As Borders UK sinks weeping into administration, I found myself wondering: When was the last time I actually bought a book in a physical bookshop? It must have been years ago. These days it's too easy to mouse-click away and then wait a few days for your new possession to arrive.
To start, we should ask how websites have managed to swipe the retail bookshops' lunch with such apparent ease. Here are the 3 killer advantages to shopping online:
- Convenience - just click to buy, no need to leave your chair and travel to a city-centre or out-of-town mall
- Choice - how can a high-street bookshop possibly compete with a range of 5 million or so titles?
- Discovery - the online format is perfect for searching, following "related product" links and stumbling across titles that you wouldn't otherwise have known about
Meanwhile, what's good about the high-street bookshops? Here are the advantages that they still cling to:
- No postage costs
- You get your book right away (assuming the one you want is in stock)
- You can talk to a member of staff (whether it's a knowledgable person is hit-and-miss)
- Social environment
- Physical - nothing quite beats browsing a floor-to-ceiling shelf of titles, picking up a book and thumbing through your potential new tome of knowledge (or of escapism, or whatever)
You would think that those would be quite compelling advantages; but the majority of them don't contribute directly to closing the sale, or discovering new products to buy. So for bookshops to compete with their online counterparts, they could do far worse than address the online advantages. One solution springs to mind: Borders Express.
(Or Waterstones Express, given that it's already too late for Borders in this country).
Amazon beats Waterstones/Borders hands-down for convenience and choice. WaterBorders (as I'll [in]conveniently call them for now) could build a hypermegastore across several floors with a massive choice of titles available. But they still can't possibly compete with Amazon's selection of pretty much every book currently in print (and quite a few that aren't, via their army of resellers). Even Foyles, which used to be considered the bookshop of bookshops, feels like a village shop compared with Amazon.
Rather than whimpering and changing nothing as their marketshare declines, I would love to see Waterstones/Borders/any remaining high-street booksellers go on the offensive.
Anywhere you see a corner shop or a Tesco Express, or a Starbucks or a Pret for that matter, you should also expect to see a Borders Express. The optimum retail unit would be about the size of a small-ish Starbucks, with a good selection of the top-sellers... and a whole bank of large-screen PC terminals so that customers can browse for alternatives - as they'll inevitably find that the book they want isn't on-site, assuming they're looking for something specific.
Here's the make-or-break part: the staff should be in a position to promise that any books ordered will be in the store by 8AM the following morning. No postage/delivery costs for the customer, as it's warehouse->store. (Or to be really compelling, even offer for the title to be carried round to the customer's house, if it's within 2 miles of the shop, say).
Even better, offer print-on-demand on location, so if the book isn't in stock, it can be printed out and bound while you wait - assuming it's not a large-form-factor picture book, or a children's popup book or similar.
And of course they should sell coffee, offer free wifi and the chairs should be comfortable.
(As a side-note, Borders had a nice thing going with in-store Starbucks, with 36 Starbucks coffeehouses located inside Borders UK shops; perhaps it's time to invert the symbiosis, and for Starbucks to bring in one of the remaining big-name book chains?)
The "Borders Express" solution addresses the convenience angle, as well as the "any book under the sun" advantage offered by Amazon, as - with a half-decent distribution network which the likes of Waterstones should already have in place - they should be able to place an ordered book in your hands even faster than Amazon do via Royal Mail (walk into your nearest Borders Express, order a book at 5.30PM, and pick it up at 8.30AM the next day); with the additional benefit that the customer incurs no postage cost, plus all the benefits that a high-street store has - knowledgeable staff (we hope), being able to browse and impulse-buy the in-store titles, etc.
The key is in the ubiquity of the small-scale bookshops. They would need to be everywhere: almost as convenient as buying a book online, but with the perky benefits of a physical presence, and a Print-on-Demand Espresso Machine brewing away in one corner to provide the Amazon-scale depth of choice. The irony isn't hard to see, of course: the very "mom & pop" bookshops that the high-street megaliths steamrollered out of business could turn out to be their salvation, albeit in franchise form.
This solution is also far lower-risk than placing their hopes in yet another megastore that's doomed to fail horrifically expensively, as each individual shop (which I assume would be operated under a Starbucks-style franchise op) must justify itself and turn its own little profit.
Obviously, it won't happen... but I would love the convenience of being able to pop down the road (a few minutes' walk) and browse some books for sale in a comfortable environment. Instead, of course, the bookshops will dwindle, and whither, and whine that their marketshare is being lost to websites and supermarkets, when the answer is staring them in the face, in that empty retail unit next door to Tesco Express.
(Footnote: The photo at the top of this article is adapted from this terrific set of photos of interesting bookshops).
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