Nearly a year and a half after the American Booksellers Association launched IndieBound at the 2008 BEA and renamed the portal portion of its BookSense.com program the ABA e-Commerce Solution (now known as ABA IndieCommerce), the association is finding online commerce slow going. The transition to an open-source platform, Drupal, is now more than a year behind schedule, with the platform yet to be implemented by about half of the roughly 230 IndieCommerce stores. According to ABA COO Len Vlahos, the target date for IndieCommerce stores to make the switch to Drupal has been pushed back to the end of the first quarter of 2010. Vlahos blamed much of the difficulty in implementing Drupal on “a monstrously large learning curve.” Complicating matters is that Ricky Leung, director of IndieCommerce, left earlier this month. In addition, ABA can't afford to run two systems much longer, nor does it have enough staff to continue to spend so much one-on-one time with Drupal users.
Although the move to Drupal is intended to give booksellers greater flexibility in creating and updating their sites in terms of both selling print books online as well as delivering e-books to customers, the delays have made it unlikely that independents will be able to offer e-books for the holidays in any meaningful way. Independent booksellers with Drupal can sell e-book downloads in several formats, but consumers can't put e-books and p-books in the same shopping cart. Putting the two formats together in the same basket is “very high” on the ABA's priority list, according to Vlahos. But he doesn't anticipate it happening until after the first of the year.
On top of that, this summer's announcement that ABA stores would be able to sell Sony e-readers this fall turns out to be premature. “It's still possible,” said Vlahos, “but if anything happens at this point, it will be too late for the holidays.” With the e-reader market churning with Barnes & Noble's new Nook, e-book downloads to iPhones and Droids, and the rumored introduction of Apple's Tablet early next year, choosing a partner or partners could be tricky, possibly moot. “It's still an unsettled and very nascent industry. We're going to continue talks with Sony and anyone else,” said Vlahos.
Independent booksellers are not only grappling about what to do in the e-book space, but with online ordering of print books as well. “Amazon is like Kleenex for some people,” said Kerry Slattery, general manager of Skylight Books in Los Angeles, one of the early Drupal testers. “It means ordering online.” Still, she continues to hone Skylightbooks.com with new elements like a virtual tour of various store sections. With Drupal, she and her staff can make changes easily. For her, the biggest challenge is educating people that they have a choice about where to shop online.
On the other hand, Philip Rafshoon, owner of Outwrite Bookstore and Coffee House in Atlanta, credits customers who write e-books with pushing him to sell them on the store's site. “We can't compete with Amazon,” said Rafshoon, who plans to do some online discounting for e-books. “But we've put a lot of time and effort into making the site look good. Now it's a matter of getting the money.” He will do a small rollout of the OutwriteBooks.com site early next month.
John Hugo, manager of Andover Bookstore in Andover, Mass., said that he and his father, who owns the shop in Andover along with stores in Newburyport and Marblehead, recently signed with IndieCommerce specifically to sell e-books. However, unlike Rafshoon, they have no plans to discount. “Our customers say it's not the price, it's the format. They like to read e-books and they'd rather shop local. If it was all about price, there wouldn't be any independent bookstores left,” noted Hugo. His community, he added, learned firsthand the value of shopping local after watching five downtown businesses close.
Not everyone agrees that e-commerce is the best way for independents to hold on to market share. “I don't think there is a changing need for Web sites,” said Dick Harte, who founded BookSite 15 years ago. “I think there's a growing need for customer care. It's not about technology, it's about the customer. I wish independents would stay focused on customers.” BookSite, which has 600 customers, mostly libraries and about 100 bookstores, is also changing its platform. Harte is using the switch as an opportunity to prune services that he sees as unneeded for booksellers, which includes selling e-books. “Frankly, if we hadn't already built the e-commerce module before integrating the e-newsletter and e-marketing module,” he said, “I probably wouldn't invest in it now.” For booksellers with limited budgets, he recommends a home page with their address, phone number, e-mail, directions, and hours, which would cost less than $150 a year and be cheaper than a Yellow Pages ad in most communities.
