Ever wonder if there was a way to compare and rank the world's top bookstores? Paul X. McCarthy, CEO of Online Gravity Consulting, a corporate innovation and technology strategy advisory firm, and the author of Online Gravity (Simon & Schuster), decided to find out and created a special index based on web data to calculate a store’s popularity, or notoriety. It may have come as little surprise that mega e-tailer Amazon topped McCarthy’s list of the top 40 bookstores or that Barnes & Noble was #3. But several U.S. indies also appeared, including Powell’s Books in Portland and City Lights Bookstore in San Francisco at #14 and 15, respectively. New York City’s The Strand was slightly further down at #25, and The Coop in Cambridge, Mass., ranked #34. McCarthy talked to PW about the creation of the list.
What is “bookstore mind share” and why do you consider it more important than sales in ranking the world’s favorite bookstores?
Bookstore Mind Share is a new measure I’ve created that aims to capture the cumulative ‘‘fame’’ or how well remembered bookstores are by how many people and how often. It draws on large amounts of online data to examine the habits of over 300 million global web users to see who thinks about which bookstores and how often. It’s not better than a sales ranking, but offers a new way of looking at the relative scale of the visibility of brands of very different types of booksellers.
Even though your list includes a mix of online retailers, chain booksellers, and independents, Amazon and its subsidiaries (The Book Depository and AbeBooks) hold three of the top seven slots. What do you think this says about the way people shop worldwide?
We are all creatures of habit. If, like me, you have a favorite local independent bookstore, you may pop in on a regular basis just to browse. Online, however, there’s an invisible force that guides us towards shared habits driven by a number of factors that I call ‘‘Online Gravity.’’ It’s a central theme of my new book. Have you ever wondered why single online planetary-scale businesses emerge in each category such as Amazon, Facebook, or AirBnB, whereas in most offline industry we have multi-planetary systems—Coke and Pepsi, Tiffany & Co. and Cartier, and MasterCard and Visa?
Your list seems to have skipped mass merchandisers like Wal-Mart and Target, which are a significant part of the market for books in terms of sales. Was there a reason that you didn’t include them or didn’t they have enough “mind share” to be part of the top 40?
This is a good question and I understand these retailers are a huge part of global book sales today. The intent here is to rank companies whose principle brand association is with books. Admittedly Amazon and Flipkart are also general online retailers, but books was where they started and is still where they lead. Wal-Mart and Target are not known principally as booksellers. They are general retailers who also sell large numbers of books, so were omitted on this initial study.
What surprised you most about the final list? Did it include some of your own personal favorites?
What surprised me most was the sustained and ongoing level of global interest in iconic independent bookstores like Shakespeare & Company, City Lights, and Powell’s. Their reach and impact extends much beyond their physical footprint or sales would suggest. Yes, I love many of the bookstores on the list, but I also have many personal favourites in Sydney where I live that are not on the list like Bray’s Books in Balmain, Ariel in Paddington, and the independent chain Berkelouw.
