As new directions for bookselling evolve, the industry is increasingly looking to take advantage of the changes taking place across the entire retail spectrum. “I think the last two years... have been extraordinary in the sense that technology has deconstructed... retail,” stated Devin Wenig, president of eBay Marketplaces. “We’re past the tipping point,” he continued. “It’s not about the phone or the desktop or the store—it’s about all of those.” While this so-called omni-channel strategy will take some time for independent booksellers to adopt, they are looking at ways to innovate. “With more indies in the ecosystem, each iterating around different ideas, not everyone will make it, but the ‘species’ will, thanks to those who figure [the future] out,” said Neil Strandberg, director of technology for the American Booksellers Association.
Changes in bookselling are being supported by traditional publishing supply-chain partners who offer innovative services for bookstores, like Ingram’s “direct-to-home” shipping. Matthew Norcross and his wife, Jessilyn, own and operate McLean and Eakins Booksellers in Petoskey, Mich., a resort town on Lake Michigan. They have used the service to give the store a 365-day presence. “Although some customers see us only in the summer, thanks to ‘direct to home,’ they buy from us year-round,” Norcross explained.
A development that will profoundly change the entire retail game is what tech companies like Cisco call the “Internet of Everything.” Cisco estimates that by 2020 there will be 50 billion “smart” objects in the world, things that can communicate and interact wirelessly with computers, handheld devices, and each other. If houses, cars, refrigerators, televisions, even tomatoes can be “smart,” it seems unlikely that books will be left behind. Norcross envisions a “smart” book that would interact with an app on a customer’s smartphone, showing exactly where the volume is located in the store.
Yet retailing in the future won’t be all digital. “While I think a lot about the upheaval of self-driving cars, etc.,” Norcross noted, “human interactions are not replicable. We have customers, who, with the closing of bookstores in their towns, spend eight hours in our store the first day of their vacation.” Norcross added, “And everything that’s supposed to be eradicated tends to come back, even vinyl records.” Norcross has sold some 35 turntables at $130 each, and $5,000 worth of LPs. Wenig agreed that the “death of the store has been greatly exaggerated. People... like the serendipity of stores. Shopping is as much about entertainment and engagement as it is about [just buying a book].”
Norcross and his staff subscribe to the Kobo philosophy that it’s about the content, not the channel. However, while McLane and Eakins sends out an email to some 5,000 subscribers every Monday, “We don’t really do anything else with the customer data we generate,” Norcross acknowledged. According to Wenig, that is precisely the problem: “Understanding how to connect with your core customers across every way they want to connect... requires [new approaches to] design and product management... [as well as knowing] how to market in a digital world.”
One way booksellers can reach customers is to tap the knowledge of their staff, something Simon & Schuster is doing with its new “Behind the Book” video series. “We never think that a consumer’s loyalty is to anything but the author or book,” explained S&S spokesman Adam Rothberg, “but we have a lot of articulate professionals with good stories. In an age when hardcore readers and fans want to vacuum up any info they can about book[s] and authors, we have reservoirs of knowledge, info, even gossip we can use.”
The time has come for booksellers to do the same: build on what is already happening in retail, experiment with new directions, and fill their own reservoirs with new customer approaches and retail savvy.
