It was Mark Twain who said, “Reports of my death are greatly exaggerated,” in a cable he sent from London to the press in the United States after his obituary had been mistakenly published.
As I was sitting in a bookshop drinking coffee, and browsing my purchases, Twain’s retort came back to me. Maybe, the many gloomy reports of the imminent demise of book shops are an exaggeration.
You see many business pundits are almost gleefully predicting bookshops will be amongst the many bricks and mortar retailers that will fail due to the opportunity and convenience of internet shopping. They add to their argument by claiming the availability of just about every publication in digital form will accelerate the book shop demise.
The pundits may be right, they may be wrong! My answer is “It depends!”
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And upon whom does it depend? Why, the bookseller of course!
If they continue to do what they’ve always done they will certainly fail.
But if they make it an experience that can’t be reproduced as an internet purchase, life will be good for them. And the bookshop I was in had certainly managed to do that and will probably thrive despite the overheads of staff and their expensive location.
And this store certainly had created an experience.
Extremely well set up with fantastic eye catching displays and great merchandising of their books, the store looked very attractive and certainly caught the eye of the many passers-by, who almost immediately sniffed the aroma of great coffee which wafted out to drag in many by their noses!
As they passed the bookshelves on the way to the coffee shop located at the rear of the store their attention was captured by the stock on display and so many stopped to browse and buy. And once they had ordered their coffee and been allocated a table, they had more time to browse whilst their order was prepared.
It was a neat operation that was working well and if they offer the same service as I received, get people into their database and build the relationship, I reckon that’s one bookseller for whom the reports of their death would be greatly exaggerated.
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