What I Learned From Opening a Bookstore | Hacker News Reader

What I Learned From Opening a Bookstore

open.salon.com

302 pointsfogus68 comments

When people make lists like that, they usually come up with an odd number, like 8, and then think "Hey, if I think of two more I can make a list of 10". That's one of many reasons why such lists usually aren't reading.

With this list, I get the impression that instead she crossed off a few less worthy items to get the round number because it's pretty hard to find any fluff.

In which number system is 8 odd?

Probably odd as in weird.

odd as in "not-round". But agreed, poor choice of words. You'll notice later that I used "round" as the inverse. But what word should I have used? "not-round" is awkward.

Use odd and hope you give it enough context for most people to understand. And be glad natural language is infinitely flexible. :)

'Unusual'.

It would be pretty odd in base 7.

There is probably some marketing study that says people are less likely to read "top ten" lists. A non-ten list probably stands out more and suggests, "gee, this writer knows the exact number of items!" :)

Turns out mild loathing towards users isn't unique to software.

You never worked in retailing, right?

We call it "understanding the customer mindset" and is something that every small business owner in retail does intuitively. When formalized, organized and budgeted it is called marketing.

The difference is that small business owners in retail usually have better social skills than software developers and, therefore, are way more accepting of people's flaws.

> more accepting of people's flaws

Based on what they say when customers aren't around, I'm not sure it's accepting people's flaws so much as just being careful to rant about them out of earshot.

Designers: "No, 'kind of roundish' doesn't tell me what you want."

Editors: "This is a paragraph. Publishers usually want a few hundred pages."

IT: "No, we probably can't run [important software] off your office computer and save money."

> IT: "No, we probably can't run [important software] off your office computer and save money."

'Yes, I know we can get an HP desktop from Staples for $350, and yes, I still think that $10,000 is a reasonable price for the master database server.'

I suspect that, in retailing, it's one of these things where 95% of the customers are fine, but that last 5% take up a disproportionate amount of your time and mental energy, whether because they're clueless or morons or whatever. That's how I think jaded teachers / professors develop: most of their students are okay, but that small percentage of "story" students create all kinds of artificial barriers and special exceptions and so on that make the teacher / professor not real pleasant.

The same is true of video game retailing. The 20 minutes I spent arguing with someone who'd bought a game, torn open the CD sleeve with the serial on it (THROUGH the serial), spilt coffee on another CD sleeve, and then demanded that I let him return it because it didn't support LAN play is time I will never get back. And that was hardly one of the worst customers.

there's a great TV show called 'Black Books', if you want to truly understand loathing towards users you need to watch it.

People are getting rid of bookshelves. Treat the money you budgeted for shelving as found money. Go to garage sales and cruise the curbs.

I found this amusing as the first bullet point, since it pretty much screams, "Don't open a bookstore."

Which, to be fair, is her second bullet point.

Heh, wow. I read the article and managed to miss that sentence completely. Thank you for pointing it out.

Having just come in to work at an independent bookstore, I find most of it accurate, particularly the part about checks. We have an abnormally high-quality customer in that regard.

The one gripe I have is the thought that when people ask for historical-fiction they want romance, that's hardly the case here. That probably comes with the fact we're primarily a niche store focused on the sale of West Virgina History, and related, and West Virginian Authors. We rarely carry supply of Best-Seller list titles, with the exception of children's titles, because Amazon has severely undercut that business. We handle special-orders in this case, which take on average about 4 days.

Check out "West Virginia Historical Atlas" 2010, by WV Univ Press. I did the maps.

This was much fun too read. What I really would like to know is how book stores will look in 20 years? It seems the author sees her store more as a hobby and is not really concerned about the future?

Independent brick bookstores are going to look a lot like what's described here: some new books, but mostly used. Run on a very-slightly-profitable basis, in the cheapest commercial rental space available. One proprietor, who does most of the work, and occasional after-school or summer help. All the inventory will be on the web, thanks to a phone app that turns a picture of a book's cover into a full catalog listing. Prices will be depressed to rock-bottom, and some variant of the EBay "1 cent plus shipping" scheme will be the rule for anything not currently in demand.

In twenty years, your average $50 ebook reader will have a 300 dpi full-color full-motion transflective screen, readable in sunlight or with a backlight. Most of the weight will be battery. It will have a tiny CPU and a relatively studly GPU, a small amount of permanent storage (less than a terabyte) and a short distance wireless network link, which will feed your headphones if you want sound, or connect to your phone or your house networks.

There will be a secondary screen on the back which displays the book's cover. You will have the option of changing that to anything else you want to display.

Many people will not bother to buy them, because they already carry a phone that can do all that, just with a smaller screen.

I find this very sad. I do nearly all of my reading with dead tree books (I simply don't find e-readers nearly as satisfying), and if I want a book the first place I check is the used bookstore up the road. I tend to accumulate books faster than I have time to read them, and by the end of my first semester at college I had filled the woefully tiny (1 meter square) bookcase I brought with me and begun to overflow onto the windowsill and my desk.

Surely there are other people who are the same way?

Yes, I am this way as well, but I think of it as a kind of allowance of irrationality that I have to make up for in other ways. I love dead-tree books, but eBooks are better in pretty much every way. The bright side is that there are plenty of used books that will continue circulating through stores and private collections for many many years, and they'll be cheap.

I can't write all over the pages of an ebook the way I can a print book. That, unfortunately, makes them almost completely useless to me and many others.

Well, you can't YET. It's not especially difficult from a technical side.

...yet. Decent digitisation / handwriting recognition should take care of that, and will probably be ultimately more useful than physical notes, since you'll be able to search, edit, or send them to other people.

I'm the same way. It began when I was an undergraduate: the sight of crowded bookshelves in a professor's office – one actually sagging under its load – flipped the crazy switch in my brain. After I got my first real job, the project of accumulation began. Having a large home library is not without its problems, but it's also a real source of joy. My only regret is not taking the time to learn some basic carpentry skills.

I would hate to do serious research in a world of ebooks – and any sufficiently serious reader becomes a researcher – but for general use, they probably are a good technology for most readers. Defenders of the paper book need to remember that mass reading of paper books is a historically recent phenomenon, for some values of "recent".

Whereas my brain boggles at how big a pain it must have been to do a literature review pre-JSTOR/Web of Science/pdfs in general.

I am a voracious reader (generally 2-5 novels/equivalent per week, depending) and love ebooks. Carry 5 long novels, 3 YA series, 4 non-fiction books, my work literature, and an assortment of my favorite comfort/pickmeup novels/short stories/essays with me constantly and instantly searchable? Yes please.

I suspect that part of the secret to that one is called Librarians.

Well, that and it's likely that when doing a literature review is hard and time consuming, people aren't quite as concerned about it's completeness as well it's easy and quick.

Well there are still record stores, so books have a model to follow.

I was that way for years. After accumulating a certain number of cubic meters of books (wish this was hyperbole, but it's not), having shelves to put them on so that they're accessible requires a pretty hardcore commitment in terms of the layout and decor of your home, and moving becomes something of a logistic nightmare.

Many thousands of titles on a nice portable device I can take with me anywhere? Yes, please.

I have a service business, and one of my clients is a used records, books, cds, dvds, etc. We do a lot of trade work (instead of cash). The wife and I have a room we call "the library" - all of the shelves are mostly overstuffed (double-stacked and two-deep).

Also, while working at the client after hours, they showed me how to open the security cases so I can sample whatever audio I want on the store system - Makes the environment much nicer.

20 years?

In 20 years there will be very few bookshops. There will be a few niche "artisan" booksellers, which serve only old fogeys and whatever Hipsters will be called in 20 years time.

So the evolution of hipster will start with those whom gush about e-readers to those whom gush about paperbacks?

I'd submit we're already there. I've read at least three articles linked on HN alone in which the author comes to praise eBooks but feels they must desperately sing bizarrely tepid paens to paper books lest they lose their hipster creds.

8. If you put free books outside, someone will walk in every week and ask if they're really free, no matter how many signs you put out .

That's because the book has a physical existence. It's made of paper and ink, has a cover, etc. Adults understand it costs money to make such things, so it's better to put an inexpensive price on it, like $0.50, than to try to give it away.

It's odd that the opposite is true of e-books and e-media. The low cost of frictionless delivery gets confused with the true cost of production.

Kids will always go for free gum btw. That's in chapter 3 of the "being a kid" handbook.

Probably because they've been burned before in similar circumstances.

Maybe, but its not so rare to see physical things for free that an adult would be in disbelief at the very idea. I think that it's no trouble to me to ask "are these really free?", but it's a lot of troble to me to have you running down the road after me shouting "stop thief!", then shouting at me so I feel like a fool, then making me unwelcome to come bsck in future. Maybe you only mean some books, or a bit of the sign blew away, or I misunderstand the context, maybe someone put the sign there as a joke, maybe all sorts of awkward misunderstandings.

I'd yell "Stop Thief!" if you stole the sign and were running down the street chewing gum with a free book in your hand.

Great morning read, I'll have to be more careful about my fly...

This was a funny and somewhat insightful read; however, it misses some interesting points. Opening a bookshop (much better name than a bookstore, and if you think "what's the big deal about naming" you probably shouldn't even attempt to open one).

Allow me to offer my own list:

1. Opening a bookstore is very much like starting a startup in that a really high percentage of the attempts will fail. The big difference is that if you do succeed, you won't get rich.

2. If you think (1) is a sad consequence of today's soulless dominance of Amazon, people not reading, etc., then read Stuart Trent's The Seven Stairs where he chronicles his adventures in opening a bookshop in Chicago after WWII, where he details pretty much the same difficulties as today's bookshops face.

3. In order to succeed, you have to have a specialty, e.g. maps and map making, the classics, books on New York, etc. Stock a very good collection on the topic (or two) of your choosing and strive to be the best source of information and books in your state, than in the US for that topic.

4. Of course, in addition to (3) you have to have generalities, throw-away popular fiction, cookbooks, travel books, etc. But that it let dilute your niche.

5. Your store should have a unique atmosphere. Additional points if this correlates with your chosen topic niche.

6. Know and love your customers, even when they're weird (you'll encounter these much more frequently than would be expected from a normal distribution) and their flies are open. You have to earn their respect with your knowledge and collection. Again, refer to The Seven Stairs for a wonderful example of how this is done.

7. In case you skipped 1: remember that the wonderful Stuart Brent also failed (I had a chance to see his store on Michigan Ave in 1996, ran by his son, I believe; it was reduced to a standard B&N type of store and was closed in the late 90s).

8. Reread 6! If someone with a classical bent asks for historical fiction and you take them to the romance section they will never come back. If you don't have even a small collection of timeless classics, say Aurelius' Meditations, Khayyam's poetry, Ulysses (and, of course, Odysseus) yours is not a bookshop.

9. Learn how to use the Internet! Understand that probably a good percentage (if not the majority) of your sales will come through the Web, so have Web presence as good as your store. Put useful information on your web page.

10. Lastly, you just have to love books, this is no endeavour that a truly sane or financially dependent person should attempt. If reading Parnassus on Wheels doesn't truly move you (to tears), you are in the wrong business.

I agree with #1 the most. I really love hanging out in a bookstore, but I can't say that I often buy anything more expensive than a magazine. These days I only seem to have time to read programming books, and if I didn't buy them from amazon I wouldn't be able to afford them for very long.

Bookstores also have to deal with the fact that millions of people are switching over to ereaders. I myself prefer physical books, but there are plenty of situations where I find it more convenient to use my kindle.

Maybe there could be a bookstore with a bunch of Kindles laying around instead of physical books? Combine this with some kind of café and it might just work.

Of course, it would be hard to charge any kind of margin on the e-books as the customers can just whip out their own Kindle and buy the e-book directly from Amazon. And I don't know if it's even possible to become an e-book reseller like that. (Ie buy the right to re-sell a certain e-book 1000 times or whatever).

If I were to tackle the book business, I'd like to try something like that: ebooks plus an on-demand printing service for those that like their physical books :) .

I don't know if there's a good binder for such a service, but I've been demoed some very impressive printers at very cheap per-page prices on loan.

The real problem, of course, is securing the copyrights and the right to print or resell the books.

I think maybe 3 is a little bit narrow. I agree that it needs something that sets it apart from the giant online tubes where all books come from but it doesn't necessarily have to be as much a specialty, it can be an editorial perspective. For instance, one of my favorite book shops ever: Green Arcade in downtown San Francisco. It has a pretty general selection but all somewhat skewed to a particular social perspective. I'm not sure I'd call this specializing per se as adding a human touch that, if you agree/are aligned with his perspective on things, will allow you to have a lot more faith in the book you're about to drop $30 on.

How did your bookshop turn out?

I'm suprised bookstores are still viable business. I can not come up with any real benefit of buying books in a store.

The only reason that comes to my mind is the joy of browsing, maybe buying something you've seen somewhere recommended before. Are impulse buyers a huge part of the market?

I've been to a local private bookstore twice and the only customers I've seen there are people who probably prefer face-to-face and resent the distant and modern way of buying things, where the only social interaction is saying hello to the mailman.

Could the bookstore provide me with anything amazon couldn't? Books that were unavailable to amazon were unavailable to them. Imports took even longer and due to not living in an english speaking country, 99% of the books on the shelves were translations which I don't want to read. Which is even more of a problem in bookstore chains. We have one with four large floors and a café. How many shelves of Twilight in German the day on release? About 10. How many shelves constantly filled with english literature? 1. Out of a number that probably goes in the hundreds.

Well, this seems to be about used bookstores, given the talk about buying books from the public and giving stuff away for free. So the pricing will be good.

Also, a LOT of books are bought as gifts, and gifts books are usually bought by browsing.

I do believe that there is a market for physical bookstores that can manage to fill a particular niche. Case in point, have you been to many technical bookstores? I know of two that I love: Powell's Technical in Portland, OR and Ada's in Seattle.

The advantage of these stores is that, as a nerd, I'm pretty much at least vaguely interested in every book they have there, so the serendipity in browsing is high. Also, these places have used copies co-shelved, which just increases the odds that I will pick something up randomly.

btw, across the street from powell's tech is the flagship powell's, which has 1 million books and like a whole room full of english lit: http://www.powells.com/pdf/burnside_map_2011.pdf

My favorite thing about used bookstores is that the books are cheap: I can try out new authors (based on nothing more than the cover and the blurb on the back) and not feel I'm wasting money. This goes double since I'll be trading in my previous set of novels, so those new authors are even cheaper, and I won't have any compulsion to keep the books around.

My second-favorite thing is browsing a (relatively) small selection; Amazon is so amazingly huge that I'm not sure where to begin, but browsing a dozen shelves of <insert interest here> is fast and easy.

Browsing is a biggie, though. Amazon does not deliver in that respect. Or at least browsing on Amazon is very different (say Filter Bubble).

Still, I don't see many bookshops surviving either.

One thing I do is keep old books in the trunk of my car. Whatever a store won't buy I put back in my trunk. Every couple of weeks I add some newer books and try again. Sometimes books that were rejected the first time are bought later. A few months ago I was on a short road trip and tried to sell my stuff in another town. They bought everything I had, even some old pc games.

I wonder if these smaller, indie bookshops would benefit by being a bookshop+cafe . A place you could grab a coffee and snack while catching up on reading or news. There was this very nice place back where I went to grad school. Old used books, good coffee and snacks. I really miss having such a place where I live now.

To misquote the elders: If you have a bookshop and use a cafe to solve a problem, now you have two problems.

Good article from 2005 on opening a coffee shop, also from Slate: http://www.slate.com/articles/life/a_fine_whine/2005/12/bitt...

in my country, the biggest sections in bookstores are self-help and "how you get rich [really really fast]"

That sounds like chain bookstores where I'm from (the US). Independent bookstores are usually different.

This also reminds me of an old joke from a friend: You know the bookstore is bad if the Philosophy section is filled with copies of The Tao of Pooh.

You know the bookstore is bad if the Philosophy section is filled with copies of The Tao of Pooh.

Or it's a GREAT bookstore!

I bought a copy on audio tape and listen to it every couple of months. I find "pooh-tao" (as my wife and I call it) very entertaining.

And easier to pick up at any point in the work than Castaneda, Hitchens, Socrates, etc. Good for driving background audio, in my opinion...

I saw the Salon domain and made a point of grabbing a beverage before settling in and clicking the link, hoping to read an engaging, well written, lengthy article.

While I was initially disappointed to see that this wasn't at all what I was expecting, I was pleasantly surprised to find that the list was engaging and well written, even if it wasn't a lengthy magazine article.

This is a rare case where the HN headline would be better, to me, if the "25 Things" was left in the title, even if that is technically against the submission rules.

"people do in fact buy books based on the color of the binding"

Come on, tell us which colors sell better than others?

I asked this on her blog:

As a programmer who's always looking for new projects, this made me curious.

What is a piece of software that would make your life as a used book store owner easier?

What is a piece of software that would help your customers?

Please give me some ideas if you have any :)

"... What I really would like to know is how book stores will look in 20 years? ..." @sunnysideup ~ http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3518193

This is really the most insightful question here. What would a book store look like? I'll have a stab.

Eighteen years ago the Internet existed but the Web was just being born. I come from Melbourne. Melbourne really is a book city with bookshops catering for different interests. Those who liked comics, science fiction or books on artwork gravitated towards Minotaur in Swanston St, classics or first editions One Tree Hill on Collins, old books and out of print first editions a small shop at the top of Swanston St. The general public might go to a chain bookshop like "Collins" or "Angus or Robinsons". But if it was anything technical, you turned to McGills.

McGills was a second home to people needed fast access to very specific information. You would probably buy the source of the information if you needed it in a hurry or read it if out of interest. Remember the Web was in its infancy. To gain access to technical information to build things (software) there was no other choice. McGills was a hub for nerds. You'd find programmers, engineers and scientists who would pop in, look for a particular reference book at lunch time. As the afternoon wore on it would fill up with students too poor to buy monthly subscriptions to Wired, Game programmer or the latest Dr.Dobbs. The era at this time was disconnected but strangely connected.

Now we have seen what's happened in the last 20 years. The publishing industry is changing their distribution technology from print to electronic displays. The demise of the bookshop and books. Even so, the prices are similiar.

What might happen in the next 20?

Discoverability

    Everyone has a little Nancy Drew in them.  Stock 
    up on the mysteries. 

    It is both true and sad that some people do in fact 
    buy books based on the color of the binding.

We used to go to book shops to find books but the next 20 years is going to get more frustrating when choosing. Twiddling your thumbs over the "next" button is the new walking down the isle looking for one particular book. You want the google equivalent of book finding. It might be by colour, author, a quote, a film reference, music or voice of a character that played it on the successor of Hollywood. Companies are still working on this hard problem. How to see the product readers want from millions of titles on one small device.

Location

    If you open a store in a college town, and maybe even 
    if you don't, you will find yourself as the main human 
    contact for some strange and very socially awkward men 
    who were science and math majors way back when.  Be nice 
    and talk to them, and ignore that their fly is open.

Books have a social element. Instead of going to a bookshop you now go to your favourite cafe who have installed a new WIFI gadget. It's only found in particular cafe's catering for the intersection of coffee lovers and technical book readers. It has all the latest Open Source manuals, blog articles collected into books. We dropped the ePub or electronic reference to books years ago. This place is "hacker friendly" so you can chat to other hackers. Specialist WIFI gadgets are appearing all around the place in food outlets catering for particular audiences. The social aspect of books hasn't disappeared, just morphed.

Sharing

    If you put free books outside, cookbooks will be gone 
    in the first hour

Sharing is now a problem. There are free books and restricted books. If you can't afford a book you can book it at the library to download it. It ceremoniously burns on your machine when the time to hand it back has passed. Another person can now borrow a digital copy. The concept of digital ownership becomes a political one. Book owners don't take up the "Cloud" concept after the great cloud hack in 2028. Millions of books are electronically burnt on owners devices as rouge elements of "Anonymous" take their "Library of Alexandria" action too far. All in the name of freer access to live news feeds. We still hook up to bookshops; glorified websites with sparse text and images of book titles and a google like search engines with predictive analysis software. Sharing of books is difficult. The hardware detects who is using the book. Sharing is not impossible but difficult and risky. Hacks for reader devices are there, if you want to risk being detected and black banned from device sellers. There is always the black market. One of the unintended consequences in ownership restrictions, is if you move from one area to another your book becomes locked and you can't read it unless you pay a regional fee.

Information

    No one buys  self help books in a store where there's 
    a high likelihood of  personal interaction when paying.

The price of certain types of "information of value" skyrockets. Value is dependent on information usage in the market. There are market indexes for everything. Even childrens books like Dr.Suess. Censorship is rife but regional. You can't access certain types of information in books in certain areas. Old printed books that contain this information go up in price if they can be found. Information is bought and sold on ones ability to locate valuable information in private libraries. Enterprising companies that use software to mine old or cheap information and repackaging it as specialist books thrive. Software companies specialising in producing software to extract the essence of book classics like Shakespeare and write alternative scripts for media-vision networks. There's the Chinese version of "Macbeth" portraying the past regime and a portrayal of the Steinbeck classic, "Grapes of Wrath". Recast to the present show the migration of Californians moving east to escape the water crisis bought on by severe temperatures and drought. New publishing empires are formed.

Cost

    You will have no trouble getting books, the problem is 
    selling them.

    There's also no need to perpetuate the myth by pricing 
    your signed Patricia Cornwell higher than the non-signed 
    one.

The economics of book production change. The cost is now reflected in popularity, the sophistication of the language, translation, region and censorship restrictions. Books that have been simplified are now more expensive than complicated books. The cost of books fluctuates as the numbers of people who buy it increases or decreases. Books that are popular in certain areas of restricted information become expensive. Some people set up companies to monitor the costs and allow customers to purchase books at their lowest cost.

Display

    People are getting rid of bookshelves.

The display is the new bookshelf. People spend lots of money to purchase the latest hardware. When at home, bookshelves are projected on the TV screen to show what you might want to read. The constraint of the reader is size. Large screens solve this problem scanning personal readers and the network feed then showing a physical representation of the book on the screen for users to see and pick.

Psychologists work out that humans are still optomised to scan for titles laid out in physical space. Humans can't interface directly with the reading devices yet. That invention happens 10 years in the future.

After trying to run an ebook marketplace, I can empathize with #14.

I thought this was great, and rather humorous. Funny thing is, unlike #1, I just bought a bookshelf less than two weeks ago.

Reading her list reminds me of when I worked in a record store back when I was a teenager.

One thing I quickly learned is when a grandma asked what album/artist do I recommend for her grandson, she wasn't asking for MY recommendation (i.e. Zodiak Mindwarp and the Love Machine or whatever the heck I was listening to).

The correct answer was almost always Rick Astley.

WONDERFUL!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com