Hi Andy .. I wasn't sure until I got to the end of your post whether you were mocking me with sarcasm or not I'm still not sure …. but I'll assume the best

Firstly the topic is marketing .. and you wrote “So the problem is that readers need help choosing books? “. I am not saying this is the whole problem or any way close to the whole problem. I am just saying that I believe it is, and will continue to become, a major problem as bookshops like yours fade out over the next 10 years due to what I believe is the inevitable transition to eBooks. It's not that I believe paper books will disappear any time soon. But the shift will be enough to severely alter the business model of paper printing and distribution. This will alter the pricing and availability and the margins for booksellers and it will be a feedback loop that will wipe out tons of bookshops.

One loss arising from this disappearance of many many bookshops will be that readers of eBooks, and paper books even, will be left with a real problem of how to chose what books to buy from the millions on offer. In my post I opined on how that void might be filled online by specialist recommendation sites and social reading networks.

My own opinion is that your video suggestion is not a great one. In addition the complexity and limitations of the video model would not scale and cover overheads.

Anyway, that bookshops provide this filter to readers is not because of any expertise they offer. It is because they simply reduce the vast flow of books to a manageable selection which the reader can cope with. Readers don't really know or care that it is more than often a filter based on marketing priorities by the distributors or margin choices by the bookshop.

By changing over to your suggested video model however, the basis on which you chose books would start to be questioned and exposed and your ability to filter books of all categories and make quality choices to satisfy the almost infinite range of customer tastes, would fail. That is my personal opinion.

Were you to have personal insight into specific categories – for example if you were a long time Science Fiction reader and could persuade your customers that your opinion was valuable – then you could set up a web site for your bookshop offering recommendations, and they could buy by clicking through your site to the big eRetailers, giving you commission. If your partner(s) had special knowledge of, say, Romance Novels, you could join together and offer recommendations on both of those categories. I see no reason, or raison d'etre, for maintaining a bricks and mortar shop with all of the overheads that that brings. But I do see how you could still sell paper books through the same recommendation web site based on, initially, the normal distribution supply of paper books and later, as I comment on below, paper books from a Print-On-demand machine you could keep in a cheap location.

I can easily imagine a future, in say ten years time, when there may be only one of two bookshops in my own city. I can imagine wanting to buy a book, something like a spy-adventure book. Rather than going to Amazon (and assuming that I don't have a specific author and book in mind) I would go to my favourite “Adventure Genre” recommendation site. It might be run by people I trust or it may have a social reading element to it. There I would click through to someone like Amazon and buy. I can imagine the same for buying a Science Fiction, or a Literary Novel, or an erotic novel ….

Where I do see a future for a bricks and mortar model is with the advent of Print-On-Demand. I can imagine a bookshop – with both a range of shelves stocks with sample books (similar-ish to bookshops as they are now) as well as a paper or screen-based catalogue. I can imagine readers browsing whichever model they are comfortable with and then going to the Print-On-Demand printer and printing their own copy. I believe this model is the only one that can expect to keep the price of paper books within an affordable range in the medium long term.. I don't see an eBook/Bricks'nMortar combo working myself.

Hi Andy – I wish you all the best. Yes we do disagree but I hardly think that is earth shattering news. For myself I have often said that it will take 10 to 20 years for the eBook to reach 80% of book sales so I am not surprised by your nephew or your own views. My own son in 18 and is a literary writing fan. He hates eDevices for reading with a vengeance. Nevertheless the momentum of change is inevitable and the economics also. I fully accept your view that this change will not occur and paper books and bookshops will continue to flourish, but I would like even more to know how you feel this will happen and how they will make money.

Thanks for the well laid out reply Andy.
I regret to say that I don't believe much of what you claim makes any sense. You must be making money to live on, hence you must be making a return on investment I(even if that investment is the paying of the rent). It's not rocket science and your assertions about investors requirements being different from a proprietor of a small bookshop are simply not true. Investors and proprietors are no different. Each need to make money to justify their involvement. You must be paying for your food, your clothes, your house, your life – hence you must be making some profit. If you are not profitable then you are claiming that you have an income from another source which allows you to run your book business at a loss. I find this a poor basis for predicting that bookshops operating at a loss are here to stay.

Your view that life is cyclical is an interesting one and one that I can relate to. You are absolutely right that this does happen in many facets of life – long hair, short hair, long skirts, short skirts. But throwing it out their as a bald theory without some kind of justification is not much use. Why do you think people in 20,30, 40, 50 or even 100 years might move en masse back to paper books ? what about the distribution costs ? the trees ? the price ?
We moved from horses to cars. Is it likely that we will ever return to horses ? We went from the abacus to the computer .. is it likely we will return ? Is there any other significant facet of life that did in fact cyclically return to it's original state ?

also though, Howard, don't you agree that radio, movies, television, newspapers & magazine, books and internet exist simultaneously right now? is it your opinion that everything but internet is going away??

Thanks Mike. I have been reading Jeff Gomez's book “Print Is Dead: Books In Our Digital Age”–and because you and Jeff Gomez have different opinions, but your ideas do overlap in some places, I am afraid that I have sometimes confused your ideas with his!

In any case, I apologize for taking this thread so far away from the topic of your original post. I don't disagree at all with the ideas you have fronted in the post — they are exactly the sort of thing I need to do with the Eric Carle Museum online store website, since we represent a trusted source of advice about choosing children's books for our customers, who number currently in the thousands (we do have their email addresses and are doing bi-weekly newsletters that are garnering solid transactional responses). I am really curious about my suggestion though — I have got to get myself a videophone finally, and attempt this idea of selling at my own bookshelves while on the videophone, then archiving my filmed bookselling behavior. I am a much better bookseller when confronted with a living breathing individual than I am at writing blogposts. I wonder if someone else around the country is currently doing this sort of live videophone bookselling. Thanks for setting up a situation where I have stumbled across a new idea of my own.

Andy

Hi Mike,

Sorry if I misrepresented your ideas.

I believe that the gist of my argument is simply that I take issue with the extrapolation into the indefinite future of current trends. Rather, I think we're in a cyclical business, and that any trend that is currently observable is subject to reversal.

No question that sales have been moving online over the past decade. Amazon's book sales have doubled in the past five years while the storefront share of book sales has been declining. Very dramatic trend.

One hundred years ago Sears mail order catalog and Montomery Ward mail order catalog were capturing sales from chain stores that had spread along the railway lines. I think Amazon is an expression of the same mail-order impulse that has been a major player in American life since those days. We have a sprawling country, yes. Mail order seems to satisfy us, in some generations.

But we also have a highly urbanized society, and backlashes against mail order are expressed in the return of local stores. That's why the first half of the 20th century saw the rise of local indie stores, supported by local politicians such as conservative senators Robinson and Patman from the South, who helped push anti-trust laws through in the 1930s protecting locally owned stores.

The commercial and political climate changed in the second half of the 20th century, sure. Now we live in a mail order era that is taking over from a second chain-store era.

I don't understand how anyone can write off the possibility of a cultural transformation of any sort. For me, a renaissance of indie bookselling is simply a matter of timing and fashion and cultural preference. It will happen and then, guess what….it will pass and we'll be off into some OTHER era. I'm simply trying to make the point that you may be right about the next five years of the trend, or the next ten years — but you have no business drawing straight lines into the indefinite future. None of us do. What is old will become new. The old-fashioned will become the hip/retro. Indie bookselling may have to wait for eBooks and online sales to become overwhelmingly dominant before its renaissance, but that doesn't mean that the renaissance won't come, and that it won't be welcomed by the onetime eBook and online book-buying acolytes.

Andy