The Path of the Bookseller

“Borders book store chain goes it alone online” in CIO UK Magazine is a good tech-based article from a British magazine on Borders’ recent roll-out of its own online bookstore. The chain had previously had a site that was just a front end to Amazon, but is now doing everything itself (with the help of partners and vendors that the article discusses).

The world of online bookselling is, to say the least, complex and laden with difficulties. It would seem to be expanding, but competitor Barnes & Noble announced last week that their online sales in the nine-week period through January 3rd were actually down 11 percent over the period a year earlier.

Amazon.com is, of course, the 800-pound gorilla in the field, but other stuff is happening, too, including IndieBound (formerly BookSense), which ties together independent retailers. Several of the “all things to all people” online shops such as those run by Wal-Mart and Tower (yes, they still exist) offer books. And the various used book and auction-based sites are making a dent in the market.

What does all this mean for us as booksellers? It certainly presents challenges. As customers can, as the old canard says, shop in their pajamas at home, it would seem to decrease their interest in coming in to the stores (though many use the site to find things in the physical stores and reserve them, then pick them up in person at the store).

We do get a lot of people in our store coming in and using the booksellers’ knowledge to spot what they want,but then going home and ordering it online, often from other vendors. At our store (the local, physical store — I’m not privy to much of what’s being considered on a corporate level), we’ve been giving a lot of thought to how we might convert the in-store research into actual sales. We have kiosks from which people can order online from within the store, but we’re trying to figure out how to make them more obvious and inviting to the customers. Work is being done at a corporate level to improve usability, but there’s still room for improvement in the interfaces and in getting several sources of information that don’t yet appear to be on speaking terms to play well with each other.

Ordering online will, for the forseeable future, be necessarily less immediate than walking into a store and walking out with the book in your hand. Our challenge, as with all stores, is to have precisely the items that customers want at the moment that they want them, without anything at all sitting in inventory, unwanted until it is sent back. That is, with current setups, an unachievable ideal.

But almost inevitably, we’re going to have print-on-demand systems in stores: people will come in for a book, pop a credit card in to a machine and make a selection, and have a newly-printed copy of the book pop out within moments. Systems such as the Espresso Book Machine already are in use at a very few locations. I’m excited to see them spread, and am hoping that they will drop in price to the point that they can go into lots of stores.

That is, of course, unless they get so much radically cheaper and easy to use that they just show up in homes. It would seem impossible now, but I remember when the $100 printer/ scanner/ copier/ fax system that is sitting on my desk would have been a massive humming and jamming monstrosity that needed a room to itself at a library or copy shop.

Or, of course, everything could crater economically. But we can remain relatively sure that people will continue to want good, old-fashioned analog books that they can read if we get plunged into a new dark age. (That does seem to connect what Groucho Marx and Harlan Ellison said about man’s best friend. Strange bedfellows for a three dog night…)