The independent bookstore lives! Why Amazon’s conquest will never be complete
Borders might have gone the way of the buffalo, but indie booksellers are actually growing. Here's why
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Stop carving that gravestone. Brick-and-mortar bookstores aren’t dead, yet. On the contrary, independently owned bookstores are growing in number. According to the American Booksellers Association, since hitting a nadir in 2009, the number of indie bookstores in the U.S. has grown 19.3 percent, from 1,651 to 1,971. The current total is less than half the 1990s peak of around 4,000. But it still serves as a rebuke to the conventional wisdom that equates Amazon’s relentless rise with the inevitable death of the physical bookstore.
What explains this renaissance? The collapse of Borders in 2011 is one big piece of the puzzle. (Removing a dominant carnivore from the savannah gives all the other animals a little more breathing room.) The end of the recession also contributed to a more nurturing economic environment.
But there’s more to the story. There is increasing evidence that the same digital transformation that has so dramatically reshaped the publishing industry, and driven millions of consumers online, also paradoxically rewards locally rooted authenticity. Our digital tools are steering us toward brick-and-mortar stores that promise a more satisfactory consumer experience than either chain stores or online emporiums can provide.
In a world increasingly influenced by our social media interactions, it’s turning out there may well be enough room for the little guy to survive — and perhaps even thrive.
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Oren Teicher, CEO of the American Booksellers Association, has a theory. Ever since the 1998 movie “You’ve Got Mail,” the general public has been convinced that the kind of bookstore that perky Meg Ryan used to run is doomed.
“We know that the popular narrative about all this is that indie bookstores — indie businesses in general — are supposed to be up against the wall fighting the behemoths, and largely losing the fight,” says Teicher.
“The data is quite contrary to that. It’s absolutely not true. There are lots and lots of bookstore companies across the country that are increasingly profitable. Now, as with any small business, it’s tough out there and the competition is fierce. But there is a recipe.”
Teicher identified several reasons for the fact that new indie bookstores are popping up across the United States: Bookstore owners have become adept at taking advantage of new technology to connect to customers. Publishers are more willing to collaborate in innovative ways with bookstores to boost sales. But most important, said Teicher, is a growing consumer preference for shopping locally.
“The localism movement in America is real,” says Teicher. “The data is now indisputable: There are millions of American consumers making decisions every day to shop at a locally owned independent business.”
Teicher’s citation of the “shop local” movement jibes with what academia is starting to learn about how consumers are using social media to inform their purchasing behavior. Over the past five years researchers have been generating a vast amount of data pertaining to the impact of online reviews, ratings and social media buzz.
Unfortunately, almost none of that research focuses on bookstores, independent or otherwise. We know a lot about why consumers are choosing restaurants to eat at or hotels to stay in, but very little about where people buy books. And there are obvious huge differences between restaurants and bookstores. You can’t — at least not yet — digitize a meal, and online takeout ordering doesn’t substitute for a dining experience the way Amazon delivery substitutes for trudging to the bookstore.
But there is still much to be learned from the research that’s been done on restaurants. The values that emerge after the data is crunched help explain why the “shop local” movement is gaining traction. People crave authenticity, and they like supporting locally owned independents. What the data on restaurant choice tell is that now we have better tools than ever before to help us satisfy our cravings.
In 2011, Michael Luca, an assistant professor at Harvard Business School, published a study on the impact of Yelp restaurant reviews. He discovered three interesting things:
(1) a one-star increase in Yelp rating leads to a 5-9 percent increase in revenue, (2) this effect is driven by independent restaurants; ratings do not affect restaurants with chain affiliation, and (3) chain restaurants have declined in market share as Yelp penetration has increased.
His conclusion: Yelp was steering people to independently owned restaurants at the expense of chain restaurants.
Luca’s finding made intuitive sense. This is how we live today. We don’t just get off the freeway and choose where to eat based on the sorry collection of fast food outlets within sight. We check our phones and find the high-rated diner that might be another mile or two down the road. Five more minutes of travel time is a logistical price we’re totally willing to pay if we are confident in the ultimate reward. Smartphone in hand, with the collective intelligence of our social media networks at beck-and-call, we are no longer at the mercy of our environment. We get to choose.
In 2012, the National Restaurant Association reported 28 percent of Americans made their restaurant selections based on information from social networking websites. That’s a number that’s only going to go up.
Aileen Chua, an undergraduate at New York University, studied restaurant choice in New York City for her honors thesis in 2013, and confirmed Luca’s findings. Independent restaurants received an average rating of 85 percent, compared to 77 percent for chain restaurants. Chua concluded that in the future, “building an independent restaurant might be more feasible than franchising a chain, because the accelerating growth of social media and the information that it makes available proves to be more beneficial to independent restaurants than chain restaurants.”