.
| Hearsay: |
Indy booksellers are still struggling for survival, but having adapted after the attack of the big box stores by carving out community-based niches, their problems are now much more in line with everyone else’s; the shitcanned economy more dangerous than competition. That said, the key to survival is staying connected to your local community, says this piece on the situation.
“This has been a terrible time for retailers in general, including bookstores,” said Avin Mark Domnitz, chief executive officer of the American Booksellers Association in Tarrytown, N.Y. “But the key for independent booksellers is to stay very tightly tied to their local communities, including the shop local campaigns. It’s very important for them to keep those ties.”
The ranks of these so-called “indies” nationwide have been sliding into the shadow of big-box discounters, such as Wal-Mart and Target, as well as growing e-book publishers or Internet-based stores, like Amazon.com.
About 5,400 bricks-and-mortar independent bookstores were around in the 1990s, when the Barnes & Noble and Borders boom hit. Today, about 1,800 remain. The loss of more indies is expected, just as the rough economy chips away at many industries, said Jim Dana, executive director of the Great Lakes Independent Booksellers Association, a group made up of 450 independent bookstores, authors, publishers and marketers.
“We’ve seen a decrease in our numbers and it’s a result of the economy,” said Dana.
Still, the chains are no longer the threat they once were. A survey of independent bookstores and other retailers by the Minneapolis-based Institute for Local Self-Reliance showed that independent businesses nationwide saw the last holiday season sales decline about 5 percent, compared to the same period in 2007. However, the chains saw sharper declines: Barnes & Noble was down 7.7 percent and Borders was down 14 percent.
“Independent retailers in communities with active shop local campaigns have outperformed retailers in cities and towns without such campaigns,” Teicher said.
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February 20th, 2009 at 11:42 am
Even Mr. Obama criticized the Democrats’ plan to include protectionist measures for the U.S.A.’s latest multi-hundred billion dollar stimulus bill. But we all knew that those old fogeys did that only for the sake of showing that young upstart whippersnapper, Mr. Obama, that he is not bigger than the Democrat Party, right?
He refused to pass the protectionist part of their stimulus plan, because he knows that when the People only buy local, the economy that is a recession, goes into a depression, because the economy is also a global economy, because what keeps the economy as a whole (global and local) happy, is a good and constant flow of imports/exports, to and from different regions in the country and to and from around the world.
The latest business strategy that the independent bookstores are championing en masse, is to get the People to only buy books from their local bookstore. That is a very bad strategy. It might seem good in the short run, but as I have mentioned, the economy is also global, the independent bookstores need to have a global aspect to their business also, meaning that they need to have some of their sales to come from beyond the neighbourhood where their store is located. In the long run, that protectionist strategy of theirs will be the final nail in the independent bookstore coffin. But apparently, that the economy is also global is what the local independent bookstore owners are not willing to understand. Are they really so ridiculous? Do all of the books in their inventories come only from local authors? The longer that the economy is bad, the more that independent bookstore owners will find themselves forced to close their stores.
Thank you, Daily Herald, for providing an example with which to tell the independent bookstore owners how to behave with even more incompetence in regards to the business side of the book industry. It is such a mystery to any reasonable person, especially those that are not industry insiders and thus party to its politics, that the numbers of independent bookstores have decreased by 66% since the 1990s, with many more closures most likely on the way? Does the book industry need its own Mr. Obama-type outsider to get itself back on track; a person that is willing and able to say to them what needs to be said?
Anybody that cares about their local independent bookstore, should grab its owner by their collar, and thoroughly yell at them that they had damn well better start to learn the basic fundamental rules of marketing and the economy. Perhaps there are some books on the subject matter that you can smack them in the face with, from the business section of their store’s inventory!
February 20th, 2009 at 12:14 pm
You know, I was going to reply to this screed with care and attention, and from a (privileged?) position of having first-hand knowledge and all.
Then I saw who posted it, and decided to do something useful with my time. Like sell books.
February 20th, 2009 at 2:24 pm
Rob in Victoria: First-hand knowledge, but second-hand wisdom.
February 20th, 2009 at 3:07 pm
Really? Seriously? THAT’s what you’re gonna go with?
You didn’t want to strive for something with the intellectual complexity of “I’m rubber, you’re glue…”?
February 20th, 2009 at 6:38 pm
I try to support my local bookstores in Brisbane, Australia, but I find they have virtually the exact same books as Borders and the rest, and they are more expensive to boot. So…why should I bother?
There used to be a very nice bookstore that had quite a selection, and the staff were pretty knowledgeable. It disappeared a few years ago, though.
February 22nd, 2009 at 11:26 am
“Indie” and the book business is interesting. Someone wrote recently how we love indie movies and we love indie bands but we like big, multi-national publishers behind books. We even really admire self-made movies and support self-recorded bands but have very little time for self-published books.
Filmmakers “sell-out” to Hollywood, bands “sell-out” to corporate masters, but writers get great book deals.
I guess when it comes to books we satisfy all our indie-love at the retail level.