Back to the future with bookstores | Hacker News Reader

Back to the future with bookstores

cooper.com

44 pointskgthegreat33 comments

I reckon an Amazon store that serves as an interface to their online store might be good. Don't sell books there, but rather you go in, and can browse through books, drink coffee etc just like a Borders store, and if you have a kindle, you can buy books on the spot, if you don't, you can order them shipped to your house. That way they only need a 1-2 copies of each book in the store, just as display stock. They could sell kindles there, and have computers/tablets for purchasing online (even perhaps let you buy books through your kindle app on iOS/android by scanning barcodes/qr codes). Staff could teach people how to use Amazon/kindles etc. Book signings/launches could also be held there.

That's basically how I've used Borders here in Australia before they went bust. I would go in, and enjoy the atmosphere of the physical book store, flick through books, and then take photos of them and go home and buy them online via Kindle or Book Depository for half the price. I don't mind if I don't get the book instantly (though I would anyway if it was out on kindle), I just enjoy browsing. It would be a good sales generator for Amazon with still a fairly low overhead.

This might be a good idea, if they can figure out how to make enough money to stay open. One problem with Borders was that coffee shops and bookstores don't mix; I bought an expensive art book one time at the big Borders in White Flint Mall and found a big coffee ring on one plate when I got it home.

ADDED: Thinking about it a little more, what is happening to bookstores in general looks like a good illustration of "The answer to 'Why don't they...?' is almost always 'Money'."

I wonder if this model could work with Amazon affiliates program - ensure that the bookstore gets a cut from people ordering books on the Amazon terminal. Maybe Amazon would subsidize this kind of store, instead of the publishers, to capture the mall-goers that browse around Borders just because it's there and end up buying a random new release.

That would kind of remind me of an Apple store - they could have Kindles lying around for you to preview sections of new releases, a "genius bar" for recommendations, easy payments with your Amazon account, free coffee for Prime members etc.

I don't think Amazon would actually do it because setting up Brick and Mortar storefronts doesn't seem to gel with their business, but it would be kind of neat and I could see this type of specialty meat-space front end for web properties really taking off.

one reason amazon doesn't like brick and mortar stores is that they will have to charge state sales tax where they set up shop. That's one advantage they have over B&N.

Or maybe a customised website for the bookstore with amazon affiliate program built in. The website might have things like goodreads/other bibliophile sites integration for reviews/social aspect?

These sound great, and do you know the best thing about his idea? There probably already is one in your town. It's called a library.

Seriously, they provide almost everything on his list: socialising spaces, quiet reading areas, computers, free wifi, book ordering, cafes and bibliophile events. And interestingly, they are paid for by membership fees (if you squint, government-run libraries make everyone a member and pay a fee via general taxation). These government-run libraries would make it quite hard to run a similar thing as a business. That's probably okay, because a library is somewhere between a merit and a public good (a quasi-public good).

That's a rosy picture of what a library is supposed to be. In my experiences they are places parents send their kids for free after-school day care, where homeless people go to get out of the heat, or where people who don't have a computer go to use the internet. Bibliophiles definitely use them, but they don't hang out there and socialize with like-minded people.

I don't know where you live, but I've had a lot of good luck finding nice libraries. When I spent a summer working in NYC, the SIBL library was just awesome in terms of facilities, hermann miller chairs, etc.

In Boston there's a few good ones too.

I basically agree, but there is an important article left to write about the future of the library.

Traditional ingredients of a library:

You need a lot of books. Fewer physical books equals less knowledge.

You need a librarian who knows how to navigate all the books.

You need a critical mass of library workers (who need not have library science training) to reshelve and process all the books.

Because mice and rats and bugs and molds may eat your hundred-year-old books, you need to exclude food and drink from your library.

Because it's inefficient to move lots of books through long distances, the scholars are going to park themselves in the library, packed cheek-by-jowl at adjacent tables. To a scholar the desk that's within a few steps of a comprehensive library is the most valuable real estate on earth. So libraries traditionally enforce quiet, and build arrays of private study carrels, and force public gatherings to take place in special soundproof meeting rooms somewhere in the building.

Obviously, to house all those physical books in a patron-browseable format you need a pretty big and nifty building.

But the future, assuming the righteous librarians finally deal with all this infernal DRM, will be different. To first order, wherever you have three people who love books gathered in a room with a librarian, you will have a library. They will be a lot more efficient to run. They will exist in much greater variety and much higher numbers. They will probably be largely indistinguishable from bookstores and coffeeshops.

There's a wonderful used and rare bookstore around the corner from my house (and it doesn't hurt that we're both less than a mile from a large university). The store has been around for at least twenty years and given the size of the store, and selection, I don't see it going anywhere any time soon.

Well, that is, as long as the owners live.

It's not uncommon to see books from the 1800s line the shelves. It's a place where one could spend hours perusing the stacks for long lost gems.

And they also sell books via Amazon. I think they've figured out their business model.

I suspect a lot of such bookstores are just pet projects of people who can afford them (they got other money sources).

The owners of the bookstore I mentioned also own/run another bookstore about a mile away that focuses on college textbooks (it's how they started---used text books along with other used/rare books).

When I go into Half Priced Books (a brick and mortar store) it's usually packed with people. That doesn't mean they're doing well; I wonder if they are? I can see used books store surviving. You can't buy used ebooks.

You can't buy used Kindle books. Other models might emerge. Also, ebooks can be torrented.

Warm and fuzzy, but I have to ask how many people can honestly say they would pay a cover charge or monthly membership fee to be allowed to enter a bookstore. I suspect the number is quite low.

But in lot of populous, emerging economy such as India for e.g., even the "niches are huge". <borrowed term>

Being allowed to enter isn't the same as being a Supporting Member. There's people who show up, and there's the in crowd. If a store can work it so that access to community is really what's being sold, it has a shot with this model. It might be particularly powerful for stores that do a lot of events.

Have to agree - I wonder if this is trying to solve the problems faced by physical bookstores, rather than trying to solve problems faced by consumers.

Another reply to you mentions the niche-in-a-big-market thought (which is fair enough), but for me something like Book Depository solves my 'problem' perfectly - painless, cheap, etc. I will read a book in the morning, lying in some ridiculous position on the couch, in airports; no part of me at those times wishes I was reading in some public space.

I have thought about something like this combined with a Xerox Docutech. I worked with one during college and was impressed that it could take pdf files off the network and do limited runs for class notes. It could even do some simple binding with heavy stock cardboard for the covers and some kind of adhesive for the spine.

I wouldn't want anything like a Kinkos but maybe the store could also do higher end binding of single books. I don't know how that is done now but I would probably pay for nice editions of particular books. Especially if I could customize the covers, stock etc.

My wife managed an independent bookshop for a few years (The Travel Bookshop) which had not only a prime London location and a nice niche, but a worldwide feature film to draw punters in from.

There's almost no money in this business, and some of the ideas in the article are frankly laughable (a "book gym"? LMAO) outside very small parts of the Valley perhaps in the boomiest of boom times.

I particularly liked the idea of a genius bar where they'll "fix your iPad". WTF? Sounds like one of the worst VC pitches you'll ever hear.

Nice try, Hugh Grant, but we know you're really an actor, not some bookshop owner.

If only.

Barnes and Noble would get more business from me if they'd make their online side and the stores work better together.

For instance, they have the ability on the site to find if a book is available in your local stores. How about extending that so that I can have a view that only shows books that are in stock at my local stores?

Another one would be to allow exchanges through the store. Right now they do allow returns--that is, buy online and decide you want to return it, and you can drop the return off at your local store instead of going through the hassle of shipping. However, if you buy online, and they ship you the wrong item or a defective item, and so you want an exchange rather than a return, then you have to ship back to them and have them ship you the correct item.

I think the author tries hard to ignore the role of technology.

1. It's clear that most books will be ebooks , especially for people interested in book communities.

2. It's pretty easy for anybody with an interest to form an offline(or offline/online) community anywhere using digital tools. reddit meetups are a good example.grubwithus is another. And they facilitate better communities at a cheaper(sometimes free) price.

3. The capability and benefits of online communities is always improving. Google+ hangouts is the latest example. Maybe in the future they'll replace offline book communities at all ?

hes talking about a coffee shop with a book focus

starbucks makes good money on people who just want to sit and read. A good coffee shop niche would be adding in a library and encouraging people to discuss books and such

Really tough sale, I'm not sure what value-add a "book store" can provide over a coffee shop.

Here's one idea: the customer pays a monthly membership. Any books they buy at the book store are shipped to the store and shelved for the customer. The customer can come in at any time and read their books or take them home. This is basically a privatized library. Maybe it could help with some of the problems libraries have.

But that's a very small niche. I'm not sure what a book store can provide that a coffee shop + kindle combination cannot.

Nice article. Interestingly, there's been a bit of buzz about Amazon finding local mail-holders (or distribution partners, or whatever) for "not home" deliveries. I think I saw an article somewhere today about a partnership with 7-Eleven stores - obviously, extending this to local bookstores could make lots of sense for everyone concerned (Amazon, customers, and local businesses who drive sales to Amazon).

The kiosk idea is interesting but would want some kind of transparent proxy to insert affiliate IDs, perhaps?

Amazon's book deliveries don't require a signature. They are waiting on the front porch or the mailbox depending on which carrier was used.

I wonder about the future of shops in general. It is nice to be able to see some products in reality before you buy them, but even now it is typical to seek shopping advice in a shop, then order from the cheapest internet vendor.

Could it be viable to create "look only" shops that only facilitate online sales? Maybe a lot of producers would even be willing to hand out the display merchandise for free?

I work in a small bookstore/coffee-shop in a smallish commuter town and there's one massive thing the author is missing out on: if you order from Amazon you don't get the @40% margin that forms the bulk of your profits. Having said that, I don't know anything about the Amazon affiliate fees programme - I imagine it'd be a very small cut?

I can only imagine that if bookstores started charging admission, big publishers would want a piece of it.

One other model that the article doesn't mention is evolving bookstores into 'show rooms' for books and ebooks. In a way, they are already for many people who use Amazon.

I've often wondered why Amazon doesn't partner with coffee shops. Amazon delivers a small library of free books to coffee shops, and partners with publishers to provide free promotional copies of their books.

Win/win/win.

Darwinism at its finest, find your niche or die.

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