Death of the Bookstore (week 7 blog)

Is this the future of book stores?

How does an offline bookshop compare to an online bookshop?

First there’s no store front. This means that you don’t have to pay ludicrous amounts of rent to be in a location that people know, that you don’t have to pay to have equipment installed to monitor theft, that installations and aesthetics can now be damned, no money wasted on counter staff. The list continues to go on indefinitely. The other key advantage is that online stores can have warehouses in any location at all, meaning they can have large warehouses in cheap areas and store a larger variety of books in these locations.

But what does an offline shop offer to people? The first one is the same for every offline store – the ability to impulse buy and have it there and then. Everything else depends on the store with some offering nothing more than a shop front but at least some of them are moving towards having cafés and things inside so that you can drink coffee while you wait. Some say there is also human interaction in that the staff of the store make it an experience, however this is very hit and miss and not every store will have great staff. So in the end it comes down to the previously mentioned experience.

So for me that’s the difference. Online shops are cheaper but you have to wait for goods to be delivered where as offline stores offer social interaction and immediacy of owning goods.

In asking whether the bookstore can be saved we begin to start looking into how they can offer other things that online stores can’t offer. The social experience is good, but even regular hosting of events such as book signings and readings can only do so much. Niche market bookstores can be established to sell titles that even stores like Amazon wouldn’t have heard of, but these are generally suited to online retailers.

I would go as far as to say that leveraging off social experiences is only the first part and would be at best a means of putting off the inevitable. If they could address either the cost or the selection issues then possibly they may be able to continue to compete, but if both remain uncontested then it’s only a matter of time.