My July 12
edition of the Globe and Mail newspaper has an article about Munro’s Books, an
independent bookstore in Victoria, British Columbia, Canada. This is a notable independent bookstore, as
it first opened in 1963 when Canadian writer Alice Munro was married to Jim
Munro. Alice Munro has since won the
Nobel Prize in Literature, for her lifetime output which tended towards
connected short story anthologies, such as “Lives of Girls and Women” and “Who
do you Think you Are?”
It turns out
that Jim Munro is leaving the bookstore business after 50 years. That’s not surprising, given that the article
states that he is 84 years old. When
asked whether he would advise anyone to follow him into the book business, he
is quoted as saying “Don’t do it.”
Essentially, he chalks that up to how difficult it is to run a physical
bookstore, given the competition from online bookstores and ebooks.
He is
passing the store on to four senior employees, starting this September. They will pay him rent for the 4500 square
feet of space, but other than that, he is basically giving them the store and
the inventory. The inventory is said to
“hover around 30,000 books at any given time”.
It is hard
to say how to even evaluate an inventory of 30,000 print books these days. A decade or so in the past, they might have
each been a potential $10 profit (or more) to a book seller, meaning at least a
quarter million in value. But the way
things are, they might not fetch even a small fraction of that on the open
market.
It’s the
same for the goodwill of the business – in the not too distant past, the
goodwill of a 50 year old going concern would have been worth a lot. Note that goodwill are all those intangibles
that an established business has – steady customers, relationships with
suppliers, reputation in the community and so forth. But when readers are transitioning to ebooks,
all of those intangibles are worth a lot less than they used to be, even though
the Munro name is now connected to the prestigious Nobel Prize in Literature (so
now it will forever have a place in literary history).
The
inventory of 30,000 books is a key part of the problem. How can a store compete with Amazon or the
other e-retailers, when they have a nearly boundless inventory, in the
millions? Even physical bookstore
chains, like Chapters and Barnes and Noble have trouble competing, and their
stores can easily exceed 100,000 books.
It’s the same with knowledgeable staff, who can make good
recommendations and who know how to special order less popular and rare
books. How do you compete with
·
tens
of thousands of Amazon reviews (provided free by customers),
·
Also
Bought recommendations (a very clever algorithm which has persuaded me to buy a
lot of books and DVDs I didn’t even know about before it brought them to my
attention),
·
and an inventory that can satisfy the vast
majority of niche interests (and is growing bigger and more varied every day)?
In my own
hometown of Edmonton, Alberta, Canada we have seen one very prominent
independent bookstore close down over the past year or so (late 2012 to be
exact). That would be Greenwood’s Books,
a fixture in the popular Old Strathcona area of Edmonton since the late 1970’s. This was partly precipitated by the death of
one of the owners, who was the key business mind behind the store. The others (family) didn’t think they could
make a go of it without his business acumen. But it was probably no coincidence
that they made that decision when they did – i.e. just as the ebook revolution
was getting seriously underway.
The
remaining big independent in Edmonton is Audrey’s books, also long a fixture,
in the downtown area. I can recall
special ordering a computer book there in the mid-1980’s. It was where you went for that sort of
service back then (Audrey’s or Greenwoods Books). The book was called “Simply Dbase II”. Interestingly enough, it is still available
on Amazon (as a used paperback) – a simple Google search was all it took to
find that out (see the image below). It makes
me wonder who would pay nearly fifty bucks for an old obsolete software manual,
but there must be a market. Collectors
maybe? It’s amazing what people will
collect.
I guess that
tells you something about business disruption and technological transformation.
In this case, Amazon is the preserver of
one sort of heritage (the book Simply Dbase II, still available), though it
might eventually be the cause of the loss of a different sort of heritage (the
physical bookstore). That’s the long
tail in a nutshell (to mix metaphors).
I have been
back to Audrey’s on many occasions since then, of course. In fact, I was recently downtown to take a course in Social Media
Analytics (that’s worth a blog itself, someday soon), so I dropped into
Audrey’s over lunch one day. It is still
there, on 108 Street and Jasper Avenue, at the same location and about the same
size as ever.
I bought a
couple of books, as a birthday present.
I also made the following notes on the inside of one of them (Survival
of the Nicest by Stefan Klein, $12.98 today on Kindle, $31.95 three weeks ago at
the bookstore), while having lunch a few minutes later at a nearby restaurant:
·
Audrey’s
Science Fiction: 8 sets of shelves X 4 shelves per set X 20 books per shelf =
640 SF books.
·
Many
of these were well known backlist titles: Prachett, Toklein, Jordan. There wasn’t much that a novelty seeking SF
reader would find intriguing.
·
Compare
that to Amazon, which had 163,000 SFF (Science Fiction and Fantasy) titles in
July of 2014, of which 74,000 were Science Fiction.
·
In
one niche category alone, Romance – Science Fiction, the Amazon Kindle store
had over 4,000 titles. It is difficult
to see how any store could compete with that.
Granted, that also makes it hard for writers to be discovered, but
that’s life in an open market.
·
The
lower floor of the store was completely devoted to children’s books and
toys. I would say at least half was
games and plush toys. I can recall
picking up a poetry anthology by Ted Hughes a few years earlier in that
location.
·
There
was nothing like that now at Audrey’s (that I could see, anyway), though I
noted there were plenty of anthologies by Ted Hughes on the Amazon Kindle store
today, many quite reasonably priced. To
be fair, though, I didn’t look very hard for the poetry section at Audrey’s on
that visit. Also, to be fair, it only
took me a few seconds on the Amazon search engine to find dozens of his
anthologies.
·
I
noticed that a lot of the bookshelves had books “cover out”, rather than “spine
out”. That makes those books more
prominent to the eye, but it also covers a possible shortage of inventory. You can make a smaller number of books seem
to go further, if they are cover out.
·
The
store didn’t look down at the heels or anything like that. It was clean and pleasant, and the staff
seemed to be happy enough. So, you never
know. They might be doing ok. I hope so – it is still nice to have a
bookstore to drop into, when I am downtown.
Anyway,
those were my latest field observations concerning the health of the print book
store, with special emphasis on the independent bookstore.
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