To boost sales, retailer Borders Group is taking a simple but radical approach, our colleague Jeff Trachtenberg reports in today’s Wall Street Journal.
Borders is increasing the number of books that it displays with the
cover facing out (rather than the spine facing out), even though this
shelf-space-eating approach will require cutting inventory at each
store up to 10%. Says one analyst: “Breakfast cereals are not stocked
end-of-box out. […] It’s a little bizarre that it’s taken booksellers
this long to realize that the point of self-service is to make the
product as tempting as possible.”
The link is here. I understand the basic model as follows. Superstores first invest in high inventory and a tony reputation. You start thinking of them as "the place to go" for books, or in an earlier era, for music. They then devote more and more of their space to non-book items. The number of greeting cards and chocolates stocked by my Borders has risen steadily over time, as have the size of the coffee shops. Having more books "face out" — at least they are books — is one of the lesser aspects of this more general problem. It’s related to why most trendy restaurants peak in the first year and a half of their operation, followed by decline and then stagnation. Once they have a high enough (and sticky enough) reputation, it is time to cash in and lower the quality of the product to the informed and more sophisticated buyers.
But in the case of bookstores, wasn’t the whole process driven by internet sales?
The boom in mega-bookstores happened before amazon had really taken off. At that time, the stores could win customers by having the biggest selection around. Now, online bookstores are “the place to go” for books and there’s no way physical stores can ever compete in terms of number of titles. So they’re forced to go a different route.
You’re right that non-book diversification and having the books face out are part of the same trend, but I really don’t see any parallel with the restaurant business.
Let’s face it, the bigger problem here is that most of the public does not read books, has no desire to start, and the number of biblio-abstainers is growing over time.
So your solution would be what? A stock room full of books, but customers who were handed only a pages upon pages of book listings, title and author, to choose books from which to purchase?
Go ahead Tyler try it. Start your “high quality” bookstore today.
The Public definitely still reads, I’m part of it, I should know. But yeah, the composition of what they read is probably much different than what old fogeys consider “reading” to be. E.g. books and newspapers are being replaced by websites, blogs and what have you.
The real problem for bookstores is that every person under 30 buys books solely online, more or less. I don’t really get bookstores or their appeal at this point. It’s easier to sample, compare and find books online and the only thing a bookstore has going for it is the off-chance I need a given book right now, as opposed to two days from now.
I came here to say what Sonic just said. I can’t understand why Tyler considers it a problem. Maybe he needs to overcome his “old-style” bookstore bias.
As an aside, I was in The Strand in NYC last week, and they have lots of tables and bins where the books are displayed face-out, and they’re about as bilbliophile-friendly as they come.
I wonder how long it will take Borders to start charging publishers fees to shelve their books facing cover side out?
I completely agree with Sonic, especially the whole “90-degree-head”-thing.
I wish displaying more covers would be something taken up by German bookstores as well…
@Jason: It’s not so much about older people – I’m 23, and I still prefer to have a convenient look at the books.
This is an entirely good and welcome development. In the early years of the Borders/B&N expansion their value proposition was clearly massive selection. A Borders would carry something like 100,000 titles, which, unless you were one of the tiny handful of people to live in Manhatten, D.C., Cambridge, Chicago or a few other places was 2-5X as much as you had ever seen in a bookstore.
But Amazon does the deep catalog much better. Much much beter. So the only value propositions left to the chains are
1) Get it now and start reading today (as opposed to waiting at least 24 hours, and much more than that if you’re not willing to pay top dollar
2) Browse for something you don;t know about yet under pleasent conditions.
The Chains’ move allows them to better meet criteria #2 without seriously undermining their ability to meet criteria #1. Its clearly a smart move. Actually, they would be better off killing shelf space entirely in favor of more tables. The few tables in a Borders today take up maybe 20% of the floor space but always seem to have 50% of the customers.
Ryan,
That’s funny. I wonder if the “cereal box” idea was something the PR department cooked up. Maybe Borders just wanted a way to cut inventory costs and increase income from fees and needed a cover story.
Anderson: in the English-language section of one of the bookstores in Abu Dhabi, where I used to live, the books are shelved in alphabetical order of the author’s first name.
That took a bit of getting used to.
What we need is the physical equivalent of Apple’s cover flow. Unfortunately, Amazon or B&N are more likely to have it online before someone comes up with a way to do it in a bookstore.
I still browse bookstores when I don’t know what I want. When I know what I want, I just order it online.
When big box bookstores started their big expansion publishers took the stocking risk. If I remember the book business correctly, a bookstore ordered the books and put them on the shelves, effectively on consignment. When a book was sold, then the publisher got a return on its capital. Sometimes books were not returned, but the bookstore would simply provide proof that they had been destroyed. Fraud was a problem. Many books had a little note on their title page warning buyers that books sold without covers were likely books reported destroyed, but sold despite this, and that you were buying stolen goods.
Since books didn’t cost the book stores anything to stock, it made a lot of sense to stock a lot of books. You could move down the long tail, and people would spend more time browsing the extensive collection. Some would even take a latter break and go back to browsing.
I am guessing that publishers aren’t as eager to serve as bankers for the bookstores anymore, and that the terms of the trade have changed. If nothing else, most books are sold by big box general retailers like Costco and Walmart, and they stock only a handful of titles. I know that these retailers have their own deals. Have the terms of the trade changed for the other large chains? They want to be able to match the general retailers in price, but otherwise they are selling a long tail product. Are the publishers as willing to put up the capital as they once were?
Even a slight change in the cost of stocking a book store and a small movement of the risk could result in big changes.
I think restaurants have a different cycle. For the first year, restaurants expect to run in the red. The hope is to attract enough of a clientele in that year so they can move into the black in the second year. The restaurant business is surprisingly tricky, and can be rather arduous. Details of table placement and reservation scheduling can make the difference between red and black ink.
(For example, the staff would like to stack all the diners as early as possible so they can go home early. This “stacking” tends to strain the kitchen leading to uneven customer waiting time and often a bad experience. A naive owner or manager might not even recognize what is happening as they start to lose repeat business.)
As the first year ends and the second begins, the typical restaurateur starts tuning things to get into the black. Portions may be changed, tables moved, reservation policies change, ingredients may be substituted. The chef, on a one year contract, may be replaced. A great restaurant the first year may not have been a viable financial entity, at least not under its current management. As it struggles into the black, quality may decline.
Of course, a lot of restaurants don’t even make it past that first year. Some do, and some go through a rough period as the owner learns and applies the lessons. It takes a lot of knowledge to get into the black and stay there. That is one reason you find chains of restaurants run by a single chef/entrepreneur. They can apply the lessons learned from one restaurant at a number of restaurants. In Seattle, we have Tom Douglas (Dahlia Lounge, Etta’s …) and Christine Kef (Flying Fish & Fandango). This isn’t franchising. The restaurants are not clones, but it does let the entrepreneur leverage his or her knowledge in restaurant operations which are surprisingly knowledge intensive. (I think restaurant operations are even more sensitive than book stores to these kinds of things. You CAN run a book store on love of books. You cannot run a restaurant on love of food.)
I am a author who wrote two books both dolls like us books and for some reason you don’t carry either of my books . You use to carry my first book but you droped it recently I have a 291 page website with my pin name on it you should check it out . I illustrate with dolls .
I published my first book under my maiden name and my second book under my married name but it is still me you can see similarities enough to tell one author two books .
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