The Path of the Bookseller

As in so many stores, our CD selection now takes up less space than before. The entire industry has been reducing in-store holdings. But with the moving of the furniture to open up space for, among other things, an increased teen book and manga area, customers have been asking a lot more questions.

One thing to which customers have responded surprisingly well is being told frankly how and why the CD sector has tanked. No, we don’t have the selection that we once did, but *nobody* who deals strictly in new CDs has that selection anymore. (I would love to know of exceptions.)

Everyone thinks that the issue is illegal downloads, but it’s more that the inefficiencies of the system have caught up with the market. Looking at it from any point of view but that of the customer, when you compare shipping a couple of copies of each CD to a thousand stores to shipping a lot of them to a few dozen warehouses (if that many) and fulfilling orders from there, it’s no contest. (And it especially pains me to say that, as a member of the flipping-through-acres-of-vinyl generation.)

And legal downloads are growing, especially for classical music (my focus area) where more and more companies are making avaiable extremely high-quality MP3s and lossless FLAC files.

A surprising number of customers do come back, utilizing us in the role that we must learn if we are to survive: we’re the folks who can find the stuff that they want based on their vague criteria, and can navigate the ordering systems for them.

But, inevitably, the historical moment (corresponding roughly to the 20th Century) in which music was made available to people by having them come to particular buildings to buy physical objects that contained recordings is ending. The only question that remains is how we cope with the change.