Book Sales In Unexpected Places
18 Dec 2005, 2:37:39 pm
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Earlier this summer, I happened to find myself in Minnesota's "lake country," around the Brainerd area. As usual, there was a fuel-and-food break. We found the Oasis Liquor / Oasis Express.
Inside, in a small hallway-like space that doesn't really appear to be a good place for products to be located, I found a small shelf of used books.
Shoved under tree-shaped air fresheners, dashboard compasses, and ball hitches is found a makeshift "book club", as the sign calls it. The dog-eared, broken-binding books are all priced, according to the sign, at half their cover price -- see, the book club wasn't even important enough to waste price-tags!
I'm done mocking the store's book club now, for a very good reason: the books are there in the first place. Sure, it's not Barnes & Noble, with cushy leather chairs and double-double frappuchinos nearby, but it's not an unbelievable venue. Besides the package shoppe and gas station shown here, there's also an attached restaurant, and fishing/camping supplies above and beyond the normal convenience-store fare. Everything sold could be considered useful to their clientele, the campers, hunters, fisherman, and hikers who frequent northern Minnesota.
When departing from civilization to parts unknown, a camper can pick up everything they'll need for their time away...garbage bags, nightcrawlers, propane tanks -- and a couple books to help pass the time. There are two lessons in this:
- First, do not assume books need to be sold in bookstores. Books should be sold where book customers can be found. Yes, book-shoppers are quite often found in bookstores, but if Harlequin taught us anything it's that it's better to go where the customers are than to try and train the customers to find you. Harlequin focused on grocery-store sales, and built their empire on it.
- Books are more than a frivolous purchase: they are a neccesity to many people. The shelves pictured above could easily have held a couple other cases of small-engine lubricant, or bottled water. However, they saw a demand for this product and devoted space accordingly. While they're not making a fortune off the books, the shelves wouldn't be there if it didn't have a purpose.
Publishers need to consider that 'purpose' -- the reason that books can be for sale in a non-bookstore environment, and be worth their shelfspace. The idea that people want eBooks on their celphones is a misguided interpretation of the fact that people want books no matter where they go. Downloading a book into a machine that you carry everyplace is the wrong side of
Occam's Razor: a solution with far too many components. The solution would be to figure out how to have books available to people in all the places where they might wish to select something to read, in a simple and convenient way. Selling books for cheap, in environments where likely bookbuyers are located, will be a simpler and more convenient plan of attack. An entrepeneur willing to manage the rotating-used-book-shelf business for gas stations could build a business off it...or publishers, who already hate the used-book market, could put their new titles on the shelves in their place.
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