From The Bookseller:

The Canadian book industry’s increasing reliance on bestselling “blockbuster” titles is causing significant rises and falls in yearly sales, according to the c.e.o. of Canadian book sales service group BookNet Canada.

. . . .

Genner said the past seven years had seen major selling titles or series significantly drive up the Canadian market, with the growth of online retailers strengthening this trend, with consumers searching for and buying a book they have heard about, rather than going browsing in a bookstore.

Link to the rest at The Bookseller

From The Guardian:

Light streams down from rooftop windows on to a spacious white-walled atrium catching the edge of a 1930s dancefloor like a spotlight. It’s a huge change of scene for Foyles, London’s temple of books, which was once famed for dark forbidding bookshelves and a payment system so arcane that many visitors chose to steal rather than buy their favoured paperback.

The bookstore may be moving less than 100 metres down the street to the former St Martins School of Arts building, but after 85 years in its labyrinthine premises on Charing Cross Road it marks a significant step in the revival of a cultural institution.

Former boss Christina Foyle put the bookshop at the heart of the literary world from the 1930s, by hosting lunches attended by famous authors and a string of prime ministers – but her eccentricities nearly killed the business off. When she handed over the reins to her nephew Christopher Foyle six days before she died in 1999 he found a business in meltdown. Sales were dropping by 20% a year as the store had shunned modern technology. The accounting system was based on three people entering items in ledgers by hand.

. . . .

“Even if there is a continued gradual migration from the physical book to the ebook and from bookstores to the internet there will still be a major market for physical books from physical stores and our ambition is to get a larger share of what might be a smaller market,” he says. He believes publishers are on the side of Foyles and other independent bookstores as a viable alternative to the power of Amazon and the supermarkets.

. . . .

His aim this time is to give the store bigger draw power with services that cannot be emulated online. “People are not going to make the journey here unless they think it will be worthwhile. Why do people go to Harrods, Fortnum & Mason or Hamleys rather than the internet? Because they think it is going to be an experience.” Foyles has an online store, but it makes up less than 5% of sales and the retailer recognises its strengths lie in providing a real alternative to Amazon’s impersonal efficiency.

Aside from up to 1m books, and a dedicated Ray’s Jazz music section, the new store will have a large cafe and two galleries. A new smartphone service, planned for the autumn, will help shoppers locate books in the four-storey shop. The original 1930s dancefloor and stage, where the Sex Pistols and Pulp once played and artists from Gilbert & George to Antony Gormley once showed their work, will remain in place but they have been transformed into the slightly less rock’n’roll children’s books and cookery sections.

Link to the rest at The Guardian and thanks to Milo for the tip.

From TechCrunch:

Barnes & Noble’s e-reader and tablet division has been in a bit of a tailspin over the past couple of years, but today it announced that it’ll be taking a different approach through a new partnership with Samsung. The partnership brings Samsung on board to create a co-branded version of its Galaxy Tab 4 with custom NOOK software. A 7-inch version goes on sale in the U.S. in early August, and will be sold at Barnes & Noble bookstores and online alongside NOOK e-readers.

Barnes & Noble says it’ll continue to offer the NOOK GlowLight, but this looks like the end of the line for the company’s own more full-featured NOOK line Android-based tablets. The decision to work with Samsung is a key component of the bookseller’s efforts to “rationalize” its NOOK business, the company said in a release, and the co-branding deal means that they can avoid shouldering the cost and risk of producing NOOK tablet hardware themselves.

Link to the rest at TechCrunch and thanks to Joshua for the tip.

From Intelligent Life Magazine:

When online shopping offers choice, convenience and competitive prices, why would anyone go to an actual shop? To try on clothes, perhaps. To sit on sofas or lie on beds. But if you’re after music, film or books, you’re more likely to go straight to the internet. In the digital age, bricks-and-mortar shops have to work much harder to attract our attention, let alone custom. Brands rip out and refit their stores every few years: interior design is, clearly, already crucial to their fortunes. But could design go further, and lure us away from our tablets and back onto the high street?

Curious to explore this territory, we asked four leading architecture and design practices to create a shop. Specifically, in the age of Amazon and e-books, a bookshop to save bookshops.

. . . .

We gave each practice—Gensler, 20.20, Burdifi­lek and Coffey Architects—the same brief. They were to design a general-interest bookshop, selling fiction, non-fiction and e-books, in store and online, on a typical European high-street site, with two floors of 1,000 square feet each. The budget was £100,000—modest, we knew, but independent booksellers aren’t minted and that figure was ring-fenced for the fit-out; they could assume there would be further funds for training staff or running events.

. . . .

In January, I went to Gensler’s London office—one of 46 around the world—to see the work in progress. We began with Tollit’s associate, Owain Roberts, laying out the firm’s ideas in black and white, unfurling a long scroll of tracing paper on which he had mapped out the challenges facing booksellers with pen and ink, distilling them in drawings and diagrams of startling clarity.

Their analysis was stark: “Design on its own will not save the bookshop.” But Roberts was undaunted. “If you leave the model as it is and redecorate, nothing’s going to change. The solution needs to be much more fundamental: informed, strategic and daring.” The bookshop, as Gensler saw it, had to anticipate every sort of literary need, from grabbing a paperback or download, to relaxed browsing, personally tailored reading-lists, self-publishing, book clubs, author events and even an enhanced experience of reading a book in the bookish equivalent of a flotation tank.

A week later, Roberts produces a bird’s-eye view of Gensler’s bookshop, another disarmingly simple drawing containing a lot of original ideas. The first surprise is that you don’t have to enter the store to shop from it: the glass façade is a touchscreen that can be tapped on to download e-books from QR codes. The choice could be infinite—“the whole catalogue of the British Library,” said Roberts, taking on Amazon with a sheet of smart glass.

A vending wall swings out onto the pavement, popping out a changing selection of paperbacks. Inside, new titles are laid out on a long table that marches down the space. To one side, there’s a “Harry Potter wonderwall of discovery”, to be explored by ladder (ignoring, for the moment, health and safety). While customers can be in and out of the shop in a matter of minutes, the back half of the store caters to those who can stay longer. Literary sommeliers advise on what to read next, or usher you into a pod for a multi­sensory experience: you curl up and read a hardback with an appropriate drink (tea for Austen, whisky for Hemingway), soundtrack or even smell. Readers wanting a more social experience gather on bleacher seating (“simple timber steps with cushions”) to take part in book clubs, hear an author give a talk or discuss self-publishing, which can be done via screens in the far left-hand corner.

Link to the rest at Intelligent Life and thanks to Karen for the tip.

From MLive:

For 13 years, Matt Chosid was an in-house attorney at Borders’ Ann Arbor headquarters. He was present during some of the company’s best days and some of its worst.

Chosid said that there were a lot of things that contributed to Borders’ demise, but the convenience and hard-to-match pricing the Internet offered – mostly due to the rise of Amazon.com – played a big part in expediting that process.

“We were the first company that was truly attacked by Amazon. People would come into the store to showroom us – that is, look at the books and go ‘I can get this exact same book for 40 percent off and you guys only sell it for 30 percent off,’” he said.

“And I never understood it, but we didn’t have any price-matching policy.”

But Chosid set out to turn that on its head by starting a company called PriceLocal. The company allows shoppers the opportunity to get Amazon prices from local retailers who sign up as willing price-matching participants.

As the founder and CEO of PriceLocal, Chodis said that the service works as a web extension, where consumers download the software and shop on Amazon.com the same as they normally would.

When people select items to purchase, a dropdown bar will appear and remind them that they can get the product through a local retailer at the Amazon price.

Link to the rest at MLive and thanks to Margaret for the tip.

From veteran publishing consultant Mike Shatzkin:

The current very public battle over trading terms taking place between Hachette Book Group and Amazon has brought forth surprisingly few recollections by those reporting it (an exception here) of a similar fight last summer between Simon & Schuster and Barnes & Noble.

This is publishing’s near-term future. The two most powerful channels that deliver books to consumers — one dominant in online transactions and one dominant in physical store presence — are determined to wrest more margin, which ultimately also means more pricing control, from their publisher trading partners.

The B&N dispute becoming public was a first for them. The only prior disputes between a publisher and a trading partner that had ever leaked beyond the buyer-and-seller that I can recall involved Amazon, and they were rare. The first was when Amazon took the buy buttons off Macmillan books in 2010. That was a vain attempt to stop the industry from going to agency pricing and it lasted only a few days. They pulled back so quickly from that effort that I concluded that their famous customer-centricity made punishing publishers in ways that were evident to their shoppers (which this one, which also became public, really was not) something they’d decided was not in their best interests.

Drawing that conclusion was apparently a mistake.

What B&N did with S&S, apparently, was simply to stock less of what the publisher was selling and to deny them promotional opportunities. That’s not obvious in a retail store. Books that aren’t there, or which aren’t there in quantity, are not apparent. Bookstores can be out of any particular book at any time without surprising anybody and it would take a uniquely aware book consumer to notice that something new and hot wasn’t displayed as prominently as would be expected.

But Amazon’s action against Hachette was much more visible.

. . . .

I had thought the immediate catalyst for this conflict was that Hachette was the first publisher negotiating a new deal to replace the court-imposed agreements following the agency collusion case. Apparently that is not the case. Nobody is telling me what Hachette is trying to achieve in these negotiations. One would expect that print book margin, ebook margin (often affected by various co-op fees), and ebook pricing flexibility are probably the key moving parts in the negotiation.

But the details don’t really matter. What is important to understand is how, with one exception, the power has passed from the publishers who control the distribution of copyrighted material to the retailers who control the customers. In the past, the pain for the retailer living without ready access to the most commercial books was much greater than the pain for the publisher without ready access to one retailer’s customers. Not any more.

But there is that one exception: Penguin Random House.

One former executive from a big house in a private conversation attributed the fact that PRH doesn’t ever seem to be subject to Amazon’s bullying to the fact that PRH’s second-ranking executive, Madeline McIntosh, had a brief interlude as an Amazon executive between her former and present tenures at PRH.

But I doubt that’s the answer. There’s a simpler one. PRH is too big to bully and nobody else is.

. . . .

Of course, both Amazon and B&N have plenty of reasons to feel justified in pressing for more margin. Amazon, with its low returns, has historically been many publishers’ most profitable account. B&N knows that their stores are “showrooms”, driving sales at Amazon as well as in their own stores. Amazon has no reason to want to be the most profitable account for publishers on the back of their own investments, efficiency, and customer loyalty. B&N wants the publishers to pay for the value they reap from being on B&N shelves that is not resulting in B&N sales.

Link to the rest at The Shatzkin Files

PG proposes that one contributing factor to pricing disagreements between Big Publishing on the one hand and Amazon and Barnes & Noble on the other is that Big Publishing hasn’t the foggiest idea about what works and what doesn’t in retail.

From The Idaho Mountain Express:

The owner of Iconoclast Books in Ketchum has launched a campaign to save the iconic bookstore from permanent closure.

Today, May 16, owner Sarah Hedrick will host a public meeting from 6-8 p.m. at the bookstore on Sun Valley Road to answer questions about the store’s imminent eviction from its location and whether the business can be kept alive.

. . . .

Hedrick has been a longtime crusader for the community to support local businesses. She has repeatedly talked publicly about the challenges of doing business in the Wood River Valley in recent years, in part because of the recession and the impacts of large wildfires during the summer season.

. . . .

Many people have asked Hedrick why she hasn’t filed bankruptcy. 

“I just feel it’s not the time or that it’s right,” she said. “I just don’t think that the store is at that point.” 

“Plus,” she said, “I have to walk down the street and see people I owe money to. I couldn’t look them in the eye if I filed. These are people I know and love.”

 Hedrick’s bookstore has its share of devotees, too. She talked about a local resident who visited the store just a few days ago.

“He said he wanted to thank me,” she said. “I asked him, ‘Why?’ For letting my son grow up here,” he said.

The man’s son is 5 years old and would sit in the back in the children’s section and look at picture books, he said. 

Link to the rest at The Idaho Mountain Express

For those unfamiliar with Ketchum, it’s located in Idaho adjacent to a rugged and beautiful wilderness area and is best known for a classic ski resort, Sun Valley. Ernest Hemingway owned a cabin near Ketchum and that is where died.

From Hugh Howey:

Imagine selling two million books, having half a dozen of your novels hit the New York Times bestseller list, being inundated with thousands of fan emails every month, and then having someone call you an “aspiring writer.”

That’s what happened in New Orleans this weekend, when the planners of the RT Booklovers Convention decided to place self-published authors in a dinky room off to the side while the traditionally published authors sat at tables in the grand ballroom.

Authors like Liliana Hart, who is at the top of the game not just in the romance genre but in all of publishing, was labeled an “Aspiring Author.”

RT is a major bookselling convention, a place that publishers expect to sell boatloads of titles. The bookselling, I believe, is handled by Barnes & Noble, a company with a history of segregating self-published authors on their online bestseller lists and who has no incentive to promote authors they don’t stock.

. . . .

Twenty years from now, when a new generation of more tolerant and inclusive artists finds themselves in the position to organize events like this, let’s not be dicks like our forefathers. All of those authors deserved to be treated the same.

Link to the rest at Hugh Howey and thanks to Sandra for the tip.

PG will make a prediction that in twenty years, Barnes & Noble will be a dim memory and Hugh will still be selling lots and lots of books.

From Forbes blogs:

Liberty Media sell-off of its stake in Barnes & Noble last month might have seemed like one more nail in the bookseller’s coffin.  The company has been struggling for years and most recently reporting a year-over-year revenue decrease of 10% in Q3 of 2013. B&N’s Nook division had been considered its one bright spot and led to Liberty’s interest in the company in the first place.  But when competing with Amazon proved to be too difficult, Liberty bailed and the news of its divestiture sent B&N’s share price down by 10%.

Instead of sealing the company’s fate, though, the sale by Liberty might have produced a silver lining.   Attention is now back on B&N’s retail operations and the brand’s stores may indeed be its saving grace.

. . . .

Instead of retreating from stores, Barnes & Noble – and other struggling retailers like it, including Staples, Radio Shack, and Gap – should rally around them. And they should look to the recent innovations and counterintuitive strategies that are making headlines for other retailers.

Restoration Hardware is repositioning its stores as destinations. The chain is opening new locations in high profile real estate, such as the huge neoclassical building on Bolyston Street in Boston which used to house the Museum of Natural History. These new stores are “Design Galleries” which present the company’s home furnishings as objets d’art for customers to curate and customize with the help of RH staffers. By using the structure and design of the store as a draw beyond the product, RH has made its stores iconic and the shopping experience in them irreplaceable.

. . . .

Apple’s Genius Bar proves the widespread demand – and consumer willingness to pay — for expert help in retail. Access to personal service from experts is part of what makes Apple stores so popular and profitable. Not only does the Genius Bar help Apple live out its user-friendly brand identity, but also reports show that one out of ten customers purchase a device after receiving help from the Genius Bar. Of course, people need more help with electronic gadgets than with books or other basic products, but with content and choice overload posing such a prevalent problem these days, it seems a curator or docent of sorts could be of greatly valued in many retail settings.

Link to the rest at Forbes blogs and thanks to Abel for the tip.

PG would note that Restoration Hardware and Apple both closely control the retail prices of their products and aren’t subject to underpricing through alternate outlets.

Barnes & Noble, on the other hand, put hundreds of independent bookstores out of business by underpricing them.  And Apple pays its Geniuses far more than Barnes & Noble pays its clerks.

Plus, an increasing number of busy purchasers of books and other products seem to prefer quick and efficient from Amazon rather than a “retail experience” with a docent.

Do readers really suffer from “content and choice overload” with ebooks? PG is a busy guy, but books are one area where he never feels overlaoded.

From Hugh Howey:

One of my favorite movies of all-time is The Zero Effect. If you haven’t seen it, you really should. Absolutely brilliant. One of the best scenes has Daryl Zero (played by Bill Pullman) explaining the trick to following someone without getting caught. It’s simple, he says. You just get where they’re going before they do. The obvious joke here is that it’s impossible to know where they’re going, which is why they need to be followed. But Pullman’s character in the film is a Sherlock-Holmes-sort-of-genius, and he expects that everyone ought to know where everyone else is going at all times. Just as a matter of course.

But we’re not all Daryl Zero. We can only guess at the future. We are resigned to follow.

A few years ago, I put forth a zany idea about where we in the book industry were heading: I thought there might come a day when agents and publishers would scour bestselling self-published books to wrangle in new talent. Doing so would allow them to mitigate risk; it would offload the arduous task of managing the slushpile by crowdsourcing it; and it would allow market research and experimentation to take place on someone else’s dime and time (the self-published authors’ and the readers’).

. . . .

Authors didn’t have a stage for their own gigs until e-books gained wide adoption. Once that happened, the rest was inevitable. Everything that musicians, photographers, comedians, fine artists and the like had been doing for generations was now open to writers. We could see where literature was heading because of the well-trodden path laid out before them.

By being at the forefront of this transition, Amazon has reaped most of the benefit. And not just monetarily, though that’s worth mentioning before we get to the meat of this rambling blog post. Amazon enjoys higher margins on self-published e-books. Before costs, they make 30% – 65% on every sale of a self-published work. For major publishers, their margin on e-books are likely less than 10%.

. . . .

Where Amazon really wins is with the data they collect. When Amazon purchased Goodreads, it seemed to me that they were mostly purchasing the reviewing, buying, and reading habits of its users. Data like that is worth a lot of money. And its value is only going to go up in the future. This data makes it possible to recommend more items that customers will want to purchase. This is the most important trick in retail. It was my job as a bookseller. Keep this in mind, as I’ll get back to it when I posit how someone can win the next revolution in retail.But first, I’d like to digress and point out what might be an equally powerful advantage Amazon wins from their data: Not only are they seeing what customers buy, they’re seeing how authors sell. They see the next big thing before agents and publishers can. In fact, they can often see an author’s career trajectory take an upward turn before the author is even aware of it.

. . . .

Employing hindsight (that clever genius), pundits have pointed out that Random House or a collection of publishers should have gotten into the e-reader device and direct e-book sales game early on. Rather than wait on a competitor to disrupt their business, they should have taken a page from Apple’s playbook and been the ones to disrupt. I’ll go one step further and use the power of hindsight to suggest something even more audacious: Publishers should have been the ones creating FREE self-publishing platforms. They should have created WattPad or their own version of Kindle Direct Publishing. Both offer ways to discover and profit from rising talent. Both offer ways to collect sales data from customers rather than relying on the infrequent and imprecise dribs and drabs of data that they get from retailers.

Link to the rest at Hugh Howey and thanks to David and several others for the tip.