Can Amazon Save the Bookstore?
February 3rd, 2006 | Published in Out Loud
I like shopping, exploring bookstores. I like looking for interesting books—interesting specimens of printed matter. See, now that I can easily get just about any book in the world shipped to me, I find that the quality of the physical object matters more to me.
But even though I have one of the nation’s great bookstores at my disposal, Powell’s, there’s something lacking the experience. Now, I’m just postulating here, but it seems there’s a balance that any retail store needs to strike between the inventory it stocks and experience it offers. With books, you have to warehouse (stock) many books on a wide variety of topics in order to satisfy your customers. At the same time, you need to find some room to create a shopping experience through which you can promote those books to customers.
Big chains like Barnes & Noble simply optimize their stock on sales data, leaving plenty of room to promote the “experience”. Since they’re large, this data allows them to hone their stock to only the titles they know will really sell. Smaller stores don’t have access to a large set of sales data, and they usually recoil at the prospect of optimizing toward lowest common denominator best sellers and the like.
This is of course a self-fulfilling prophecy in the retail space: you can’t sell what you don’t stock. So retailers can’t accurately explore their “long tail” without dedicating the majority of their space to warehousing titles. And since new titles are continually appearing, I imagine it’s very difficult to get any sense of a tail at all – you just can’t afford to waste time or space promoting older niche titles.
So I was wondering, what if Amazon, who probably has the largest and deepest book-related data set in the world, sold that data as a service to bookstores looking to optimize their inventories on a vector other than sales?
How a book sells is not necessarily the best indicator to how well it belongs in your inventory. How authoritative is it? How well does it do as it ages in your back catalog? How does it relate to the other titles you stock, your speciality, clientele, etc.?
I imagine that you could build a pretty amazing tool using this data, data that we couldn’t have collected before the advent of the Internet and Amazon, and which led to the decline of retail bookstores in the first place. So maybe, this is just a natural stage in the evolution of the bookstore, after all, and in a few years, we’ll all be marvelling at how wonderful our local bookshops (admittedly, the ones that are left) have become.
Silver lining, anyone?