Business Week has an article analyzing the demise of Berkeley’s best-known bookstore, Cody’s. With another of the Bay Area’s notable bookstores, Stacey’s, announcing its closing a few days ago, the landscape of independent bookstores there, as elsewhere, is shrinking. There are still some great places open, such as Moe’s and Pegasus and Pendragon, but the situation is dismaying. Even the Barnes and Noble across from Pegasus is gone, replaced by a Staples. (Not that I live in Berkeley anymore, or that I have much of a sense of what Cleveland was like, bookstorewise, before I got here, but I still have some remote dismay.)
The article brings up some of the usual points, what with the advent of the big box bookstores and the 800 pound gorilla, Amazon. But Cody’s did try some things of the “what the hell were they thinking” variety, such as opening their store at Union Square in San Francisco.
That store might have made sense on paper somehow, but the execution was lacking. One big problem was that the store was close to invisible. It was on a less-traveled street, hard to see, despite a big yellow sign, unless you were looking for it. And even that sign was obscured by the scaffolding of the store at the corner that was renovating during much of that Cody’s lifespan.
If you spotted the store and looked in from the outside, it looked extremely small, with few books visible. There was little to entice customers to come in. When you came in, you could see more clearly the staircase leading down from the ground level to the basement.
And what a basement it was: vast, cavernous, with shelving all around the edges, surrounding another area (sunken even further, if I recall). They had a lot of stuff, much better in the erudite and academic materials than the other stores in the area. But still it felt sparsely populated. I would go there for magazines and bargain books, but rarely got much else.
Few other shoppers seemed to ever get down there either. What workers there were seemed to huddle at the desks, startled when they spotted a customer.
In short, someone should have thought out opening there somewhat better before they opened it. I heard that its workers called it “Andy’s Folly,” after the owner who opened it.
The Amazon factor, though, might have zapped it anyway. The article speaks of people coming in over a decade ago, with printouts from Amazon. As happens so often, when Cody’s would offer to order things for them (and they excelled at finding almost anything in print), people would decline and go home and order it.
We see that happening all the time at our store. People come in with requests (sometimes demands) for obscure books, and seem shocked that we don’t have them, often in great quantities. After all, Amazon appears to have them, so the physical books must be everywhere. (The economics and tricks of marketing and design that makes them appear to have everything and physical stores to have little should be the subject of a whole bunch of other posts.)
Often, we have people come in looking for obscure things that they can only vaguely identify. We are able to figure out what they want quite often, and offer to order it for them. But they tend to take down the information, go home, and order the books from there.
If the big bookstore selling All Things to All People is quickly fading, we have to find a way to deal with it. With books getting sent back to publishers after only a moment in stores ( I’ve been hearing from other booksellers of return schedules so aggressive that they are seeing books listed to be pulled before they even reach the stores in the first place), and bookstores effectively carrying only the hottest books at prices that have to compete with non-book stores that can carry the bestsellers as come-ons and loss leaders, we have to find ways to be a step ahead of what the customers want, and to find a way to convert customer questions into actual orders.
Not that I know how to do this. But this is what physical book and music stores will have to learn to survive.
Autopsy of an Indie Bookseller – BusinessWeek.
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The fact that customers seem to use us more and more as an information resource without ordering books has been a constant source of frustration for me as well. Especially when customers want books that they clearly could not find on their own without my (yes, I’ll go ahead and say it even at the risk of sounding pretentious) expert knowledge.
I’m not sure how to change the perception that ordering online is easier. I’ve been able to do it on an individual customer level, but only with customers who are willing to wait for a moment while I explain that in-store ordering (a) is just as fast, (b) is free, (c ) entails very little risk, as customers are not obligated to pay up front, and (d) is the ethical thing to do after you, the customer, have used me as a resource.
Of course, big bookstores haven’t really placed themselves in direct competition with Amazon. Both Borders and B&N have websites, but neither of them compares to Amazon’s in terms of user-friendliness or even usefulness. And we continue to reduce stock depth in favor of quantity of bestsellers, but fail to price bestsellers competitively. When you can’t get much at a bookstore but those new release titles, and you CAN get cheaper new releases, cheap DVDs, a new mop, a desk chair, and a week’s groceries at Target, it’s no wonder we aren’t seeing any business.
All of which was a roundabout way of saying, I know, and I don’t have any answers either. Perhaps aggressive marketing of backlist titles? Being able to sell e-books from the store to people with Sony Readers would be nice. Little ways of keeping up with the demands of the market.
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