The Path of the Bookseller

I love seeing customers meeting, talking, and comparing what they’re browsing. This is one of the great things about small, community-centered shops. It’s trickier in the Big Box stores, especially those with customers drawn from a wide geographical area or, as in the case of the more tourist-heavy store in which I worked before, around the world.

The online shops have the big advantage, as Dave Winer reminded us today, of persistent user comments. I had once thought of instituting something like this in our store: I would encourage people to write comments on forms like those that we are encouraged to use in the store for Staff Recommendations. But this had the same problems that result in very few staff members writing recommendations: it takes time, has delayed gratification, and most people just plain don’t like to write and aren’t all that good at it.

But I had a bit of an idea-bomb reading Dave’s post. We could do this using widely available technologies:

A customer is talking enthusiastically about a book or other item that we carry. We encourage the customer to come over to a PC that has a code scanner and a webcam. The customer scans the bar code on the item (as for a price check or the more advanced listening stations), and clicks a big button on the screen to start the camera. The customer speaks freely about the item (maybe free-associating onto similar stuff). When finished, the customer clicks the big button to end the recording, which then gets associated with the item in a media database. Other customers who look up the item would then be able to play back the comments. An idle station could also play a random (or less randomly determined) stream of existing comments.

This would, of course, have implementation problems: content (mostly language) that wasn’t appropriate for in-store playback, the need for workers to have time to manage it, and possibly privacy and rights issues if the messages were to be propagated across the company network. (I don’t see the possibility of negative reviews as much of a problem: that people were avidly engaged with the store and its product would be more of a plus than the impact of whether they praised or panned a particular product.)

The odds of our implementing this? Slim. But it’s fun to imagine and drop into the mindstream.