Why the Seattle Mystery Bookshop Must Close
seattlemysteryblog.typepad.com
seattlemysteryblog.typepad.com
> That’s what publishers did. They allowed a far less expensive version of their books to be available right away, undercutting the sale of hardcovers with the cheaper e-version
This is a fraught analogy and in a way shows the lack of forward thinking of lots of people in the book and publishing industry.
The problem is that from a customer perspective, an ebook == hardcover in nearly all ways. It has the same story, it is written by the same author, you can read it at home or on the bus. There's no difference. In fact, some might argue ebook > hardcover since it takes up no space and you can use a Kindle and all the features it has.
Watching a movie in a movie theater is about the experience of being with others with amazing sound and video quality as well as the actual movie. So movie theater > movie at home for most people.
Forward thinking would be the Steam way which Amazon has tried to do with ebooks: sell for less but make up for it with huge volume. Yet publishers often price ebooks higher or equal to physical copies.
It's sad to see this bookstore go and I wish I would have visited it since I live in Seattle. But this is a pretty poor analysis on the "changes in the over-all economy".
I'm really wonder if that's true for most people. Sure, there are people that would rather watch in the theater, but there are also people who'd rather hold a hardcover to read.
But even so, theaters have been amazingly resilient to the digital age. I'd chalk this up to the fact that they provide a shared social movie-going experience that's not quite something you can replicate at home (i.e. it's something to go do with your friends), and in some cases, you want to see certain hits with a certain timeliness so that you can talk about them at school/work/with friends.
Hardcovers are just not like this at all. Even if you'd compare them favorably to an ebook, you'd be hard pressed to find one person on Earth who would say that they provide a superior experience over a paperback (except that they look more handsome on a bookshelf). They are, and always have been, quite simply a way for the publishing industry to squeeze a few extra dollars out of consumers who were willing to pony up the money so they could read a book early. This is exactly the sort of wrinkle that you'd expect to be ironed out in the Information Age — people's tolerance for this kind of profiteering decreases as access to media broadens.
The article's author is right that diminishing the edge of hardcovers is certain to cut into the margins of bookstores like his own, but he's wrong that it's a bad thing (directly). It might cost him money, but it's better for literally every single book buyer.
I like hardcovers better than paperbacks. They are easier to read, larger usually, they stay open with less force, they don't break as easily.
The printing is higher quality, the paper is brighter.
There is a thing called (I think) a trade paperback which is a hardcover quality book with a paper cover.
The problem is that despite that being so, ebooks also have zero incremental costs. People recognize that, and so they resent eBooks costing as much as hardbacks. If eBooks were only and explicitly > hardbacks, people would happily pay more, but there's more to it than just value.
Thats more of a perception problem than an actual fact. It turns out that hosting/supporting ebooks does have incremental costs and people dramatically over estimate how much the price of a hardback is the physical copy. If they just priced the difference in physical production vs ebook support into the price, I think most people would be surprised at how little the discount would be.
Now there is a difference of course but the greater part of the price of a book comes from the creation of the intellectual property (including subsidizing all those books that don't get sold) and the sales process.
The bigger issue is that publishers have lots of expertise in selling physical books (100s of years) and ebooks are brand new. Further, the biggest platform for ebooks is run by a company that is not in anyway aligned with the publishers business interests and is in fact a competitor. This is not true of traditional book sales channels.
The publishing industry can blame themselves for that.
Back before ebooks, a typical paperback would run between 8-12 dollars whereas a hardcover would easily be 20 dollars or more.
This gave the perception that printing and binding is a significant portion of book price.
Of course, we all know that's crap. In practice, they were simply charging a premium markup for a product that was perceived as being superior.
But now who can blame the consumer for having the same basic expectation, but in the opposite direction, when ebooks are considered?
In fact, it doesn't make sense: it's not like hard covers get cheaper over time.
But are you claiming form factor is not part of the price at all? If so, how do you explain it for books that have both versions actively in print?
Or especially if I'm going to gift it to someone who really wants it.
Those stores used economies of scale to make the 40% discount (basically selling for cost) on blockbusters to drive business into the store, with the hope that people would also pick up higher margin items (toys, coffee, etc).
But the more traditional bookstore model was to stock the blockbuster hardcovers at full price, then move them onto discount shelves as time from release went down, until they had to return them to the publisher right before the soft cover release date neared and the books became a liability (as the people that were willing to pay the premium for early access had already been exhausted).
There are still places that have heavily discounted hard covers. The entire business is called 'remainders' and the publishers sell giant warehouses full of hard cover books for pennies that they deem unsellable as they are too far from release date. Soft backs don't go through this process as they are even less valuable, the publishers pulp those, sometimes at a loss.
[edit] another more obvious way to think about this is, why do hardcovers and soft backs come out at different times? If it was just about the 'premium' product vs the lower end one, they'd be released at the same time. But they aren't. They are release about a year different.
* The fixed costs of publishing a book dwarf the marginal price of each printed book. Those fixed costs are dominated by the salaries (or 1099s) of human experts.
* Like most products, books aren't priced from their (minimal!) marginal cost basis. They're priced based on utility and market substitutes.
* If ebooks were priced "too high", nobody would buy them. But in fact, so many people buy ebooks that they're putting bookstores out of business.
The "resentment" you're referring to is I think maybe mostly a creature of message boards.
Not really, the issue is that with digital, there are different formats and readers, some just suck and others are better. You can't just put all e-books under one umbrella because the experience varies greatly.
For example, I've totally boycotted Kindle format and devices, it's horrible for so many reasons, if I want an eBook, it's now PDF or nothing.
Kindle for me was always missing or broken TOCs, bad user interfaces, no copy and paste (if you have digital, why not?),no portability between devices (Linux etc), hard to share, dynamic page numbers, missing or poorly formatted images and diagrams, no off-line backup (you never own the media), no thanks.
I was also a person who, in earnest, wanted to go completely digital with my library, I just loved the idea of it and gave away a lot of printed media, I regret this now. I really gave it a good try, but give me a hard copy any day.
If publishers put out official-grade softcopy EPUBs — like O'Reilly used to do until recently — they'd be just as good as the same publisher's hardcopy prints.
Side note: I really hate that I can't buy any EPUBs of O'Reilly's titles. I don't want a non-portable, non-saveable, online-only subscription; and their supported method of getting non-subscription digital copies are all on Amazon and Google Play Books, neither of which provide EPUBS and suffer from the same problems you highlight.
But the market didn't actually behave that way. They had trouble selling ebooks and piracy was a huge issue.
The next one to watch will be Tor. If they back off of their DRM free stance we'll know that its basically an untenable model.
Pragmatic programmers do this and it's an absolute joy to use their digital books, you can have ePub, Mobi or PDF format. The quality of their eBooks over that available from Amazon is much higher.
I disagree with a lot of your Kindle paragraph. It isn't nearly as bad as you portray.
I mean, you're paying money for something you never actual own, what's that?
I read a lot, and I enjoy collecting books, but I ceased buying physical books a long time ago. I've started backfilling my ebook collection based on my old physical collections. At some point, I will be able to find digital replacements for 99% of my physical book collections and I will eventually find a decent way to digitize the rest. Ultimately, digital books are just better for me. I can pull my Kindle out of my bag and have a copy of every book I've ever read and access to basically anything I might want to read. I may mourn the loss of paper books, I absolutely do mourn the loss of bookstores but ultimately ebooks are just a far superior product. The fact that they are cheaper doesn't personally factor into the equation to me.
Ultimately, I think the digital print industry is just shaking off vestiges that the physical print industry required and the digital economy no longer requires. In a few (more like 10-20) years the amount of value-add coming from the publishers to writers is going to drift close enough to zero that I think the whole industry will go closer to self-publishing and become far more egalitarian.
You'll pay someone to proof your book, someone to (digitally) typeset it, and someone to upload it to the top N digital distribution platforms. (Apple iBooks, Amazon, ?? who else) and the revenue cut from that will be far, far lower than what today's publishers get. You can obviously hire a publicist and have them do that facet of things too.
I prefer to own the book, and not merely a license to use a DRM'ed instance of it.
A lot of non-fiction works ok on Kindle but it can be a bit hit or miss. I do generally prefer ebooks though just to decrease clutter at home and because I do a lot of long form reading while traveling.
These days it is completely normal for people to preview music from YouTube or torrent communities before deciding to buy the physical artifact. I don’t see why books should be any different.
This is the reason that I have not shopped at bookshops for nearly 20 years.
Service at small bookshops varies from indifferent to rude.
I almost always receive polite and helpfull service when I buy a $2 coffee or a $15 collection of groceries at Aldi.
Why are bookshop staff so indifferent and unhelpful when I am buying $50 of books ?
I would rather interact with a mindless algorithm than with the staff at bookshops.
> All those new millionaires and billionaires might be good for investment bankers and real estate developers, but they can only buy and read so many books.
I suppose the trick is that same, sell them something you've convinced them is appropriate for "someone of their standing" - something overpriced - a first edition, with a mounting case, second reading copy, and platinum plated personalised bookmark?
I go to /r/fantasy and ask for recommendations. I will probably get someone recommending goddamn Malazan* no matter how applicable it is to what I asked for. I will also get a lot of recs that are just a title, maybe a title and an author, with no further info. Some authors who hang out there will pimp their own books. Maybe someone recommends Name Of The Wind and a mini-flamewar about book 3 taking a decade and counting happens. I end up with a lot of unfiltered recommendations, and an overwhelming amount of research to do on them.
I go to a good bookstore. I can wander into the SF section and find a whole bunch of staff recommendation cards on the shelves next to things they’ve loved. Maybe there’s a list of Hugo and Nebula winners. Maybe some new stuff the average reader hasn’t heard of. Maybe a “if you liked THIS THING then try THIS OTHER THING” card on the shelf points me to something new. I’ve got a fairly small selection of recommendations, curated by people whose job is partially to keep up with new fiction and recommend the great new stuff. And maybe something outside my genre comfort zone catches my eye on the way to the SF/F section...
Also it is TONS easier to get an idea of just how long a book is when you’re picking one up off the shelves. One cover image and maybe a little tiny text note of how big the file is on Amazon’s page is a lot less information about the sheer size of the story I’m considering picking up.
* /r/fantasy loves this turgid-ass sprawling account of someone’s D&D campaign, I finally tried reading the first book and gave up after three chapters, then got told that “everyone knows it doesn’t pick up until book 3” and life is way too short for that IMHO...
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TL;DR: Reddit ain't gonna give you professional recommendations. Reddit will give you a bunch of recommendations of stuff twentysomething guys with a ton of free time on their hands like.
You've mentioned recommendations and exploration but things like Goodreads have similar tools - you can follow users who have similar 'likes' as you, you can read lists by people who have similar tastes, and you can get recommendations from the 'pros'.
I'm sorry I mentioned Reddit. I really did mean any online medium, Goodreads, random book forums, anything else.
With a bookstore, you can reasonably expect, at least to a certain degree, an authority figure. With facebook/reddit, you can reasonably expect nonsense, and maybe one somewhat knowledged guy piping up in a wave of shit.
Tbh, I have no idea why you'd bring up reddit or fb instead of at least hn, where the noise to signal ratio at least attempts to approach something useable.
Reddit and facebook are where you go to accidentally stumble into something useful; not when you're searching for it.
In fact, if you're looking for an expert, you usually go where few people go: because those you would find there probably have good reason to be there; places where its only worth being if you're an expert in the niche
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Those who have benefited from the exposure and attention of little shops, who are so grateful for our help launching them into bestsellerdom suddenly do not wish to use their power and leverage to help those who gave them attention and benefits. “I contacted sales and all the tip-ins went to Barnes and Noble. I have no control over that…” Well who the hell has more control that a major bestselling author?
*
As far as I can tell, neither Tom Clancy nor Stephen King have any control over their publishers' marketing departments; certainly nobody less exalted can hope to do anything with them.
Are you joking?
If Tom Clancy or Stephen King or a JK Rowling-level said "Add Seattle Mystery Bookshop to my next signing tour" it would get done. They might hem and haw about how wanting to do B&N instead, or some other excuses and they might try to talk them out of it, but if the star wants it, they're going to get it. Nobody wants to be responsible for losing the rights to Stephen King's next book.
Small authors can obviously go wherever they want, nobody cares enough to stop them. It's the mid-level guys who are under control by the publishers but aren't large/influential enough that they can dictate their own schedules.
Indy is doing fine.
> For the last decades, the entire publishing world – bookshops, publishers, authors – had been supported by huge post-WWII generations who moved up through their jobs and had the extra money to spoil themselves and their children, and to begin collecting books, collecting hardcovers.
Former avid book buyer here, now still a book buyer. I've always detested hardcovers, and not only because of the price, mostly because what I read is very often a series of novels or a range of different novels from one publisher - they look nice on the shelf. Hardcovers are always big, bulky and not the same size. Also I like holding paperbacks a lot more.
Also what others said, what about the shenanigans of having to wait for a paperback release? If I am already more the target market of preferring most books on paper than as an ebook, don't annoy me even more by having to wait for the format I have chosen to prefer 20 years ago.
And...?
Is the author seriously trying to convince me that getting books into the hands of poorer people immediately is a bad thing?
> Those who couldn’t afford the hardcover price knew they could get it at the library or get it in paperback in a year.
All so that a funky little book stores can exist as middlemen?
I'm sorry, but as much as I loved the small independent book (and music, etc) store, that model is done - and if the result is that books are cheaper, and more widely accessible, it's a fair trade.
https://www.voanews.com/a/indie-booksellers-hold-steady-toug...
http://publishingperspectives.com/2016/01/independent-bookst...
http://www.slate.com/articles/business/the_edgy_optimist/201...
http://theweek.com/articles/573874/4-reasons-why-independent...
What makes them different than this place? I've never been to the store in the article. Maybe its because they're still trying to sell new books, and the thriving stores are all selling used books?
So many people I know (anecdotal, for sure) seem to still prefer to read physical books. Even younger people, in their early 20s. Beyond that, some people will still want to collect the physical representation of something they really love.
Certainly, this will not be as many people as before ebooks were around. Still, there has to be more to the story with this one store. It doesn't seem to add up.
Downtown Seattle has pushed about as far North as it can, and is starting to expand South (past the government and banking towers) as well. Most of these shops are just going to shuffle into new spaces or be replaced by other little shops in new spaces. It's unfortunate, because the neighborhood is old, but there's limits to how much poorly developed land we can hold in the core of downtown. I expect everything from downtown to the stadiums is going to become towers just like SLU did -- because the core of the city needs the space. We'll probably keep a touristy section along the water (just like now) and the core of Pioneer Square, Smith Tower itself, etc. But these kinds of small shops need to move or find a business model that fits with the new density.
I might feel differently if it were a park than a bookshop -- but I don't really feel that bad that a small, niche store got pushed out of the core of downtown so the property could develop.