Japanese Bookshop Stocks Only One Book at a Time | Hacker News Reader

Japanese Bookshop Stocks Only One Book at a Time

theguardian.com

173 pointsrfreytag69 comments

When playing a board game, like Terra Mystica, where there are choices I can make, and there are random elements that change from game to game, there's two routes I could go - The first is to play out the plan I've thought about so many times previously, to align the choices I make with that plan as faithfully as the random elements allow. The second, is to completely ditch whatever was in my plan, look at the random elements for this game, and play accordingly. I call the second strategy "Play to the board". The first strategy often means I'll do fine in the game, but will lose out to the player who benefited from the random elements of the game this round. The second strategy provide no such guarantees, but is the only strategy that allows great wins.

In life, people can pick one of three strategies. The first is they can fantasise about what kind of car they want, what kind of job they'd like, what kind of girlfriend they'd have, and then try their best to make these "achievements", often falling short because the world is not fantasy. The second, they observe what kind of random elements the world exhibiting, e.g. "Oh these days accountants make lots of money", "These days Software Engineers have high salaries" and directly translate to mean "I am going to learn programming, even if I don't like it", and then they are playing to other people's fantasy rather than accepting their own strengths or weaknesses. Or thirdly, they can "play to the board" and make the best of what life gives them, at each moment in time.

The bookshop-keeper here, is eking out every single edge he can out of books to operate his shop. Where 30 years ago operating a successful physical bookshop might mean having a large selection available at any time, and frequent events to draw crowds, today, in competition with digital books, operating a successful physical bookshop might mean emphasising the advantages of the physical book, the romanticism attached to physical objects. I get the feeling he is the type who sees what the world is like today, and because he's got experience bookshop-keeper, not a software engineer or tech startup founder, he goes with the flow with what he's got.

Where in a board game, the game board is the entirety of the world, and can be considered by itself, in the real world, our own selves are part of the board - and I can't always do it, but I aspire to do what I can to play with what I've got, like the man depicted in this article.

He's only sold 2100 books in 7 months - not much of a success, at least in terms of profitability.

I suppose that would depend on how much he sold each book for. ;-)

We'll see in the next 7. The Guardian article is 1 day old so far. ;)

I don't think an English language article on the Guardian will draw many readers to a Japanese bookstore, unfortunately.

Ginza is already a pretty popular tourist destination. Certainly this article might make the bookstore a destination to visit while in Ginza.

I wouldn't be so sure. Recently Nat Geo featured a place that is located 10 miles from where I live on their cover ('Places of a life time', Äscher, Switzerland) and it's now over-run by tourists.

If he can pay the rent for Ginza, must be making acceptable money.

You're not counting what the publisher is paying. Publishers pay for table picks, end caps, face out displays and more.

Are digital books really a part of the Japanese market? The Japanese have historically preferred physical goods over digital goods.

How is the decision to do software because the moneys there not playing to the board?

What OP means is that this person is following a long term plan which will eventually turn out to make them miserable since they don't really have a passion for software engineering. Hence, it is analogous to following a plan for the board games instead of adjusting to the random element. The random element here is how your talents and interests develop.

The difference is whether the decision is based on where the money is today or where the money's been historically.

The board game analogy is pretty apt. In The Settlers of Catan, players compete to reach 10 Victory Points by developing a robust and healthy colony. Settlements are worth one VP each, and upgrading one to a city makes it worth two. The city also pays out double resources, and it's relatively difficult to stop a player from building cities. I might observe that players who win tend build all their settlements and upgrade as many of them into cities as possible, so I decide going into this game that's what I'll do. I decided on that strategy without actually taking this game's state into account, and I will probably not do very well if this game is unlike games I've seen before.

Alternately, I might just build whatever seems appropriate given the resources I'm getting. This is "playing the board." The strategy for this game is based on the current game's state, not general knowledge of the game's rules in a vacuum or observations of prior games.

If someone studies historical trends and concludes that people with skills related to broadly applicable inventions will get paid a lot, like people who can make steam engines or program computers, they're using the first strategy. They didn't look at today's conditions at all, they noted that life in general seems to cause good salaries and specific types of skills to coexist. If they instead just show up to their first day of college, look up the average starting salaries for recent graduates in every department, and join one with the highest number that they feel confident they can graduate from, they're using the second strategy. The end result could be identical and they wind up writing software either way, but the strategies were formed using totally different methods.

Catan very much requires "playing to luck", and I wonder how that fits into the rest of the analogy. Sure, there's an optimal strategy, but because of the resource discard rules on rolled 7s (the most common roll, of course), you very often have to make the purchase that you can. It's either that or not make a purchase at all and lose out to the discard.

"Playing to luck" is different than "playing to the board" in my book because it requires making probabilistic decisions that have no place in, say, Chess.

> The bookshop-keeper here, is eking out every single edge he can out of books to operate his shop.

It could be, but it could also be the case that he's trying to be 'quirky' and happened to implement this particular idea, picked more-or-less randomly from a set of other quirky ideas. Walking around Tokyo it is not hard to find shops where you really struggle to figure out how they are making money, and often it's the case that they actually aren't and they close their doors after a few months or a couple years.

I guess it's just really easy to get a loan in Japan even if your business plan is utter shit?

This is such flat, materialistic comparison. What about going back to roots, hara how its called in Japan, doing one action well, instead of focusing on the amount, focusing on single quality and trying to find beauty in it. I would almost call it practical art. There is something peaceful about it.

His point was that sometimes business owners can get used to applying a template. It's a bookstore so it gets the bookstore template -- 4000 books and a coffee shop, right? Instead of applying this template, an owner with a pulse on the business can see what their customers are doing/buying/wanting and can change accordingly rather than apply a template.

Great comment. So, as I understand:

strategy 1 = idealism

strategy 2 = realism

strategy 3 = pragmatism

Great comment! I drew the same analogy from hold'em poker.

> Where 30 years ago operating a successful physical bookshop might mean having a large selection available at any time, and frequent events to draw crowds, today, in competition with digital books, operating a successful physical bookshop might mean emphasising the advantages of the physical book, the romanticism attached to physical objects.

This isn't an accurate description of the current bookselling climate. Two counter-points:

http://fortune.com/2015/09/23/e-books-digital-publishing/

http://www.slate.com/articles/business/moneybox/2015/12/barn...

Digital e-book sales are on a sharp decline now, and normal booksellers are stabilizing.

I've imagined this repeatedly. When you can buy any book you want online, physical bookstores become, in practice, galleries—and their clerks become salesmen.

In such times, there's not much point to having a big store stuffed to the gunnels with anonymous tomes that the clerks don't even know they have, let alone know anything about. Bookstores have none of the things that the book-buyer wants (discoverability, recommendation or "match-making", knowledgeability); and, especially in the case of used book stores, the online copy is probably in better condition, too.

When you treat books, instead, like pieces in a commercial art gallery—curated and exhibited for effect, with well-trained staff who can tell you all about them, or guide you to a book that fits your desires, or call/email you when a book you might like comes in—you get something from the physical store you don't get online. And, therefore, you actually might buy your copy from the store—maybe even at premium—because you aren't just paying for the book, but for the whole experience that led to you buying the book.

This seems to be a repeated theme [that I'm noticing] at present which to my mind hints at a particular flaw in capitalist society - that we end up paying for things by proxy.

You want a curated suggestion for what to read but instead of paying for a curator to make those suggestions you pay for a book that poorly hints at the worth that you've received from the curators effort. Or you want a particular piece of software but instead of paying directly [in part] for those who conceive of the software and implement it you pay for a support contract, or [gratis Google software] you pay slightly more for many things the advertising of which in part pays for the software that you use. You want to watch a well written movie, you pay for high-priced drinks and popcorn. Et cetera.

It seems that the value being generated gets removed one or more steps from the point at which the money paid that [poorly] feeds back to the system that you find that thing valuable. To me it seems that we lose a lot of the financial value to third-parties that place themselves at the interstices - the publisher's executives takes a large cut of the book price but did little of value, the 'stars' in the movie take a large cut but any one of hundreds of actors could have done that part, the advertising execs take a large cut but much of the output they direct is antagonistic towards those who are really seeking other things.

Just seems a really weird way to go about improving society.

You're basically describing the unbundling problem. People aren't accustomed to (and therefore generally unwilling to) pay for news, travel-related advice, recipes, et al. but they were historically willing to pay for such when they were bundled into a physical publication or where the advice was covered by a commission on some other service (like purchasing airline tickets).

People do pay for advice, though. Financial advice in particular has an obvious unbundled market (not just in the form of "your guy at the investment bank", but also in the form of stock analysis, industry reports, etc. Bloomberg terminals are pure "advice", if you want to think of things this way.)

Slightly more murkily, though, we've got things like fashion advice, where you pay a "fashion consultant" who works with you to select clothes that work for you. You've also got "personal trainers" who curate your exercise experience. You've even got these things called "doctors" who don't even have any medicine in their offices(!), instead just writing down their recommendations for medicine you should buy on a piece of paper! ;)

I think the uniting factor in all those cases where we are willing to pay for advice is that the advice is very "interactive": the fashion consultant looks at how clothes fit on you, the personal trainer watches how well your plan is working out and keeps you motivated, and the doctor does a bunch of tests and schedules appointments at intervals for "long-term outpatient treatment" to make sure your medicine is working, adjust dosages, etc.

Meanwhile, it seems weird to imagine paying e.g. Netflix for the output of its recommendation engine, or iTunes for a generated Genius playlist; those are able to be created as batch processes from a bunch of data that already existed, namely your watch/listen history. You might imagine paying for the service that provides that capability (like e.g. Spotify), but not for each piece of advice from it.

Doctors are a special case in that, for better or worse, you have to go through them to get a lot of medicines. (And IMO by and large that system makes sense.)

Outside of Bloomberg terminals which are a relative high-end niche, most individual investors get their research and financial advice bundled with transaction and management fees.

I basically agree with your other points. But, relatively speaking, things like fashion advice and personal trainers are very much a niche--and, as you say, based on very interactive service. And pretty much for comparatively high-income individuals like other personal services.

"Along with pet therapists, and personal shoppers?" Quote from some movie. Forgot movie. The actress Mila Kunnas.

I think you're right, but I don't think in this case there's as much of an impedance-mismatch as in those other cases.

While I might say "book gallery", the real description of the place might as well be "curator's service with a storefront serving as street-visible advertising." That the curator happens to have copies of the books they will recommend you is just an obvious extra convenience to throw in, from their perspective; the room for stock in their store is less limited than the room for recommendations in their brain. When e-books are free to pirate, basically all of the price you're paying for the book at a store (or a game on Steam, or a song on iTunes) is in appreciation of the value—including the convenience—of the curation service. If both the buyer and the seller know they're exchanging money for curation, but just both happen to call the trade "selling a book", I don't think it's really a problem.

On the other hand, in a modern economy, if you actually do want to transfer value to the creator of a piece of IP, you have to explicitly cut out the middlemen entirely. If you really like e.g. a band and want their career to thrive, you don't buy their album at a store; you buy their album online straight from them (usually this means "via Bandcamp"), and you go to their concerts and buy merch, and you support any adaptations that happen to their work so they'll receive royalty payments.

In fact, in my own life, I don't think I experience much "bundling"—I'm always either paying solely for the value of the middleman, with the creator receiving at most a pittance, or I'm paying some outsized amount as a show of appreciation to the creator of a thing. (The one exception I can think of is venue tickets. I want that money to go to the people on stage, but almost all of it goes to the people who built the building and the people who run the website that took my money and generated me a PDF of a barcode. Horrible racket, that.)

---

> the 'stars' in the movie take a large cut but any one of hundreds of actors could have done that part

Actors are paid based on their "star power"—the ability to pull an audience purely by trading on the interest people have in seeing a movie with that actor in it. Effectively, they're getting their royalties for using their name in all the advertising copy, not for actually acting in the movie.

If this wasn't true, you can bet there'd be a thriving industry of "actor impersonators"—typecasting taken to an extreme, where directors could just order up "someone who can be That Guy From That Movie, for this movie", and get 100 entirely-qualified applicants. "People who made themselves look and sound like Tom Hanks" would outnumber the world population of Elvis-es.

> the publisher's executives takes a large cut of the book price but did little of value

This isn't actually a problem; it's a vestige of the old system where publishers were necessary for typesetting, printing, and distribution logistics. The old generation of authors are staid in their ways and still suffering through working with these antequated beasts, but the new generation have switched to buying the services that publishers provide à la carte, with Kickstarter for the "business loan", a contracted freelance editor, software doing most of the typesetting, Lulu for printing, and Amazon for physical distribution. You might need a publisher to get into bookstores... but—just like we're talking about here—who still shops at bookstores?

> When e-books are free to pirate, basically all of the price you're paying for the book at a store (or a game on Steam, or a song on iTunes) is in appreciation of the value—including the convenience—of the curation service.

I disagree. Pirating a book is not a replacement for owning a physical copy of a book. Lots of people remain very attached to the physical embodiment of a novel, and are willing to pay for it like any other physical item sold in stores. It's like the impulse of vinyl collectors, but more mainstream.

This Christmas reminded me that as long as there are people like me, who leave shopping for presents to the last minute, physical stores with large stock aren't going anywhere.

But I am definitely waiting for the moment when physical stores turn into a purely advertising space, and draw their revenue from there. In a very near future you might not be able to buy things at a store, you will only be able to look at and try things (books are a good example).

Clothes are an exception here.

> Clothes are an exception here

If I could buy all my clothes online I would. The problem is sizes are at best a rough guid - different brands and even different styles in the same brand, fit completely differently. I guess I could find one outfit that fits and then just buy that online when I need a replacement :)

We have already solved that problem. People could just measure their waist and other atributes with one of those flexible clothier's Measuring Tape things.

Then have those be searchable and selectable on the store.

Getting people to actually do their own body measurement could be a problem though.

When I lived in a rural area as a child that's exactly what we did. My mother measured everyone and bought our clothes through the Sears catalog.

I do exactly that for shirts. I just hope they don't discontinue the one I buy.

Find a place that's easy to return to, buy +/-1 size, and return the ones that don't work. Bonus points if the extra sizes get you free shipping by inflating the order total above some minimum.

The problem could easily be solved by industry-wide standardization. Make a set of reference models (hell, NIST could do it), and sell clothes as being designed to be worn on a given reference model. Then you'd simply find your closest fit, and buy clothes for that one. There's some precedent here in shoes with the use of lasts of a given size. I bought dress shoes online recently that fit perfectly, never having tried them on in person, and I was able to do that by looking up the information on the last it was sized on, and comparing that to another shoe that I did have and that I did know which size was correct for me.

For used book stores, I usually wander in out of curiosity, and often walk out with six or seven books that I didn't realize I wanted when I walked in.

I adopted a similar strategy for Tomotcha: we pick/sell only one tea each month. Most of our competitors send several samples each month, and from a revenue point of view maybe it's better, but I like the ability to give focus to a single tea.

For instance our next shipment is a Genmaicha: it's a combination of green tealeaves and roasted brown rice. The first time I drank Genmaicha I didn't like it much, because it's so different from what I was used to drink. But now I love it. You have to give each tea a try: if you just drink small samples you'll never develop a taste for the more complex ones.

If I like a particular tea, do you allow me to buy it again, afterwards? It would be reasonable, I think.

It really depends on the tea, if we still have it or if we can still reorder it from the producer. It will be pretty much impossible for a Shincha (new tea), as they are usually limited in quantity, and quite short lived. On the other end of the spectrum roasted green teas (houjicha) live much longer, so we can usually reorder them from the producer if we are out of stock.

2100 books over 6 months = 350 books per month, or 12.5 per day. Assume the books are $30 - $50, so $375 - $675. Assume a 70% cost of goods sold = $112.5 - $187.5 revenue per day. Tough to make a living unless he can push those numbers a bit. Interesting idea. Hope he can do it.

His previous bookstore had also a gallery space for rent, so it may be the case that this new store's model is actually closer to a gallery---author or sponsor may pay some fee. Just guess; I couldn't find an official document stating so.

That's plausible. Indeed it would be pretty hard to break even without an alternative business model: books usually have a MRSP printed on the jacket and charging more than the MRSP is unusual; plus the rent in Ginza is over 400usd per sq m.

The published MSRP is an issue, but generally books are available at wholesale for 40% off. So there is still a decent margin to start from, rent and staffing quickly eat into that cut. It's all about sales volume. Most mainstream hardcovers are around $16-35; after markup would be about $6.40-$14/copy in gross profit.

I used to work at an independent bookstore that had a niche for local and regional(WV/Appalachia) authors and stories. This worked great as we were in a tourist area, so the influx of new customers was readily available.

For local customers we offered custom orders, to address issues with limited supply. Though it would be cheaper to go to Amazon, a large portion of the community are artists and craftsmen so they liked to encourage the local economy.

It's more of a gallery than a bookshop. The book is on display. The theme of the book is extended into the presentation of the place. Instead of a gallery gift shop you can buy the book the gallery was themed on. It's a nice idea. Gimmicky perhaps, but nice.

It does seem like a gallery. Also reminds me of a prix fixe menu.

It's akin to a musician/artist performing/producing at some minor venue (park, museum, bar, etc just sitting in the side providing ambiance) where just a few minutes experience is enough for some to buy a CD/DVD/book. Give a wandering shopper a reason to drop into the gallery/store and have a remarkable few minutes, and some will buy without planning to.

Zeroing in on one book is crazy. However singling out a single author each week might work.

One week it's Hemingway and the next week perhaps it's Elmore Leonard. You decorate the store and the key is the author has many books and you stock them all. In a place like Tokyo, NYC or London this approach might work.

It would almost be like an art gallery highlighting dozens of paintings by a single artist. You could invite people in to discuss the author and those events would draw in even more people.

I can't really back this up with a source but I read somewhere that this is similar to how traditional Japanese merchants used to operate. They would show a customer a single item, which he could either accept or refuse. Then another item was brought in and so on. By restricting access to the entire catalogue the merchant was able to get better deals out of the customer.

It seems to me almost a given that the authors and publishers are paying or otherwise helping support these endeavors, via some sort of cooperative advertising type model. Some of his comments seem to hint at that.

Either that or he has a trust fund, given Tokyo real estate prices there don't seem to be many other reasonable hypotheses.

The room looks like an art gallery as others have commented. I can remember seeing displays of the catalogue for an exhibition in art galleries - a large array of a single book. The arithmetic implies some form of subsidy, and that room looks lovely. There is a street view here...

http://www.takram.com/projects/a-single-room-with-a-single-b...

...looks to be an exercise in branding/design.

I'm wondering if a community will form around the 50 or so titles stocked in a year. A book per week is a reasonable reading target for most educated people. If so, then a coffee shop model becomes possible: a coffee shop stocking one title per week and encouraging discussion while continuing to sell their coffee and food to pay the rent.

Coffee shop was also my primary idea of how it could work economically. An entirely new hell of "no spoilers" ;)

Other than that, a carefully balanced mix of freely curated selection and occasional paid features might also be a way to monetize some of the attention generated.

It's also open between 1-8pm and, according to that link, events are organised every night, so building such a community seems to be a main part of the concept.

Wow this sounds like it could be something straight out of Italo Calvino's "If on a winter's night a traveler".

Also from the TV show Portlandia, which had an episode about shops selling a single item.

I'd buy it. I mean, if the guy's stocking one book, it's going to be pretty good, right? I mean, what is it going to be like that (redacted) book I was reading written in a dead author's name? [1] I was like, wait a second what is this piece of crap - then I was like, ohhh. Yes, that would explain it.

That's not going to happen if I buy this guy's one book.

[1] like this - http://www.avclub.com/article/pay-no-attention-to-the-man-be...

So this is essentially a subscription model?

It sounds like he is trying to capture the attention of a group of regulars to the point that they will all buy every book he displays. That, or every time he stocks a new book the updated store will at least turn heads. Standard bookstores never really change in appearance.

I guess there is also a threat. Buy it now because it won't be here next week.

This is "sell a lifestyle / experience" model like Starbucks and to some degree Apple.

A model, although very successful, I abhor. It purports that you can "buy" happiness. It targets those so affluent and/or so bored that mere ownership of things is no longer enough to make them feel special.

There is more information and photos in this blog post:

http://www.spoon-tamago.com/2015/09/06/morioka-shoten-ginza-...

And then there's the record store that only sells (and buys) the White Album:

http://hyperallergic.com/65570/we-sell-white-albums/

Despite the URL, the article text explains that the store actually doesn't sell them. They only buy more.

A lot of people are calculating the cost of the book based off of MSRP and discounting it. However am I the only one that thinks he might consider selling the book above MSRP? In a way buying a book from here is an experience.

...because in his former shop, he had to carry a whopping 200 books!

Very Zen.

Life is really simple, but we insist on making it complicated. – Confucius

I hate to be that guy, but Confucius probably said no such thing.[0]

[0]https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Confucius#Misattributed

You seem to be correct. The dangers of googling stuff.

Confucianism has very little to do with Zen

Pretty sure that's not true. Buddhism meets chinese cultural values namely Daoism, and later Confucianism, and out pops Chan Buddhism, which travels to Japan and becomes Zen.

There is a clear link. How much influence is probably a thesis topic.

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