Local bookstores have a new weapon in the fight with Amazon | Hacker News Reader

Local bookstores have a new weapon in the fight with Amazon

forbes.com

55 pointschewymouse25 comments

(The article sums up a lot of this, but the actual website is more misleading)

I went through and clicked on the about page. The books aren't sold through local book stores. It's a front for Ingram, which handles the orders. The local bookstores that sign up as affiliates get a percentage of the sale, basically as referrers.

I'd love to see this as a search-model that drives to the actual stores, but it seems that would be much more difficult to implement with arbitrary stocking information. In its current state the site represents itself as a method of shopping local, borrowing its respectability from the local stores.

This could potentially enable what I always thought the final model will look like: you go into a store, find the book, point an app at its store-specific barcode, and you get it physically delivered or saved as ebook - the store makes a percentage but prices can still be competitive with Amazon, and everybody is happy. If you really want to take the book home on the same day, an extra fee is added (to pay for traditional stocking costs).

You could even do it without custom barcodes, just with some geofencing or wifi identification. At worst, with a dedicated touchscreen device in-store.

Alas, i’ve repeated this idea everywhere for years and nobody in the industry seems to have latched on it yet, so maybe something I don’t know about the industry makes it unviable ️

I don't see how this can be cost competitive. You would have to add a percentage on every purchase high enough to cover the entire overhead of the store, including property and employees, while at the same time maintaining a large enough selection to get people into the store instead of going online in the first place. There's also no guarantee that people won't do what they do today, which is browse in the store and then go straight to Amazon on their phone to save money instead of using your scan approach.

The margin is already there today, but it’s “under siege” by Amazon prices. My model would shrink it a bit per item (getting closer to the Amazon one) and then recoup it in aggregate by dramatically reducing local inventory while ensuring the same (or higher) amount of total sales. Basically you shrink costs while making it easier for customers to give you money.

Obviously you cannot stop people from going to Amazon anyway, but if you make it easy enough and convenient enough for customers to buy stuff right away (including ebooks, which currently are not sold in-stores at all), I think you have a good chance to compete.

Now the only problem left is: Why would I go so in the first place? To browse? For the nice book store feeling?

Maybe some people do that. Since I just read E-books that were recommended to me I'm long lost anyway.

Some of the best books I’ve read in my life, I picked up almost randomly in a store - maybe they were highlighted by employees, maybe they had a particularly nice cover or backcover... that feeling of having discovered a gem on my own, or the fun of spending an hour browsing dozens of books to find The One, maybe talking about it with friends or employees, is so satisfying that it keeps me going back.

The online experience is severely lacking, imho. Maybe it will be different for generations that grew up with Amazon, but to me the bookstore experience is superior. I think they are missing a trick by not allowing me to couple their experience of serendipitous discovery with the convenience of ebooks.

This sounds similar to hive.co.uk they offer profit sharing with a bookshop of your choice and you can pick up your purchase from a local bookshop.

There was a Dutch initiative in 2019 as well (bookaroo.nl), but that seems to have failed quite miserably. The concept had local bookshops deliver the orders with Bookaroo acting as a nation-wide online shop and asking a 5% commission. It quickly proved too expensive for bookshops to be worth their efforts.

In the Netherlands people who know the value of a good local bookshop tend to make an effort to support them and just go there, and many already deliver. The rest of the readers won't switch from the convenient and cheap bol.com (Dutch) or amazon.de (amazon.nl coming soon for physical products too).

Storefronts are becoming the discovery location, while sales shift online. In the past few months I’ve had more than one staple household purchase disappear from grocery shelves to require us to buy from Amazon. It makes sense - stores now charge something like $250k for stocking/shelf space fees. Bookstores have a different structure, but I hope to see more online warehouses show up to rival Amazon, because scalpers do enjoy hiking prices there whenever something is out of stock elsewhere.

> because scalpers do enjoy hiking prices there whenever something is out of stock elsewhere.

True, but if you despise scalpers, how are you going to get an unavailable something?

I use https://www.bookfinder.com to search for paper books. Sometimes I dropship them to a scan-service and for 20-30 USD I could get a decent PDF scan of the book.

This has worked very well for older books too. Prices are much better than amazon and you save a book from the landfill.

Stores just can't carry that many books.

I haven't used amazon since a few years but when I was looking for a book, I ultimately had to order online. No option.

What would've been best is go to a store and they'll deliver ur book at your home in the evening if they don't have a copy handy

Till the happens stores will find it hard to compete with Amazon who does essentially that

Usually not "no option." I frequently use Amazon's app to look up an ISBN, and then bring it to my neighborhood bookshop and ask them to order it for me.

The only time I've ever had to order from Amazon is when I'm trying to get something that just isn't distributed in the USA, or is only being sold by, in effect, scalpers. e.g., last year I got a box set shipped to me from Europe for ~70€, where US-based sellers wanted more like $300.

(Even there, I suppose I could order from Fnac or somewhere instead, but Amazon seems to fare better at getting through US customs.)

By far most of the books I buy are from thrift stores, and the sales the public library does. It's not unusual for me to come home with a shopping bag full of books.

I used to do this a long time ago but now I find that picking books like this, semi-randomly, isn't a good use of time. Reading a book takes time and there is already more interesting content than I can consume. This means if I choose carefully I can spend all my reading time reading the most interesting/useful books possible, instead of being constrained to whatever the thrift store happens to have at this moment.

I think this is mostly true for me, but I wonder if the best approach involves a little bit of the 'semi-random' too. The internet is an amazing way to discover books and authors, and I feel like I'm exposed to a pretty eclectic mix, but I assume my discovery process is biased in some unhelpful ways. The payoff of discovering an entirely new (to me) and excellent author can be pretty great, perhaps even more so if their work is completely different from most of the stuff I read -- so maybe a bit of unguided exploration in unfamiliar territory is worthwhile, even if it's mostly unproductive? (Either way, I bet someone has analogised this process to some well-studied class of CS problem, and drawn interesting but practically dubious conclusions!)

Have an idea of the books you want to buy, and know roughly what the selection of such places is -- champaigne tastes in a brewpub won't fly, but if there are popular books or topics you may find, take advantage of the opportunity.

And examine books for mildew before buying. Though freezer + baking soda treatment does work.

Internet arbitrage caused quality to tank about a decade ago: any time there’s a sale, note the people cruising through checking prices on their phones so they can pick the books with significant resale value (the used bookstore owner probably does this too, if they’re still in business).

The thrift stores do that, too. However, I've found that a book's resale price has little correspondence with its quality - more like how many of them were printed.

I've discovered the thrift store books are not bad books, they tend to be popular ones that people already read and are just clearing out their homes. I've discovered a lot of very good books I never would have run across otherwise.

I look mostly in the scifi and history stacks.

As for my time, I enjoy picking through the stacks.

Will they really be able to compete with Amazon pricing and free shipping? And pay affiliates out of a remaining margin?

I suspect not.

https://archive.md/ZyNM2

Speaking as a consumer, it would be nicer if we could cut out the middleman entirely, though.

alibris.com already does this and it's pretty dang good. I buy all my physical books through them

Alibris is great - though I have suspicions that it’s now dominated by warehouses and thrift store ‘chains’ rather than independent retail book stores.

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