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So many aspects of life are becoming self service.  Yesterday I checked out my own groceries at a self-service till and received new eye glasses, that I picked out online after measuring my own pupil distance, in the mail and even in my job I work for a website that helps people search for their own books. What about a self service library?

This morning on the Brave New World blog I see that some cities are playing with this concept.  In Seoul they have an automated library book dispenser and in St. Paul they have opened a branch where members collect books they have pre-ordered from book lockers.

                   

I think these are both innovative ways for libraries to stretch their budgets, extend hours, and make their books available to more people.  However I am sure you will agree that a self service library can NOT replace one with a skilled librarian for a patrons needs.  Just like in the grocery store, I love the self-service tills when I want to quickly escape with milk and a loaf of bread but I learned the hard way to never try and self-check out a full cart.

[Now Reading: Second Foundation by Issac Asimov]

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One of my oft-lamented pet peeves is the recurrence of media stories about books and independent bookstores that tell the same old story: indie bookstores are a dying breed, reading is the victim of new technologies, etc. So I must give credit where credit is due to two pieces of journalism today that present a more nuanced picture of the world of books and bookstores.

Via Publishers Weekly, here's an LA Times piece on the uncertain future of the fabulous and venerable Hollywood bookstore Book Soup, after the too-young, too-soon death of its founder Glen Goldman. Even with this somber starting point, the LAT piece offers the most balanced and realistic picture of the actual business of bookstores that I've read in a national newspaper. Here's a sample:

In recent decades, independent bookstores have become endangered, closing as chain stores move into their neighborhoods and market share is gobbled up by online booksellers such as Amazon .com. Some, like Dutton's Brentwood Bookstore, closed when the cost of real estate (usually rented, rarely owned) swamped small (though reliable) profit margins.

Yet believe it or not, independent bookstores, carefully run by those rare individuals who are both "book people" and "businesspeople," are often profitable -- meaning that you can make a living, pay a few employees and work reasonable hours.

Contrast this with the dire reports of Borders teetering on the brink of bankruptcy, or Barnes & Noble's reported $172-million loss at the end of the third quarter last year. To hear the chain executives talk, you'd think people had stopped reading altogether.

People have not stopped reading. The problem, most bookstore owners and publishers will tell you, is a distribution system that caters heavily to chains and wholesalers like Wal-Mart.

When the economy founders, big stores, with their hierarchical policies enacted miles from where the books are sold, have a harder time responding in a flexible way.

According to manager Tyson Cornell, Book Soup did "very well" last year. So did Los Feliz independent Skylight Books, which recently expanded from 2,000 to 3,100 square feet.

I suspect that Tyson and the other great booksellers at Book Soup will find a way to a future despite the terrible loss of Goldman. And it's good to see the newspaper with an open-eyed pictures of their strengths as well as their challenges.


Also today in Shelf Awareness, Robert Gray writes about the issue of technology and books. The best part is the link to his previous column, where he quotes extensively from Stephanie Anderson, inspiring Emerging Leader-type bookseller (and soon to be Brooklynite). Here's what Stephanie, who comes from a very traditional bookstore, has to say about the boogeyman of e-books:

"If there isn't a place for e-books in the indie store retail future, there isn't an indie store retail future. I like your Genius Bar example [i.e. asking whether bookstores can work with the Apple store model of expert help]. That is always what I've envisioned--you handsell the book and then the customer sets their e-reader into the dock, pays you, downloads the book, and leaves. It's important for indie booksellers to look at this as an opportunity, not, groan, another thing to add to an already busy day. As I see it, once most books are available in e-book form, and presumably stored on someone else's server and accessible through the Internet, the so-called advantage that chain and online bookstores have in terms of number of titles available just disappears. Everyone is on a level field now--except that we still have the advantages we've always had, like solid customer service/hospitality, staff who read books and handsell well, etc."

Kudos to Robert and Stephanie for thinking forward on this one, rather than trying to resist the developments that are coming.

And in what turned out to be her last online column for Publishers Weekly, editor in chief Sara Nelson expressed her trademark responsible optimism about the industry to which she's devoted herself. For example:

In other words, while everything suggests that the road ahead is going to be rocky, like many others in BookLand, we're still on our feet—and moving forward—because we're still passionate about what we do. We're real readers, we care, and even though many of us have spent our lives swimming around in the publishing pond, we still get excited at the sight of a mail delivery that contains padded envelopes filled with books. And publishing is all about passion: in the people that make books and the people who will still, always, continue to read them.

I was saddened to hear that Nelson had been let go from PW, as she's been a very visible face and voice for the book industry, someone who paid attention and listened and expressed well-informed opinions in the magazine as well as in panels, news sound bytes, and anywhere else there was something to be said about books. I hope she'll find another platform to speak from, and I'm grateful for her words.

Let's hear it for "those rare individuals who are both "book people" and "businesspeople,"" the ones who make books and bookstores viable now and in the future.

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Clearly, it's time to read Lev Grossman's article in Time about the future of books. I expect to agree, argue, and quibble in various measures. In the meantime, GalleyCat has a good summary and analysis of the piece, especially as it pertains to us snobby NYers.

In the meantime, Bookninja pointed me to an indie bookstore story from Britain that sounds like something out of a Frank Capra movie. An MP from Lancashire discovered that his beloved, homey local indie bookstore is closing because of economic pressure. So he storms into Parliament and tells everyone it's high time the government started supporting locally owned small businesses. And for good measure, he tells publishers they'd better be careful about relying too much on chains and online sellers, because "it's in their own interests to have a large number of outlets." Since when did a politician get so passionate, practical, and well-informed? Truly it is a new day in politics. Perhaps Kaydee Bookshop in Clitheroe will become our rallying cry for a new politics of supporting the local and independent.

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Review of an imaginary book
As I was delaying getting out of bed this morning, I had one of those weird morning dreams. I was reading a YA comic book about a boy and a girl who were left in the woods for dead. They somehow returned to civilization with a mutant superpower: if you got too near them you sickened and died. But it worked very slowly, so for most people it just manifested as a faint nausea. Then the boy and the girl became rockstars (apparently inducing nausea added to their mystique), and played a kick-ass show in which one of them played a Smashing Pumpkins song and the other simultaneously played some hip hop anthem, producing a harmonious chaos. As the kids were both either black or Latino, it was in a weird way a positive depiction of teens of color, influenced perhaps by Ivan Velez' Dead High Yearbook, and maybe by the animated comic (the ALP says "We used to just call it 'cheap animation'") in the extras of the Hellboy 2 DVD I watched last night. I specifically remember thinking in my dream, "I have to review this comic on my blog!" And now I have.

Emerging Leaders Scholarship winners
Last week, the intrepid members of the ABA Emerging Leaders Council looked long and hard at the 50 or so applicants for the Emerging Leaders Scholarship to Winter Institute. Since each of us represents a region, we shuffled things around so that we weren't judging candidates from our own region. And with very little trouble (well, except in narrowing it down among the stellar entries) we chose six awesome young booksellers to represent the Emerging Leaders generation at Winter Institute and have their travel and lodging paid for. Thanks to the generous sponsorship of Ingram Book Group, the following booksellers are going to Salt Lake City!

NAIBA:
Alison Haimson
Carnegie Mellon University Bookstore
Book Department Manager

NEIBA:
Kate Robinson
Brookline Booksmith

SIBA:
Rich Rennicks
Malaprop's Bookstore/Cafe

NCIBA/SCIBA:
Jess Ridout
Books Inc. Burlingame

MPIBA:
Joe Eichman
Tattered Cover Book Store

PNBA:
Emily Adams
Third Place Books

Congratulations to all these winners! And thanks to my fellow council members Caroline, Megan, Sweet Pea, Emily, Jenn, and Jenn for being awesome and helping to make this all happen.


Riggio on the 4th Quarter
The Millions blog does their quarterly report on the Barnes & Noble quarterly report, which (though we indies may have mixed feelings about it) potentially offers insights on the state and future of the book industry. Steve Riggio comments thoughtfully on the decreased media coverage of books during election season, which will hopefully reverse itself now, but my favorite part is his articulation of the books=gifts strategy we've been talking about for weeks now:

"Books are fairly affordable and we hope that as consumers get into the holiday season they recognize that a purchase of $15 or $20 or $25 can give someone a fairly memorable gift."

"Fairly" used twice in the same sentence? Way to hedge your bets, Ridge old boy. But the silver lining is real enough, and it's good to hear it from the big boys.


Bookselling in hard times
Despite that silver lining -- or perhaps rather, in order to take full advantage of it -- we booksellers need to be at the top of our game right now to deal with the current and predicted hard times. Bookselling This Week has gathered all of their articles and other materials on "bookselling in hard times" - you can see them all together here. There's also an open invitation from American Booksellers Association CEO Avin Domnitz to arrange a one-on-one consultation with him. If you're having a hard time taking a hard look at your bookstore's weak spots, I highly recommend getting in touch with Avin. He's a successful bookseller from way back AND a lawyer AND a finance expert, and I've consulted with him a number of times as I've developed my business plan. I often feel a bit disheartened at first by his merciless practicality, but then I find I'm armed with the perspective and the tools I need to make necessary improvements. We can all use all the help we can get -- and talking with the ABA is free.


Obama and the book trade
Freelance book critic John Freeman (until recently president of the National Book Critics Circle, and a great friend to indie bookstores here in NYC) writes in the Guardian about how Obama's presidency will affect book sales. His prediction: we'll see bumps in the backlist titles that Obama, a great reader of history, mentions as influences, which will hopefully take the place of the anti-Bush administration books that have dominated our nonfiction shelves for years. That's not to mention the books by and about Obama, of course. The global news agency AFP has a similar story, which begins with the encouraging statement "The literati are back in charge of Washington." My fellow NAIBA board member Mark LaFramboise of Politics and Prose has a typically wry quote in the piece: after expressing gratitude that we have "a reader in the White House again", he notes "John McCain books are dead now. And we can't sell an Iraq war book now to save our souls."

At McNally Jackson, we have a display table sometimes referred to as "the Obama shrine": a dozen or more memoirs, audio books, photo retrospectives, hard policy analysis tomes, and children's picture books about the 44th president. And the shrine is selling very well, thank you. It's topped by our home-made signage using a photo of Obama and a quote from his election night speech: "Our union can be perfected. And what we have already achieved gives us hope for what we can and must achieve tomorrow."


Books = Happiness
As if you didn't know this, you joyful booksellers. "A new study by sociologists at the University of Maryland concludes that unhappy people watch more TV, while people who describe themselves as 'very happy' spend more time reading and socializing." Maybe we can use this in our marketing as social proof?...

That's all for this Monday, kids. Happy reading!

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Note: At last weekend's meeting of the board of NAIBA (the regional booksellers's assocation of which I am an executive board member), secretary Eileen Dengler "comissioned" a piece for the upcoming NAIBA newsletter. This is something I've had on my mind lately, so it was a great motivation to write out my thoughts, and Eileen graciously agreed to let me cross-post it here. Your comments are most welcome.

Bookstores in Bad Times

At this particular moment, it’s a challenge to be an idealist and an optimist: two labels I’ve embraced as I’ve found my calling as an independent bookseller. Newspaper headlines, daily sales totals, and our own tightening belts tell us that things are tough, and getting tougher. As we head into the holiday season, where most of us make 40% of our yearly sales, it can seem logical to throw up our hands and wait for the apocalypse.

But booksellers are tough, and relish a challenge. And somehow I keep finding reasons to be optimistic.

For example: if our memories are long enough, we can remember that at least through August, US Census numbers (as reported in Shelf Awareness) showed that bookstore sales continued to rise month by month over last year’s numbers, even as retail sales overall were stagnant. That seems to suggest that bookstores may be more resilient than some other segments of the economy.

And economic hard times can actually be pretty good for purveyors of books. Sara Nelson of Publishers Weekly quoted Random House founder Bennett Cerf in her October 6 column: in his 1977 memoir, he asserted “The publishing business has always been rather stable. It doesn't soar when things are going crazy and people with a lot of money are spending it. . . By the same token, when everything goes to hell, books become one of the cheapest forms of pleasure.”

You’ve probably already heard the formulation “Books and Booze”: the two commodities that continue to sell when folks have little money to spend. The 15 or 25 dollars someone spends on a good book represents an investment in pleasure, entertainment, and escape that lasts a lot longer than a movie, and costs a lot less than an iPhone or a Blu-Ray player. (And if you’re selling wine or beer in your bookstore, you’re doubly insured.)

And we have the advantage of being on Main Street, not Wall Street. We’re not answerable to jittery stockholders who demand impossible quarterly growth; we are the ones we have invested in, and we’re in it for the long haul. I think more consumers are starting to understand the benefits of that. Now is the moment when the message of shopping locally to support your local economy is more resonant than ever. We have the marketing tools of IndieBound, as well as our own local first organizations and publicity efforts and personal relationships, to get that message across, and people are listening.

If we are heading into another depression – well, we’ve been here before. The publisher returns system was implemented during the Great Depression of the 1930s – so in a way, our industry has a safety valve built for just such an economic environment. As CEO Avin Domnitz of the American Booksellers Association reminded us in his open letter, now is the time to take advantage of that system, and make sure our inventory is serving us well.

Avin is a pragmatist, as are most booksellers, and I’m grateful to them for reminding me when it’s time to face hard facts. But to quote Avin himself, “Now is the time to look at your business carefully, to first identify trends, and, then, to find ways to enhance those that are positive and to soften those that are negative.”

To me, looking with all honesty at the reasons to be optimistic is one of the ways to enhance positive trends. While we work on controlling our inventory, payroll, and cash flow, we booksellers would all do well to remember the good stuff. It’s never a bad time to get inspired, to be hopeful, to remember what we have to offer, and what we have to rely on, even in tough times.

One of my fellow NAIBA board members passed along an article describing the economic downturn as an approaching storm. It’s scary, and it could get ugly.

But independent bookstores are a port in the storm. We sell a product that people can feel proud – and smart – to spend their money on. We create spaces that offer a welcome third place (and that doesn’t have a two-drink minimum). We offer human connection, and free conversation. We have “one of the cheapest forms of pleasure”, and one of the richest sources of community. We are what people are looking for.

So I’m still an optimist. And like all of us, I’m an idealist. We can and should be savvy business people (so we can keep doing what we’re doing), but we’re never going to make a massive fortune as independent booksellers, no matter how good or bad the economy gets. That's not why we do it. We do it because being an independent bookseller is one of the great good things one can do in the world. And our stores are islands of hope and perspective in scary times. We’ll be fine, because what we have to give is just what is needed now: Community. Ideas. Stories. Shelter from the storm.

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With all this contact I’ve been having with librarians lately, I’ve been thinking about the volume of work they must do to provide us with the great privilege of a variety of reading materials. The future of books has also crossed my mind. With all this talk about the internet and ebooks and speculation about physical libraries becoming obsolete, I am horrified. NOTHING, ABSOLUTELY NOTHING can replace the joy of holding a book in your hands and sitting in a comfy chair and reading. And what about the pleasure of browsing the shelves and computers in a library to discover reading and listening treasures you would otherwise never discover?

I don’t know about you, but the thought of sitting in front of my Apple computer and reading the 1200 or so pages of Atlas Shrugged is not that appealing. And what about children’s books? Can you imagine not being able to cuddle up with your favorite little person and flip the pages a book while enjoying the illustrations?

So the next time you hear about the possibility of libraries becoming extinct, please challenge the source profusely. I refuse to give up my books, and I also cannot image life without librarians telling us about a great read and encouraging us to use parts of the brain that would otherwise lay dormant.

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I have yet to read the really important Washington Post article everyone is blogging about. But I always find time for Overheard In New York (it's on my Google desktop). OINY, which also inspired a book, posts the irresistably funny, gross, weird, and unbelievable things people hear other people saying in New York. Wednesday the site gathers lots of short quotes together around a theme, with often exponentially hilarious results.

Today, people are talking about books.

If you are a book person, try not to bang your head against the wall after reading these. After all, if you overheard people talking intelligently about books (and there are plenty of those in New York too), it wouldn't be funny enough for Wednesday One-Liners.

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Read through for some random interesting links, or scroll to the end for a special invitation for NYC booksellers...

* The L.A. Times has a cool article on the future of physical/electronic books, from the perspective of some rare books librarians, with some ideas after my own heart:

"Our library is very heavily used," said director Judith Nadler. "The digital and the print-based will continue to coexist. We don't want the electronic instead of the book. We want the electronic and the book."

* The New York Observer has taken on the ambitious task of picking the Brooklyn Literary 100: the most important figures in the Brooklyn literary community, including authors, publishers, editors, etc. (What I like about the map is that it also points out the bookish places in Brooklyn, including bookstores and coffee shops). It's obviously a tad arbitrary, but not enough so for New York Magazine, which has taken the Observer's list and edited it down to the top 50, 25, and ultimately 1.

My take: This list is probably going to both obsess and annoy people, but I feel the best response is to peruse it curiously and take it with a large helping of salt. It's arbitrary (see the comments for lots who got left out), and the very idea of a Brooklyn community of writers seems antithetical to the idea of picking the important ones. Still, I admit I did delight in calculating how many of these folks are in my email archives, or one degree removed -- I could tap into the literary power of Brooklyn with a few keystrokes, mwa ha ha! Anyway, lots of ideas for the Brooklyn Lit Life series...

* On a much more serious note, the PEN American Center, which advocates for international literature in various ways, is using the approaching Olympics to launch the We Are Ready campaign, calling on China to release writers imprisoned for their writings. (There seems to be some hope that this sort of thing is working.) It's easy to sign the petition, which I did (Tom Stoppard's complex take on "moral exhibitionism" in Rock 'N' Roll, which I've just read, notwithstanding.)

And next week, PEN launches its amazing annual World Voices Festival, with six days of incredible readings, films, discussions, etc. by writers from all over the world. McNally Robinson will be selling books at some of these events, so if you're local, peruse the schedule and make plans to attend one or two.

* And finally, another item just for locals. Below is the email we sent to over 50 indie booksellers in the city; if you didn't get yours, consider this your official invitation. All of the city's indie booksellers in a room -- what an exciting possibility!

April 22, 2008

Dear Bookseller,

As independent booksellers in the five boroughs of New York City, we face unique challenges, as well as unique opportunities. Though you may sometimes feel isolated in your struggle to compete with online book sales, chain stores, and New York rents, there are over 75 other independent bookstores in our city facing the same problems, and finding new solutions.

We think we have something to offer each other as independent bookstores in New York: community, idea sharing, the possibility of making our collective voice heard. How these things might be accomplished, and what other goals we might set and achieve, is up to all of us together.

We'd like to invite you to a meeting of New York independent booksellers, to discuss and explore the possibility of forming a trade alliance/coalition/association of independent bookstores in the five boroughs of NYC. Here are the details:

When & Where:
Wednesday, May 21st, 10:30 am
Ralph Ellison Room
14th Floor of the Random House Building
1745 Broadway

We hope you will join us! We have some specific ideas that we will share, and we look forward to hearing yours too. Please consider sending a representative (or two) from your bookstore to this historic meeting, to help all of us help each other, and ourselves.

Please RSVP by May 10th with your bookstore name and the names of booksellers attending to Kelly Amabile at [email protected] or (212) 865-1588. (Please note that for building security reasons, we must have your name on a list in advance of the meeting date if you plan on attending.)

We did our best to gather emails for as many independent bookshops in the five boroughs as we could. But we know this initial email announcement may not reach everyone, so please help us spread the word, and forward to other booksellers we may have missed, or whom you think may be interested.

Let's take the great tradition of bookselling in New York City into the future! We look forward to seeing you on May 21.

Sincerely,

Chris Doeblin, Annie Shapiro and Kelly Amabile, Book Culture
Sarah McNally and Jessica Stockton Bagnulo, McNally Robinson Booksellers

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