More Independent Bookstores Closing

Lis says:

Re:Did we really need them?
Since Larry McMurtry’s bookstore was a used book store, it’s unlikely that he’d have any problem with Bibliofuture also being in the used-book business.

Have you ever had a yard sale, and sold off cheaply some no-longer-wanted pieces of furniture? The designs for those pieces of furniture, and the fabric covering them if they were upholstered, were also someone’s intellectual property–but the physical object was yours, and what you sold was the physical object, not the intellectual property rights. It’s the same with books. You own the copy, you can sell the copy; what you can’t do is make more copies and sell or give away those.

As for independent bookstores: When I lived in Concord, NH, and, even after I moved, while I still worked there, I had access to a wonderful independent bookstore, Gibson’s Books. They didn’t carry a lot of what I liked originally, but they would special-order anything, and as I shopped and special-ordered regularly, they started getting in more of what I liked, so that after a while they were getting a lot that I liked but hadn’t heard of until I walked in the store and saw it on the shelf. They also responded creatively and effectively to the arrival of Borders Books in town, and lost the teenage evening date crowd (no, really; don’t believe what you hear about teenagers and books), but otherwise weren’t greatly affected by it.

Sadly, many independent bookstore owners don’t want to work that hard, and/or simply aren’t as good businesspeople. The latter is certainly true of Avenue Victor Hugo, whose owner, as the rents rose too high on Newbury Street to allow Avenue Victor Hugo’s business model to be successful, steadfastly refused to move to the kind of area that upper Newbury Street had been when he first opened his store, or to change his business model to something that would be at home on the new Newbury Street.

The owners of Gibson’s hated the internet and the terrible threat it represented when I first moved there, but by the time I stopped working in Concord, they had long since discovered that, via the miracle of the internet, they could sell a book to some guy in South Africa who was never going to walk into their store, even if he did someday make a trip to the US. Gibson’s, because it responded both to changes in its local market and the effects of the internet, is still going strong. Larry McMurtry decided he didn’t want to change his business model to stay in the bookselling business and chose to close his store. Others, though, don’t want to the way they do business to adjust to the changing market, and also don’t want to accept the fact that there’s no longer a market for buggy whips. Times are inevitably going to be rough for them. The small, general-interest independent bookstore that isn’t offering something different from what Amazon, abebooks, Borders, and Barnes & Noble are offering is in trouble. The independent bookstore that finds a niche it can fill that isn’t being filled by those, is not.

Lis says:

Re:Gibson’s Bookstore Could Be The Next To Go
Big box stores have many drawbacks, but poorly-run businesses that are not meeting any perceived need for their prospective customers will not stay in business. Why is this hard to understand?

When you provided the link to the Gibson’s website, I expected to find that something Bad had happened. In fact I find that Michael Herrmann and John I-Forget-His-Last-Name are still there taking their pro-active, rather than reactive, approach to the challenges of keeping an independent bookstore in business. They’re not resting on their Virtue as Independent Booksellers; they’re actually out there making their store a place that everyone values and wants to shop in. Avenue Victor Hugo is gone because its owner refused to make any changes to his business, despite a lot of support from the community, including other local businesses. WordsWorth is gone from Harvard Square, because that model of large, general-interest, independent bookstore could no longer survive in the high-rent, mallified place that Harvard Square has become. And yet, in that same Harvard Square, the same owners’ specialty children’s bookshop, Curious George, is still doing well, the specialty sf shop Pandemonium is doing well, and some other independent specialty bookstores are still in business. This is because, instead of just whining about the fact that an independent like WordsWorth can’t survive in the Square anymore, they are visibly offering their customers something that those customers can see that they can’t get at Barnes & Noble.

No matter how good it may theoretically be for “the community” in the abstract, as a practical matter, I’m not going to spend much time shopping in a store which is actively disinterested in my business. “Actively disinterested”, in the case of bookstores, includes responding to queries about books they don’t have with “We don’t have that.” [No offer to special-order it.] It includes making statements like “We’re a serious bookstore,” when I ask about a lack sf & fantasy. It includes telling me “That’s not sci-fi, that’s literature, as if the two were mutually exclusive, when I comment on books that are manifestly fantasy or sf (such as Jasper Fforde’s books), shelved amongst the general fiction.

The big-box chain stores, of course, commit all of these sins, too–with one important exception. They don’t commit the first sin I listed; they’re sometimes almost too eager to special-order something I’ve asked about that they don’t have in stock. And Amazon and other online sellers simply index a book in as many different categories as seem likely to attract readers interested in that book.

What the independents can do (but too often don’t) that the big-box stores can’t, is what Gibson’s did for me while I was in Concord. They didn’t just special-order particular titles I asked for; over time, they actually changed their stock to include a much higher percentage of the kind of high-quality, well-written sf and fantasy that I like. Over time, I began to go in there and find books on the shelf that I would have special-ordered had I known about them, but I didn’t. And they’d pull books off the shelf and say, “Have you seen this yet?” and nearly every time they’d be right–it was something I wanted. B&N and Borders are never going to do that for me, and Amazon tries but has a much lower success rate. The problem is that too many independents aren’t trying to do this; they sell what they want to sell, and their prospective customers go to the big-box chains or to Amazon instead, where they may get the same poor service, but without the attitude, and they do get their books.

And a final note: you refer to independent bookstores now carrying used books, too, rather than exclusively new books, as if it were an obviously bad thing. Why? Why shouldn’t independents be trying to provide something that the big-box chains either can’t do, or can’t do as well?