The Art of the Hand-Sell, Part I

By Peter Brown Hoffmeister

What does the new publishing model look like? Who sells what, and to whom? And if Borders is gone, is Barnes & Noble the biggest player? Or is Amazon? Will there be another big chain in the future, and will that chain’s numbers be built upon the sales of its touch-screen readers, its magazines, or its mall-like foodcourt?

These past five years, I’ve felt like an old lion with a zoo being built around me. And I’m only 35 years old.

And what role will independent bookstores play in all of this? Will indies disappear like 8-tracks and cassette tapes, nostalgic vestiges of the past, or will they stay small and viable like vinyl? What will happen as books are self-published and marketed through social media and micro-blogging, as a Facebook “like” takes precedent over all else?

It’s hard to tell.

But we still know one thing. As readers continue to read, they will find authors and titles they love. And when they love something, they’ll put that something into the hands of a friend or family member. They’ll say, “Ooh, this is SO good. You have to read it.”

As long as bookstores exist, people will keep buying books because the person next to them puts it in their hands. Literally. As Sherman Alexie writes in “Superman and Me”: “Books,” I tell them. “Books.”

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That Book Place

By Scott McLemee

“Given a good pitch and the right amount of capital,” George Orwell wrote in an early essay,  “any educated person ought to be able to make a small secure living out of a bookshop.… [Y]ou start at a great advantage if you know anything about the insides of books.” It is “a humane trade which is not capable of being vulgarized beyond a certain point.”

The work had its downsides, and Orwell’s candor made his assessment that much more credible. You should be prepared to accept extremely long hours, for example, and to deal with customers who are garrulous or insane or both. Worst of all, to work in a bookstore meant risking a distinct kind of burnout: “Seen in the mass, five or ten thousand at a time, books [become] boring and even slightly sickening.” But the entrepreneur who carves out a suitable niche will at least be immune to monopolistic forces: “The combines can never squeeze the small independent bookseller out of existence as they have squeezed the grocer and the milkman.”

Good advice — for 1936, anyway. Today, any educated person hoping to earn a small secure living (or a tiny, insecure one, for that matter)  would do better to try almost anything else. Or so I took as a given until a couple of weeks ago, when Tony Sanfilippo, the marketing and sales director for Penn State University Press, sketched out his conceptual blueprint for an offline bookstore of the not-too-distant future. (“Offline bookstore” seems like the very 2010s sort of expression.) I don’t know if his plan will turn the tide, but it certainly deserves more consideration than it’s received so far.

Writing at The Digital Digest, one of the Association of American University Presses’s blogs, Sanfilippo proposed a new model for bookselling that recognizes how much many of us miss the opportunity to browse and loiter somewhere in three dimensional space. Rather than fighting the trends that have undermined bookstores, he incorporates them into his design.  And the product — oddly enough – contains lost elements of 18th- and 19th-century book culture.

 

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Shakespeare & Company: Turning the Page

Sylvia Beach Whitman in the shop

By Kate McBride

The view from the front window of the ramshackle bookstore looks out past a few trees to the river Seine and beyond to Notre Dame, towering high on the Ile de la Cité. No. 37 rue de la Bûcherie is home to Shakespeare & Company, a Parisian writers’ and readers’ institution whose longtime owner, American-born George Whitman, lived in a third-floor apartment above the shop until his death last December. Before George, the neighborhood, one of the oldest in Paris, was occupied by a monastery.

According to George, the name and the spirit of Shakespeare & Company were given to him in 1958 by Sylvia Beach, the owner of the original Paris bookstore of that name. Opened in 1919, Beach’s store moved to 12 rue de l’Odéon in 1921, where it became the center of Anglo-American literary life in Paris, a favorite haunt of Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Gertrude Stein, James Joyce and many others. Forced to close the store during World War II, Beach never reopened it.

Several years later Beach announced she would pass on the name (and spirit) during a reading by Lawrence Durrell at the bookstore George Whitman had opened in 1951, at the time called Le Mistral.

Beach and Whitman shared a belief in operating their businesses as lending libraries as well as retail bookshops, providing a place for authors and poets to congregate and present their work, and even a place for them to sleep and eat. Beach died in 1962. According to Whitman, in her will she left a number of books from her private collection to him, and the legal rights to the name Shakespeare & Company. When his only daughter was born in 1981, Whitman named her Sylvia Beach Whitman—when you meet Sylvia Beach II today, it feels as though nothing has changed within the literary landscape of Paris.

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The Man Who Took on Amazon and Saved a Bookstore

  By Phil Johnson

Certain business ideas seem doomed to fail. You can walk into a restaurant or retail chain and know instantly that its days are numbered.

That’s the gut sense I had when I learned that someone new had bought the Harvard Book Store– a comforting oasis for bibliophiles and casual browsers – just a few blocks from my office in Cambridge. In a town where independent bookstores have been folding faster than Starbucks can open coffee shops in China, this naïve optimist embarked on his new venture in the dark days of the recession, under the shadow of Amazon, and as e-books began their zenith rise.

Jeff Mayersohn, the new owner, elicited my sympathy, but I also wanted to get to know him. I respected his mission, even if I didn’t quite believe in its future. So, Jeff shocked me a couple of weeks ago, when he told me with a certain amount of pride and pleasure that he has been seeing double digit sales growth month by month over the last year.

I wanted to know how he managed to survive, let alone prosper, in the age of e-readers and the mighty Amazon. Over coffee, Jeff shared his original insight that led to his strategy for buying the store.

A former technology executive with a passion for reading and books, Jeff saw – like everyone else – that the digitization of content was destroying the neighborhood bookstore.

Imagine for a moment what it would feel like if people walked into your company and used the lobby to call your competitors and buy their products. That’s standard consumer behavior in a bookstore. People browse, find a book they like, pull out their smart phone, and order online.

Making an intuitive leap, Jeff wondered if the opposite could be true? Maybe access to the vast universe of digital content could also save the bookstore.

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The Community Behind the Independent Bookstore

Therese here. It’s the second Thursday of the month, which means it’s #IndieThursday–a day dedicated to independent bookstores here and at Beyond the Margins, an esteemed blog we hope you’ll add to your daily visits. I’m honored to introduce a post written by Bob Proehl, Director of Operations at an independent bookstore in Ithaca, NY, called Buffalo Street Books. Buffalo Street Books was in grim circumstances not long ago; it was in a financial crisis and seemed destined to close. But an unboxed idea pulled the bookstore back to its feet, and now it isn’t only surviving–it’s thriving. I know you’ll be equally inspired by Bob’s story, and enjoy not only his post but the Q&A we’ve included with him at the end for those who may consider following in the Buffalo’s footsteps.

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Barnes and Noble, with its head in a book, does nothing about its ties to illegal rainforest destruction

After the recent scandal tying several US companies to evidence of illegal logging in Indonesia many companies are distancing themselves from those bad habits.

Danone, the makers of Dannon yogurt, are not only part of a healthy breakfast- they are also creating a zero deforestation policy for their company. With plans to phase out supplies of paper and packaging products from Asia Pulp and Paper (APP), Danone is taking the right steps to make a stand against illegal logging and destructive in Indonesia.

And Xerox recently confirmed it will be reinforcing a policy banning any purchases from APP.

However, one company still seems to have their nose in a book.  Those of us who love a good read would all agree that our books shouldn’t come at the expense of ancient and endangered rainforests, home to endangered species. But Barnes & Noble is sourcing a wide variety of their own published books from Asia Pulp & Paper mills as shown by US customs data. We even sent a B&N book, “Nursery Rhyme Treasury” to a specialist laboratory who came back with us and confirmed the book was made from rainforest fiber.

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When Books Mattered

David W. Dunlap/The New York Times

By DAVID W. DUNLAP

One hundred years ago, the architect Ernest Flagg designed what might be thought of as the Apple store of its day: a sumptuous Beaux-Arts showcase for the retail business of Charles Scribner’s Sons, book publishers.

The Scribner’s bookstore at 597 Fifth Avenue, between 48th and 49th Streets, presented a generous glass front, enough to intrigue passersby but not enough to reveal all the treasures within. One had to go inside. A sense of unfolding discovery was heightened by stairways leading to a variety of levels. The volume was far more ample and the finishes far more refined than they had to be. This space was as much about establishing a brand as it was about moving inventory. Sound familiar?

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Four in ten shops to shut, Deloitte predicts

|By Lisa Campbell

Four in ten shops will shut and property portfolios will reduce by 30-40% in the next five years as customers increasingly turn to online shopping over bricks and mortar, according to a report released this morning (21st March).

To remain competitive, chain stores will have to shrink the number of shops they have on the high street as more warehouse-style retail outlets crop up with free wi-fi for students to shop online, a report by Deloitte has stated.

Silvia Rindone, a director in the retail consulting practice at Deloitte and author of the Store of the Future report, said: “The majority of UK retailers have simply got too many stores.”

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As chain bookselling contracts, independents see an opening

Small is big
By Rosemary Zurlo-Cuva

Long before Borders closed its doors last summer, the accepted wisdom was that bookstores — and even the printed book — were well on their way to extinction. Bricks-and-mortar booksellers couldn’t compete amid online discounting, the rise of e-books and the economic downturn, the thinking went. There was also a widely touted belief that an increasingly distracted populace no longer takes the time to read books.

And yet in spite of the general forecast, stories keep popping up that offer a different picture. In August, the Association of American Publishers reported that publishers’ net sales were up 5.6% over the period 2008-10. According to the American Booksellers Association, over 65 independent bookstores have opened in the last two years, five of them in Wisconsin. One of those Wisconsin stores, the Boswell Book Company in Milwaukee, has been profitable in its first two years, and its owner, Daniel Goldin, is credited with supplying valuable advice to author Ann Patchett as she prepared to open her own independent bookstore in Nashville last November.

Closer to home, A Room of One’s Own, the downtown independent founded in 1975, announced that it would be merging with Avol’s and effectively doubling its square footage by moving this summer into the Gorham Street storefront once held by Canterbury Booksellers. More recently, manager and co-owner Sandi Torkildson reported that sales in the last year had exceeded expectations, thanks in part to a request that went out to the store’s patrons to pledge to buy five more books at the store during this calendar year.

While the picture for booksellers is still not exactly rosy, there is growing evidence that smart, adaptable independent booksellers like Goldin and Torkildson may continue to find enough customers to stay afloat.

Madisonians Conor and Molly Moran believe that a boom of independent openings is on the horizon. They’ve been exploring the viability of opening a bookstore here and have developed confidence that it could work. (They are careful not to say yet just when they might open their store, or where.)

Acknowledging that chain bookselling operations have not been able to compete very well in the current market, Conor points to Boswell Book Company’s success in Milwaukee, where the multi-store Schwartz’s had failed. In addition, he says, “Madison is a good place for indies because of its large community of avid readers and a strong sentiment toward buying local.”

Before returning to Madison in 2010, the Morans lived for three years in Washington, D.C., where Conor was a manager and assistant events coordinator at longtime independent Politics & Prose.

“They were thriving” Conor says, and sales actually increased over the period of his tenure there. With events almost every night, he and Molly saw in practice that an aggressive and well-organized events strategy can enhance not only sales, but patron loyalty.

“Local bookstores provide community space,” Conor asserts, “a public forum in which to meet and share ideas.” He adds that good booksellers must make themselves experts at editing choices with the community in mind, highlighting those titles that will be of interest to their specific clientele, and offering events that cross a wide range of topics.

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A bookshop to float your boat

On board London’s only bookshop barge, Anoosh Chakelian discovers a vibrant alternative world of poetry, music and novel browsing.

 

“It’s because it’s the canal. Put a few moorhens around and people start remembering that they’re human beings,” says Paddy Screech, the co-owner of Word on the Water, the London Book Barge.

The capital’s only floating second-hand bookshop – which has been open for nine months, travelling between Camden Lock, Angel, Hackney and Paddington – stops for two weeks at each mooring to sell books donated by the public and by charity bookshops.

It is owned by Paddy, “The Doctor”, and his co-partners, John Privett, “The Professor”, and a mysterious Frenchman called “The Captain”.

The French Captain owns the boat, Paddy the Doctor keeps the business running at front of shop, including the necessary wood-chopping for the stove, and John the Professor, who runs a stall in Archway Market called Word on the Street, knows the book trade.

Rolling a cigarette with what he calls his “boater’s hands”, Paddy explains why he began the business: “What we wanted was to have art and music and culture emitting from this boat all the time. In the summer when we’ve got acoustic musicians on the roof, it’s just lovely, and it even works in the rain!”

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