To me, this is what is missing so many times when people say that technology is killing something or is the death of a standard. Technology is not killing industry, industry is like the slow or injured member of the herd that gets picked off by the lions because it can’t keep up with everyone else. Yes, I’m saying technology is the lions because it’s culling the herd of fat, slow, set in their ways creatures who refuse to adapt to the world around them.

Instead of giving up or just coasting, the Harvard Bookstore owner saw a way to integrate technology with his industry. He adapted and used it to improve the customer experience. He didn’t completely alter it, he didn’t change what people do, he just made it easier for them to do what they normally do.

That’s something I’ve seen constant cries for here on Techdirt, let me do what I need to do or give me what I want/need in a way that is not a hassle. This guy gets it and that is why I think he will succeed, he’s not the slow fat gazelle in the herd. He’s the one who’s been looking around at his environment, alert for predators and ready to go. Nothing in this life is just given to you and if you own a business and want to succeed, you have to work for it, it’s not going to fall in your lap.

Thus ends my first ever post on Techdirt, didn’t expect to go off on a rant. I look forward to any corrections, diverging opinions and general clamour that will hopefully follow.

/Shadey

I think you are right, hard copy books are never going to disappear but your suggestion of local book stores finding innovative ideas to recapture their customers is great. It is all about providing a service that cannot be provided online. Great post, thanks!

‘many of those customers will simply browse and then order the books online at a lower price’

they did their bit to keep the bookstores open by going through the shop door and browsing. the fact that they bought nothing there and as almost everyone does with almost everything, actually bought on-line at a lower cost, is irrelevant to them.

I have a Nook. I find books with photographs to be far superior to their electronic counterparts. I still regularly go to the bookstore to buy books on nature photography. This is one area where physical books can outperform the digital medium.

In my experience, the kind of bookstores people romanticize about, the kind of bookstores which have resident cats, and scholars hanging out in the aisles, are usually used bookstores. The irregular shelving is well adapted to an irregular stock, consisting of whatever the customers bring in to trade. And of course, Scott Turow does not receive royalties from used bookstores. Therefore, one can assume that he hates them.

A lot of used bookstores “square the circle,” by having used books in the basement or the attic, and something more lucrative on the main floor. In my time in Boston, as a prep school student, circa 1973-76, I used to patronize a small used bookstore in Church Street, behind the Harvard Coop. One half of its used book department was in the basement, down a rickety stairway. The main floor was given over to postcards, small plush toys (teddy bears), and similar souvenirs. The other half of the used book department was in an attic over the repair garage across the way. I recently did some street-view-crawling, and discovered that the location of the main store is now occupied by a yogurt parlor, or something like that, and the garage has simply vanished. I don’t mean the business, I mean the building itself. Used bookstores have never been able to compete for retail space with “carriage trade” businesses such as yogurt parlors. Come to that, I understand that another long-time Church Street institution, Sage’s Grocery Store, has bit the dust, unable to compete with PeaPod deliveries, and with the growing sophistication of chain grocers in the suburbs. The space is now used to sell cellphones.

I don’t think you can put the clock back. The kind of young people who read omnivorously are very comfortable with the internet, very comfortable reading words on a screen, and they go straight to the Gutenberg Project, or straight to Hathi Trust. They aren’t inclined to pay for what they can download for free. Graduate students all have their little electronic cameras, and can be expected to snap-snap their way through library books, like the characters in old spy movies. They are not going to pay twenty or forty dollars for a single book if there is any possible alternative. Not while they are living on ramen noodles and canned beans.

On the other side of the fence, authors who don’t reasonably expect to make meaningful sums of money on books are choosing to give them away on the internet. There are more or less substantial costs involved in dealing with publishers, and unless one can expect correspondingly substantial sales, the game isn’t worth the candle. The basic new book market is someone who is about twelve years old, and reading, more or less under duress, in a middle school somewhere. Traveling salesmen who used to read books on airliners because there wasn’t anything else to do can now carry a movie in an electronic device instead, something more suited to their mental horizons, or else they can clear off their paperwork on their notebook computers. If you want to write a book which is way beyond the understanding of twelve-year-olds, you cannot expect to make very much money. The publishing industry is steadily squeezing down to a much narrower range of books.

Amazon’s baseline price for used books, the price which just covers operating expenses, and applies to books which are not remotely scarce, is about four dollars. Amazon is presently absorbing Kiva Robots, and once they have enough robots, and recast their business practices around them, they will probably revise their price structure to conform to Edward R. Hamilton’s baseline price structure during the great publishers inventory sell-off of the 1990’s, of four or five dollars for the first book, and one dollar for each additional book. The cheaper Amazon can sell a used paper book– which does not require copyright permission– the more leverage Amazon has for negotiating with the publisher to put books on the Kindle– which does require such permission. Amazon will do whatever it can to make the sale of physical used books run as near to internet speeds as possible. When you are buying books for a dollar each, you don’t browse through the pages, you buy everything which looks as if it might be interesting.

There really aren’t very strong economies of scale in computer printers. At this stage, you can get a black-and-white laser printer for a couple of hundred dollars, with competitively priced toner, which is fast enough to print a book in ten or twenty minutes, faster than you could go much of anywhere, or receive a delivery. Presumably you can use software to put four or eight pages on both sides of a single 8-1/2X11 sheet of paper, and strip out the color parts, and route them to an inkjet printer, and afterwards intercolate the color pages with the black-and-white pages. People who consumed a lot of books, and didn’t want to read them on the screen would have their own printers and bookbinding tools. I do a certain amount of “repair bookbinding,” for old books which have lost their covers, or have had their binding glue disintegrate, and I don’t think it’s all that difficult. In other words, I doubt that printing has enough inherent centralization for a bricks-and-mortar bookstore to hang onto it. In the long scheme of things, people chose to own their own computers, rather than go to a central computer lab. The same principle probably applies to custom printing.

For what it is worth, there was a weird stage in the early sixteenth century, just when printing presses were coming in. Rich people would buy a printed book, and then turn around and hire a scribe to hand-copy it out for them with his pen. That didn’t last for very long, of course.