In response to an earlier post, Brick-and-Mortar Stores Shuttering at a Record Pace, TPV visitor Jenny Milchman posted a comment saying she thought PG was presenting a one-sided view.
PG suggested she send him some links showing a contrary view. Jenny recently did so in a comment to the original post, but PG thought her response deserved a bit more exposure, so he’s making it a post of its own.
Since you were kind enough to suggest I do so, PG, I wanted to send along a few links to articles that stand in contrast to your statement that “the rapid and continuing reduction in the number of bookstores is part of a very large trend throughout physical retail.”
The bookstore portion of your assertion is not borne out either by my anecdotal experiences, touring bookstores for over 150K miles on the road, nor by other sources, such as:
I have long been predicting that the big box model, never an apt fit for books, would suffer with the rise of online shopping, and this indeed seems to be so. It isn’t holding true for all bookstores though.
This article that states that independent bookstores have grown by almost 27% since 2009, attributing this in part to the human or curator factor:
Fortune magazine acknowledges the resurgence, then contextualizes it a bit:
http://fortune.com/2013/09/20/the-indie-bookstore-resurgence/
Finally, here is a compilation of sources, for those looking to read about the other side of the fence:
Used bookstores, and antique stores selling books, seem to me to be a different kettle of fish than new bookstores. A lot of older books and magazines are either not available online or are selling for high prices online. And of course, there’s the “browse through some old books and see what I’ll find” game, which is harder to play online, because out-of-print books usually don’t have online previews. Anything I’m going to browse for, I buy offline. If I know exactly what I want and it’s selling affordably online, I’ll buy it there (directly from the publisher if I can).
No mystery here.
B&N sells roughly 135 million books a year from 600-ish locations, or roughly 200,000 books a year from each store. And across the country those B&N stores are closing one after another, falling like dominoes.
Every B&N store that falls means a third of its former sales–or 60,000 a year–go to local bookstores, which suddenly start expanding and thriving, with celebratory articles and fanfares galore.
The other two thirds of the sales from that closed B&N–or 140,000 book sales a year–go to Amazon.
Yeah, these yay-bookstores! articles kind of miss the big picture, don’t they… 😉
Bookstore market share can decrease as the number of bookstores increases.
No one has been disputing that independent book stores have been relatively thriving the past few years. That’s been well reported and covered, here and everywhere else. That’s great for them, and for people, like me, who like to patronize such stores.
As an overview of the market as a whole, however, shelf-space and volume of sales from physical stores has practically fallen off a cliff. It takes more than a few hole in the wall shops to make up for a single shuttered B&N. This is critically important information for publishers, and for authors who are considering what kinds of concessions to make in a contract for the purpose of easier entry into that limited space.
Exactly.
The mix of product matters. All bookstores will stock bestselling authors. All bookstores will stock the payola supported titles. Those are available everywhere; bookstores, newstands, pharmacies…
But those “everywhere” titles take a bigger share of the shelf space of the smaller stores than they do at B&M, BAM, or (especially) Amazon.
Replacing one B&N with two or three smaller stores will result in more total shelf space devoted to the “everywhere” books and a net loss of space for everybody else. More, just because more copies are shelved doesn’t necessarily mean more sales for the name authors so crowding out the midlisters simply means less total sales at B&M.
The number that matters remains total copies sold at B&M, not the number of stores those declining sales are distributed across.
And of that shrinking space, how many indie books are getting a place on those shelves? (Which is what matters most to those of us not waiting for trad-pub rejection slips so we can use them to paper our bathrooms. 😉 )
Interesting point. Our local bookstore has been around for…eesh. Forty years? Longer? Longer than I’ve been alive at least. And it has a fair mix of genres in it, everything from local history (right up front), to crafts to scifi, etc. It’s interesting to note though, that while the kids sections have six bajillion different authors in it, and the classics are pretty well covered, things like science fiction and mystery/thriller are dominated by the mainstream authers in those genres. There are two shelves of Jim Butcher, packed two deep on the shelf. There’s so much G.R.R.Martin they have to stack his stuff on the floor. But the midlisters? Nowhere to be found.
It’s always been that way.
Back in the day when I lived in the DC region and downtown alone had a dozen bookstores (Walden, Brentanos, Crown, Doubleday, B. Dalton, plus a bunch of general audience Independents) they all had the exact same mix of recent releases. Eventually I gave up and just visited the nearest Mall store in the ‘burbs.
However, once or twice a year I made a pilgrimage to the MOONSTONE BOOKCELLAR, a tiny SF&F specialty store on Pennsylvania avenue near the White House. They had everything. They even featured UK editions of out of print titles. It took an entire afternoon and a couple hundred bucks to get out of there.
After I moved away I would still drop by when I was in the area touristing or on business. Until one time they were gone.
Things got boring for a while but then Borders came to town and shortly afterwards Amazon and ABEbooks popped up. B&N was a latecomer.
Anyway, B&M bookselling is known to be a pareto-like business where at a given time, a small fraction of the books (those from name authors, typically) provide the bulk of the revenues and the resf of the titles each provides but a trickle. That is how the newstands and pharmacies stock their bookshelves, cherry picking fast movers. And that is how generalist bookstores treat genre, especially if they are litfic-focused, like so many are. (And I won’t even go into the churn in romance. Brrr.)
And that is why Borders and B&N decimated the field in the 90’s. They went deeper into the midlist/backlist and that drew in shoppers from far afield just like the specialty stores. Eventually Amazon did the same and now the pilgrimages aren’t necessary.
It’s simple math: say there’s five thousand recent releases actively selling in a given year (across all genres), that might be ten percent or less of a B&N’s stock but a quarter of a smaller store’s stock. Even assuming each store carries an entirely different mix of books with no duplicates, it would still take three smaller stores to make up for one 50,000 book B&N.
When Borders went down they closed over 500 stores.
Have we seen 1500 new bookstores pop up? Even a thousand?
ABA reports claim barely a few hundred even including “bookstores” that aren’t bookstores.
It’s a weak argument to tie the fate of print to the number of B&M stores without discussing their size and format. Especially since many are primarily used book shops that generate little revenue for publishers or authors.
The number of stores selling books of one kind or another doesn’t tell us much of real importance. Not when the real decline is in shelf space that isn’t devoted to BPH new releases, used books, tchotchkes, toys, or “lifestyle merchandise”. The Borders implosion took out a quarter of all shelfspace and B&N closures and pivots another quarter so there is a whole lot less space for midlist and backlist new books.
That much few will dispute.
Exactly. New stores continue to be opened in the wake of the Borders implosion and the B&N closures, but overall shelf space is down.
Wait, you really thought bookstores were still on the decline?
That is certainly the case in the UK, but not in the US.
Although, I don’t know that we can really call all the “bookstores” that have launched recently true bookstores; a lot of them stretch the definition.
Anecdotally … the used-bookstore street in walking distance here — Adams Avenue in San Diego — used to have about 15 bookstores. Now only the best one survives, whose owners also own the property it sits on. A number of books on my shelves are the only copies I’ve ever seen of them, which is a major reason I haunted used bookstores: not low prices but the vast range of titles, considering the stores as a group. Now on ABEbooks I often can find at once several of a rare title offered across America and Britain. ABEbooks of course helps keep alive many independent bookstores, and unlike Amazon’s useless descriptions of used-book condition, ABEbooks’ often are quite detailed.
Several decades ago the city labeled Adams Avenue as “Antique Row”. Now the antique stores are gone too.
Without hunting about to research the particulars (i am hideously lazy) my first question is always how we count bookstores…
If Borders closed in your area (or mine) and was a 20k sq ft store with 20,000 titles in stock (or whatever – again too lazy to come up with real numbers) and 3 new book stores opened to replace Borders and they have a combined 5k in sq footage and 5,000 titles in stock, the book selling trade may not have “gained” anything.
I just realized in my scenario, Borders stocks 1 boook per square foot. No room for bathrooms and cash registers – no wonder they went down 🙂
‘Edge on’ and six shelves high there’s room for your 20k books and lots of room left over for towels and candles …
In my neighborhood, a Borders closed, then B&N closed, and the used books stores (two of them, where I went to get my SF and romance novel fixes when budget was tight) that were there for decades closed. Nothing has replaced them.
Those two megastores served an affluent population (including many professional retirees who read) in the intracoastal areas across from Miami Beach.
The problem with small bookstores, no matter how charming they may be, is that they are…well, small. Almost by definition, they can only stock, let alone display, a very limited number of the many titles available. If they want to sell a fair number of books, they have to be like the neighborhood multiplex, i.e. they display those titles that a large number of people know and expect to see. We all like to think of the neighborhood bookstore as like that cool little art film house that used to be just off campus and offered titles the commercial houses didn’t. Most aren’t like that, at least not if they expect to stay in business.
Some specialize and become destination stores with extended “draw distances”. They’re few and far between. But they’re surviving.
How is that different from the large local B&N that has twice the floor space of the small store, but (IMO) wastes two-thirds of it on stationery, toys, and tchotchkes? Either way, the book selection varies not in quantity, but in the actual titles they offer for sale.
In my ‘hood northwest of Chicago, we’ve lost Borders (of course), Family Stores, Lifeway, and a number of other chain book shops. What’s left is B&N (see above) and a single outpost of Half-Price Books. We don’t have a BAM within 40 minutes’ driving time. When I once ran into a BAM district manager, she claimed the Chicago market can only support two BAM locations; the one 40 minutes away and the other a good 90 minutes’ distance.
I’m all for a good indie bookstore, but all of ours locally, save a single terrific comic book shop, are gone; apparently there’s no way they can make ends meet.
sounds reasonable to me, Mackay Bell.
Also in agreement. There will always be those books where you want to look at all of the inside before you buy it. No international company (be it Amazon, B & N, or whatever) is likely to have a real “local authors” section. (Although I do recall one article about a UK megastore giving their local managers a bit more flexibility there. But is it enough?) Events are tough to hold online, too – and a bookstore can have those any time, not just when a con is scheduled (and can have smaller ones in places that don’t justify a full-up convention).
These all require focus, though. Stores that are a few things to a few people (although enough total people to keep it alive, mind). Staff knowledgeable about those things, and what they have or can get to satisfy the customer. An atmosphere and organization that encourages people to keep looking around. (No, the “grocery store” model really doesn’t work for bookstores – another big box store mistake. Making your customers dodge end caps and always moving your inventory around is not friendly.)
Here is one possible scenario that might favor bookstores.
Amazon destroys most of the department stores and big box retailers. While people continue to buy most of their stuff online, they do like to occasionally go out into the real world and look at stuff.
In that scenario, it’s possible that little charming bookstores might be exactly what people gravitate to, particularly if they offer coffee (wine?) and impulse buy trinkets, in addition to books people might not have considered.
Not saying that is likely, just one possible silver lining in the clouds.
The problem with this theory is the last time I went into a local independent bookstore, they had nothing to my taste. And what they had (not to my taste) was just as easily found at B&N. Parking was difficult. It was a long way away. I won’t be back. Their neighborhood may support them, maybe?
The most prosperous and charming independent locally, last time I dropped in years ago (when I went there with some regularity), had prices way above Amazon, but beyond that,did not carry genre many genre fiction titles. It focused on more highbrow stuff. There wasn’t much reason, other than the lovely bookstore ambiance, for me to shop there.
I was with my husband this week at a mall and stopped by one of my favorite stores, Bath and Body Works. That visit covered both ends of the online spectrum – they were running a sale (buy 3 get 2 free) and I was hoping to pick up my favorite vanilla bubble bath. They had a single bottle. To which I thought – “I’ll go home and order it online.” Same sale online, but with enough stock for me to take advantage of it.
They also had a line of candles they were advertising, and my husband gamely checked out all the new scents with me. Each book I write I have a candle lit and a specific scent for it – something I do to get me in the right frame of mind. Some of the scents I loved, and others I thought were awful. I never would have known which candles I liked had I not checked them out in person. Which you can’t do online.
So I know retail is headed for a big dive, but there are some things you have to do in person. Like I still don’t buy clothes online because I want to try them on first and see how they fit.
For now.
Digital scent technology is a real thing:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_scent_technology
(And Smell-o-vision wasn’t just a Warner Bros. cartoon gag. “The old gray hare”.)
As you pointed out there’s money in it. And where there’s money, there’s a way. Somebody will find it.:)
In my area we lost a New York Times bookstore in a very affluent part of town. To my surprise we gained two new ones only a mile away.
We still have a B&N and a BAM, but they are silent when you walk in. Last time I visited I was the only customer. Both are in big box territory. The new stores are both in the downtown area and are maybe the size of a large garage, but they seem to be doing well.