When Dick Harte, then owner of the Rutherford Book Shoppe in Delaware, Ohio, first developed Nautilus, a $2500 turnkey system for online book retailing in 1996, he claimed it would allow independent booksellers to "give the chains a run for their money."
Three years later, he's still making the same claim. But now his software system has been renamed, its cost has been much reduced and it has become part of a coordinated, strategic approach to cybercommerce that includes a package of electronic retailing products and cyberbusiness ventures.
The software system has been renamed the BookSite Network (Nautilus is now the name of the parent company). It is a software package that allows independent booksellers to quickly and easily produce a Web presence for $350 (plus a maintenance fee of $100 a month), and provides online access to a 500,000-title database and online ordering and fullfillment. The database has been developed in conjunction with Ingram and Baker &Taylor. Currently the BookSite Network (www.booksite.com) has enrolled about 70 independent stores around the country, providing them with a Web presence to market their stores and sell books. By the summer, Harte will offer Publink.net, a separate, continually updated database of more than 100,000 items of promotional material, publisher-supplied and licensed copy, graphics and book jackets, accessible to all BookSite Network members.
Most importantly, by early summer, Harte expects to launch ThisTown.net, a linked network of geographically focused portal Web sites featuring online bookselling among a diverse mix of local businesses with online storefronts.
Internet bookselling, Harte claims, offers independents an opporturnity to integrate another feature into a store's customer services. "The future of independent bookselling is at stake," Harte explained with typical evangelical fervor, "but independents are ignoring the Internet, which could save them." Booksellers, Harte continued, must adopt "the Internet attitude," which he described as an embrace of "competition," and focus on "networks of people and organizations" connected by the Internet that provide reduced marketing costs, easy communication with customers, online self-service and "a willingness to make mistakes, the cheapest form of research."
ThisTown.net is Harte's most ambitious venture. Although most Web retail ventures, such as Amazon.com and Barnesandnoble.com, emphasize aggressive (and expensive) national advertising to attract a mass audience, Harte is planning to compete "from the bottom up." He said ThisTown.net will offer "a network of common interests. Each site allows local independent stores to compete at what they do best. It's almost like a local, online newspaper. This is impossible for an Amazon or a B&N.com to do." Harte also has two more products in development: OrderDemon, an Internet-based ordering process for suppliers, and eRegister.net, an Internet-based product listing for stores without in-store computerized inventory management systems.
BookSite members contacted by PW had differing responses to Harte's initiatives. Roger D ren of the Rainy Day bookstore in Fairway, Kans., is enthusiastic, calling his BookSite storefront "a 24-hour version of the service we give at the store." D ren said the site generates about 10% of the store's business, "and it's growing. We use it to build realtionships. You have to work at it, but it has helped level the field. We're building an old-style bookstore online."
On the other hand, while BookSite member Carla Cohen of Politics and Prose in Washington, D.C., is satisfied with the technical performance of the Web site and uses it to solicit for the store's e-mail newsletter, "it hasn't affected the business, although we don't make effective use of it because the payoff hasn't been there. Online consumers can get books from us just as fast and almost as cheap, but they're under the illusion that Amazon d s it better."
