Moving Beyond Bookstores

Interesting article at the NY Times on how publishers are going beyond bookstores for sales. For instance, I did not knot that “for Perseus, sales at nontraditional retailers in 2010 outpaced its sales at Borders, which were around 7 percent, for the first time.”

the message I get from this article is that the single-product bookstore is dying. The name of the game is increasingly diversity:

“The national bookstore chain has peaked as a sales channel, and the growth is not going to come from there,” said David Steinberger, chief executive of the Perseus Books Group. “But it doesn’t mean that all brick-and-mortar retailers are cutting back.”

A wide range of stores better known for their apparel, food and fishing reels have been adding books. The fashion designer Marc Jacobs opened Bookmarc in Manhattan in the fall. Anthropologie has increased the number of titles it carries to 125, up from 25 in 2003. Coldwater Creek, Lowe’s, Bass Pro Shops and even Cracker Barrel are adding new books. Some mass retailers, too, are diversifying — Target, for instance, is moving away from male-centered best sellers and adding more women’s and children’s titles this year.

Having a physical outlet for books is extraordinarily important, publishers say. While online and e-book sales are huge channels, lesser-known books can get lost in that world if they do not have a physical presence to spur interest. The ability to catch a shopper’s eye in a store is almost impossible to mimic online.

This makes perfect sense to me, as my favorite bookstores have generally been ones that did something other than sell books, be it have a cafe, a lending library, events, or combine new and used book sales.

The question on my mind is where good, innovative literary books will fit into this picture. The vendors mentioned in the article (e.g. Target, Urban Outfitters, high-end boutiques) don’t sound that great for the kind of books I want to see succeed. I imagine they could be sold somewhere, though.

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