Rocket Bomber - article - retail - commentary - Rethinking the Box.

Once upon a time book retailing was about as exciting as watching haircuts. Hardcover books were often sold in musty downtown stores by fussy bibliophiles, and many readers turned to paperback racks in the more informal atmosphere of supermarkets or drugstores. Today the bookstore business is in the midst of a rambunctious revival. Highly organized chains with fat financial backing are using aggressive, unsentimental sales and promotion techniques to push into all parts of the country. The chains are cutting into book-club sales and sweeping some small independent stores out of business or forcing them to rely more and more on discounting or specialization.

You should read the whole article; the view from 30 years past is enlightening. Among other gems are the casually tossed statistics like “New York City… where an estimated one-third of U.S. hardcover books are sold” and Barnes & Noble referred to as a local NY bookseller (not one of the chains cited in the blockquote above) whose stores “have flourished by offering a mountainous selection of remainders” or the glowing description of the B. Dalton new Fifth Avenue flagship store that “will carry 100,000 titles and have ten departments offering 125 categories of books.”

The B. Dalton on Fifth stayed open for close to two decades, until 1997. At that point the chain was owned by Barnes & Noble — and the hubbub wasn’t about new big boxes forcing out bookstores, but about rising rents in New York forcing some of the big boxes to close.

When we casually refer to the major chains with their superstores as the “bookstore market”, we tend to forget or ignore the fact that the chains didn’t become major until the late 90s. I remember a time before the first big box opened near my hometown — I remember driving 60 miles round trip to Atlanta’s Oxford Books to buy a copy of Edmund Spenser’s “Fairie Queene” for my senior year [high school] term paper, because it just wasn’t available in the mall store, or the local book shop, or even from the library. (Granted, it’s a 400 year old book of long-form verse written in an over-wrought style that was attempting to sound old fashioned even back in 1596 so maybe I shouldn’t have expected to find it)

100 years ago, if you didn’t live in a city you’d count yourself lucky to be able to buy dime novels at the general store. 80 years ago you could join a book club and get new books in the mail; 70 years ago you’d have been able to pick up a cheap paperback version of many of the same books at the train station newsstand.

Paperbacks moved from newstands into spinner racks at the local drugstore or grocery. The popularity of the format (read: low price) also made it a staple of many of the small, independent booksellers — and 50 years ago the model became established: first a hardcover edition for the libraries, collectors, snooty book critics in New York, and the handful of capital-B Bookstores in the urban centres — and then if it proves popular, you go back to presses for a Book-of-the-Month Club edition, or auction off the paperback publishing rights to the highest bidder.

Oh, yeah… this was before media consolidation so as a publisher you likely wouldn’t have capabilities to do the paperback version yourself. There was something of a hedgerow between the “mass market” and any self-respecting literary publisher.

40 years ago the “chains” started moving into the then-new shopping malls (with such success that by 1978, as cited in the Time Magazine article, Waldenbooks was the nation’s largest bookseller) — offering much the same mix of product as the local storefront bookstores on main street but buying in bulk, and with nationwide sales data to pull from, able to find and invest in popular, bestselling titles.

And starting 15 to 20 years ago, the independents (and Waldenbooks and B. Dalton, too) were about to discover what a major chain really is: while a number of firms (Crown, Powell’s, BookStop, even Barnes & Noble at the time) were opening up ‘discount’ bookstores — warehouse stores full of current bestsellers on sale, remainders, and other discounted titles — this isn’t necessarily what the public wanted; or rather, not everything we wanted. B&N took the downtown New York bookstore and cloned it, throwing up huge boxes in suburbs and smaller cities across the U.S., selling us books and coffee and CDs and most importantly: atmosphere. Other chains quickly followed suit, re-purposing old brand names and converting the discount store of the 80s into the Book SuperStore of today.

B&N wasn’t necessarily first: lucky urbanites have long had such superior bookstores as City Lights, the Strand, or Powell’s City of Books — and the best of the indies are arguably better than yet another cookie-cutter box out by the mall. The point isn’t that the BigBoxBookstore is better, the amazing thing is that they’re everywhere. (Well, almost everywhere; my apologies if you don’t live near one, or if your local is in danger of closing)

Collectively B&N, Borders, and Books-a-Million operate 1500 or so outlets that are touted as superstores, and if we add in another 100? or so large independent (often landmark) bookstores then there are more places to actually find and hold, even read, a book then ever before. Obscure titles, novels, reference, classics, even comics — hundreds of thousands of titles. It’s a great time to be a bookseller, and reader. It’s a great time to be alive.

##

Retail is down. Publishing is down. Some of us are worried that online retail is going to put an ever-growing pinch on the stores, and the trend of closings that starts in the current recession won’t stop when the rest of the economy recovers. Most of us are waiting, with a mix of excitement and fear, to see if digital distribution of books (in whatever format, for whatever appliance — either extant or hypothetical) is ever going to add up to more than a single-digit percentage of the overall market, and just what in the hell that would mean anyway.

Books are a changing, evolving business. But it’s always been that way, I think. It’s not just the technology, as innovative business models can impact the business as much or more than a newer, cheaper version of a book. Paperbacks didn’t kill the hardcover, and in fact expanded the market into new genres and new sales outlets. The new superstores mean fewer independent bookstores, but it also means more books available to more folks in more places. Book Clubs have suffered greatly in the new internet age, but the loss of tens of millions of sales is more than covered by the billions made by Amazon. An e-book is going to be damn handy (I just moved over 700 manga and graphic novels into my new apartment — up two flights of stairs — so yeah, until my muscles recover I’m definitly sold on the idea of e-books) but the idea is still new and the market unknown. And a physical book — with no batteries, downloads, or buttons — is still going to be just the thing for the beach, or a plane trip, or a lunch break.

Even more than the books, though, the modern bookstore sells atmosphere. It only seems like they give it away: cups of coffee, the occasional newspaper or magazine, and eventually the larger purchase (even if only once or twice a year) pays for the comfy chairs, the music, the knowledgeable staff, and all that reading you sponges do for free while lounging in the aisles, or the inconsiderate louts who tie up all the tables (and outlets) in the cafe with their laptops and accoutrément, and even the people sleeping in the aforementioned comfy chairs.

You don’t get any of that from Amazon.

##

This is actually the first in a new series of columns, where I’m going to play to my strengths and analyze not the sales numbers, or the business, or publishing, or books even — it’s time to take a serious look at the Box, everything inside the four walls that makes a bookstore.

And since this is a comics blog, for the most part, I’m going to be blue-sky spitballing about what a 21st century Comics Bookstore (note: not a comics shop) should look like, and how it might work (picking up from where I left off actually, but attempting to explain the concept and execution with a little more rigor).

I don’t know what the posting schedule will look like, especially as I have to finish moving to the new apartment this week, but the ideas have been percolating and fermenting for quite some time now. I’d like to get another post up tonight; after that check into the blog once a week or so and page past the long, long sales charts [or bookmark the retail category for more direct access].

Further readings and references:

The Time Magazine article that kicked off the column:
Rambunctious Revival of Books, as noted from 30 Oct 1978

Another Fifth Ave. Bookshop Is Felled by High Rents, New York Times, Lisa W. Foderado, 17 Jun 1997

The Greatest Mystery: Making a Best Seller, New York Times, Shira Boss, 13 May 2007

Wikipedia: Dime Novel, Penny Dreadful, Paperback, Book sales club, Everyman’s Library, Bestseller, Bookstore Tourism

Top image entitled “Bibliotech”, a photo of the Vasconcelos Library in Mexico City, image credit rageforst@flickr, cc licensed some rights reserved