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I
read recently in Business Insider
that Amazon’s strategy for making its brick-and-mortar stores successful
hinged on three factors: exploiting big data to tailor the store’s offerings
to its local demographic; reducing inventory to only a few thousand titles of
proven sales potential; and adding a generous mix of non-book products to
broaden shelf interest and boost revenue.
There
is nothing revolutionary about what Amazon is doing here. Strategies like
Amazon’s are exactly what feisty independent booksellers have been using for
years to survive the onslaught of big boxes, high rents, and even Amazon
itself. Though they may lack the mega-data that Amazon collects from its vast
online sales records, indie bookstores do collect data, are locally owned,
and, thus, locally knowledgeable. Indie bookstores have also reduced and
tightly curated inventory as they shrink their square footage to lower rents.
And, for many years, indies have been selling sidelines, including journals,
used books, cards, book lights, puzzles, and other items.
But
now that Amazon is adopting these exact same strategies in its own retail
spaces, what will save the indie bookstore in the future? Is customers’ loyal
rejection of big, bad, corporate Amazon enough? Sure, some percentage of book
buyers will always favor their local retailers over outsiders, but if Amazon
rolls into America’s top book-buying communities with dozens more shops
featuring computer-designed inventories, low prices, and lots of shiny
objects to fascinate their customers, the ability of indie booksellers to
compete will be seriously eroded.
There
is one resource that remains almost entirely undiscovered by indie
booksellers, and that might be the key to their long-term survival, if not a
revolution in bookselling itself. And that is the hundreds of thousands of
books published each year by small independent presses and self-publishers.
Currently, these books are almost completely shut out of the brick-and-mortar
retail environment. Why? Because the American publishing industry is governed
by antiquated systems that were established long before the digital
revolution.
To
reach bookstores today, books must be printed, shipped to a distributor, and
shipped again to a retailer. If sold within a week or two, great; if not, the
books will sit on a shelf in the bookstore, taking up valuable space, and
producing nothing. If the book sits too long, it gets returned—more fuel,
time, and chargebacks to both the retailer and the publisher. Then the book
might be too shopworn and subsequently be destroyed, or it may sit at the
distributor until the whole process starts again.
We
all know how wasteful this cycle is. We all—and I mean all of us in every
segment of the industry (except the printers and truck drivers,
perhaps)—complain about it.
One
negative feature of this system is that very small publishers and
self-publishers don’t even have a chance to participate in it. Bookstores
generally won’t stock their books because they’re not available from
distributors due to their being one-off titles or because their publishers/authors
are too small, unknown, lack clout, whatever. There are, in fact, many
perfectly good reasons that these books don’t get into bookstores. It’s not
that bookstores are ignorant, uncaring, or don’t want them—after all, many of
these books are as substantive and well-designed as anything from the Big 5.
Booksellers don’t sell these books because it doesn’t make financial sense to
even try to sell them. The only way authors can get into some stores is on
consignment, but this is obviously not a strategy for broad distribution.
Maybe
these publishers should count their blessings that they have avoided the
whole wasteful ship-and-return cycle. But the absence of indie books in local
bookstores is in every sense a bad thing. It deprives the public of choice.
It deprives the publishers of sources of revenue. And, most galling of all,
it keeps all the control in the hands of Amazon. Currently, readers who want
to find self-published titles have to go to Amazon. And now that Amazon is
going local and using the very same strategies as indie booksellers, what is
there left to distinguish local booksellers, aside from the fact that they
are “not Amazon”?
What
if there was a way to make all these hundreds of thousands of books available
in the local bookshop?
I
think there is. I call it IndieBook. I know my concept is not shovel-ready,
but I offer it here as a “thought experiment” for a possible vision of a new
future in which book publishers and booksellers can truly support each other
and break free of antiquated systems of mutual obstruction.
IndieBook,
simply put, is a brick-and-mortar retail environment where real indie
booksellers sell real indie books. Not just books from small publishers
already served by Consortium, IPG, Midpoint, PGW, and IPS, but books from
publishers of every size and scale.
1. The IndieBook physical retail space is community- and
consumer-driven, laser-focused on local interests as informed by the
knowledgeable store owner and by the store’s exploitation of big data.
Customers
in the local area have personalized store accounts that they can log in to at
home, or at the store itself. Customers use their account to indicate
interest areas, check out new offerings, order books (or e-books or other
content), RSVP to events, receive promotion codes, and so on. Many indie
bookstores may already be doing this, but these IndieBook personalization
systems need to be extremely robust, up to date, and networked in to the
store’s own database.
2. IndieBook is 100-percent wired, filled with high-touch
kiosks.
Some
kiosks are for customers to log in to and service their accounts and
preferences; others are dynamically curated by booksellers with up-to-minute
listings, tie-ins to whatever is happening in the news, whatever band is
playing in town, or backgrounders on important environmental or political
issues that everyone is talking about. Large, brilliant color screens serve
up covers, snippets, and videos with a “buy” button at the end.
3. IndieBook depends on print on demand (POD), the only
sustainable technology that makes sense for small-scale indie publishers and
self-publishers.
POD
reduces risk at the same it expands inventory a thousand-fold. Readers today
already can order POD books printed at Lightning Source or CreateSpace, and
they can do that at home on Amazon. But I’m talking about stores using
devices like the Espresso Book Machine (EBM), which can turn out a finished
book on-site for instant gratification (five to eight minutes). A reader can
browse their account at home, find the book they want (an obscure title but
one that has just been recommended by their favorite blogger), hit the buy
button, and, by the time they get to the store, it’s there, ready for pickup.
Or pick your own dreamy scenario of how you can unite readers with the indie
books they want in a way that none of your competitors can—and deliver them
the same day.
An
Espresso Book Machine (EBM) at the Brooklyn Public Library.
I’m
aware that the current version of the EBM needs work, but if publishing
thinks of this as its moonshot, then reliability, speed, flexibility, and
cost can all be improved over time. (And there are delicious possibilities.
For example, an entrepreneur could set up an EBM hub with deliveries three
times a day in a metro area, providing almost just-in-time service but at a cost
shared with several retailers at once.)
4. IndieBook is multimedia.
It
provides access not just to books, but to e-books, magazines, granular
assemblies of cookbooks and guidebooks, movies, music, personal screeds,
whatever content the consumer wants—all available for immediate download or
print. Reading is not dying, but reading habits are changing. Booksellers
must be content providers first, and find those alternative media and
sidelines that serve the reading habit, regardless of medium or format.
5. IndieBook is participatory.
The
store must be a gathering place for happenings, tastings, workshops, panels,
and community actions that provide helpful information and content in a
thoughtful, long-form way. Is there a hot-button issue in town? Load an LED
kiosk with relevant front- and backlist titles from publishers large and
small. Let local writers print up custom copies of their memoirs, cookbooks,
and first drafts. Use the EBM to create personalized copies of books at
author signings. Indie bookstores are already masters at this sort of thing.
But now they can do it with store inventory, on demand and up to the minute,
in a scenario that cannot be replicated online.
6. IndieBook is no returns!
Smaller
retail spaces mean fewer books displayed. Everything else is available
on-demand. Retailers should have confidence in their choices and know their
customers: after all, they are locally knowledgeable. So, by all means, bring
in the offset-printed bestsellers, art books, and big books with big names
with assured sell-through. Otherwise, use POD. But the point is to make
everything available, hundreds of thousands of books—not just what publishers
are willing to sell returnable with free freight through a creaky and
environmentally unsustainable distribution system.
Make
no mistake: authors, readers, and publishers are finding that smaller is
better. Fewer projects qualify for offset runs. That means more books
produced POD by smaller companies serving focused audiences and with no
mainstream distribution. Let’s stop punishing them! If we, as a culture,
believe that diversity of voices is of crucial importance to maintaining a
fair and civil society, then we have to do a much better job of guaranteeing
those voices access into our community spaces.
Amazon
is already planning its next move—are we? What happens when Amazon brings its
CreateSpace technology to the storefront? You know they’re already thinking
about it.
Peter
Goodman
is the publisher of Stone Bridge Press in Berkeley, California, and a member
of the IBPA Independent Editorial Advisory Committee.
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