application/xhtml+xml
sha1:KYGOBWNB2EUZGW2UQP3AIGRQDPHF2LHJ
<urn:uuid:1f998c9e-0d3b-4329-be03-41ec66cea63f>
https://americaneditor.wordpress.com/2010/07/19/repurposing-brick-and-mortar-bookstores-in-the-ebook-age/?like_comment=1015&_wpnonce=35314f8a76
response
<urn:uuid:24427913-3af7-468c-a6ed-ceb3bdd1b4e2>
isPartOf: CC-MAIN-2020-34
publisher: Common Crawl
description: Wide crawl of the web for August 2020
operator: Common Crawl Admin (info@commoncrawl.org)
hostname: ip-10-67-67-142.ec2.internal
software: Apache Nutch 1.17 (modified, https://github.com/commoncrawl/nutch/)
robots: checked via crawler-commons 1.2-SNAPSHOT (https://github.com/crawler-commons/crawler-commons)
format: WARC File Format 1.1
conformsTo: http://iipc.github.io/warc-specifications/specifications/warc-format/warc-1.1/