Good Books: When, Where, and How You Want Them
Peter Osnos, 4/5/2006
Since the 1970s, the ancient art of bookselling has undergone, by my count, five major upheavals. The time-honored “shop around the corner” has been besieged by the razzle-dazzle of big corporations like Barnes & Noble, Amazon and Costco, which has a metric for book sales that measures palettes and “deletes” with ruthless skill any book that misses its number. Now, I believe, bookselling may be on the edge of another transformation that could actually secure, albeit in updated fashion, links to a cozier past.
The first big change was the arrival of mall stores such as Walden, Dalton and Crown, which had simple fixtures, a mix of popular and tested titles and discounting. The stores vastly increased access to books in the sprawling suburbs and focused on turnover instead of personal service to make margins. Independent booksellers devised a good response: The superstore. One of the most famous was and is, Tattered Cover in Denver, which provided a full range of choice, superb service and community center amenities like book groups, author visits and family-friendly settings.
Then, Barnes & Noble, driven by the entrepreneurial ferocity of Len Riggio, made the superstore into a national business defined by supply, price and buying power, which put big retailers increasingly in command of the terms of trade by charging for placement. Borders, which began as an independent superstore in Ann Arbor, used the first computerized inventory system as its way to grow and was eventually bought by K-Mart, which spun it off as a separate company. It is now second only to Barnes & Noble in scale and has opened stores around the world. In 1995, Amazon made a true breakthrough in the retail experience, providing the sense of nearly infinite supply, deep discounts in price and easy ordering. It is now the third largest retailer of books and its bargains are still great. But its early folksiness is long gone and Amazon now operates (and behaves) like other corporate behemoths in a variety of ways that affect mainly suppliers.
The rise of Wal-Mart, Costco and Target were the next wave. They only take books they can predict will work with their customers, buy them in very large numbers and return them immediately for full credit if they miss their assigned sell-rate. Putting a book in these outlets before their sales are proven elsewhere carries a risk of 75 to 90 percent returns in the worst cases.
Meanwhile, the role of the smaller independent bookseller as an overall percentage of book sales has dropped and thousands have closed, in much the same way as moms-and-pops of all kinds are giving in to bigger rivals. Yet the remaining independents are a very hardy and imaginative bunch. There are scores of great stores around the country and one of the best, Northshire in Manchester, Vermont, is this year’s Bookseller of the Year, chosen by Publishers Weekly. Recently doubled in size and now managed by Chris Morrow, son of the founders, Ed and Barbara, Northshire is much more than a store. It is a major local asset. The best bookstores combine nostalgia for the role books have played in our lives through childhood, school and college, parenting, friendship, love and even grief with constantly updated supply and service.
So what is next?