The Future of the End of Bookstores
First off, accept my apologies in advance for the length of this post. Over the past several weeks, I’ve been ruminating about the future of bookstores, if there is one, what it might be. This is the likely the last post on bookstores that I’ll write for a while, for reasons that will become clear.
Kepler’s 2020
I just recently attended Kepler’s 2020, an unusual gathering of nearly 80 booksellers, publishers, book industry service providers, librarians, and members of the Menlo Park community in Silicon Valley, where Kepler’s Bookstore is located. The gathering took place over two-and-a-half very packed days of conversation and debate. Publishers represented included Sourcebooks, Chelsea Green, Chronicle Books, and Workman Publishing. Also represented were folks from Village Books (Bellingham, Washington), Book Shop Santa Cruz, and Booksmith and City Lights (both in San Francisco).
For folks who don’t know, Keplers Bookstore has a rich history going back 56 years. As one of the country’s leading independent booksellers, it has played an extraordinary role in the San Francisco area’s cultural life over the years. Kepler’s has also gone through not one but two financial crises (2005 and 2012) and is now closed for renovations and a rethinking of its future. The Kepler’s 2020 gathering was an attempt to envision that future and develop, a template that might serve for the community bookstore of the future. Kepler’s has also already received donation pledges of over $725,000—an investment on the part of the community in building that future. Heading up the new Kepler’s is the “literary entrepreneur” Praveen Madan co-owners of The Booksmith, an independent bookstore in San Francisco, and the co-founder of the Berkeley Arts & Letters, an artist and author lecture series.
The Kepler’s 2020 event was led (brilliantly, I felt) by Sandra Janoff, PhD, through “the principle-based methodology called Future Search,” as described on Keplers 2020 blog, “a process used world-wide to get the ‘whole system’ focusing on the future and creating value-based action strategies.” The premise of the event was hampered, I’d say, by trying to “future search” Kepler’s future while simultaneously trying to lay out the future of the community bookstore in general. For some of the participants, these two themes often seemed quite disconnected. But, to be fair, the event was clearly (or at least it became clearly) aimed at creating community around a vision for the future of Kepler’s, specifically a vision that people would be willing to work together to realize. The event was well covered by the Washington Post and Shelf Awareness, so I’d like to focus on the results of the event rather than what the future of Kepler’s and bookstores, in general, might look like.
At the culmination of the Kepler’s 2020 gathering, attendees were ask to envision what “your ideal Kepler’s will look like in 2020.” What emerged–or perhaps more accurately, what was distilled–are the following principles on which the future of Kepler’s is to be built.
We all, as a collective, envisioned Kepler’s, in 2020, to:
- Be financially sustainable.
- Have a clearly defined mission.
- Be dedicated to community outreach.
- Serve as a gathering place for creative events and social events.
- Support life-long learning and literary education.
- Sell books in any form, on any platform.
- Maintain a virtual presence, with technology fully integrated into the store.
- Provide a carefully curated selection of books.
That’s the bones of it, the bare bones. And while the ultimate articulation of these principles—especially in the areas of integrating technology in-store (7) and agnostic delivery of e-books (6)—are potentially really interesting, I definitely came away from the whole event discouraged, depressed actually, by the lack of innovative thinking.
The Community Bookstore of the Future
This is where the two strands of the agenda came unbound, at least for me. Kepler’s will thrive or fail largely due to factors other than the eight guiding principles above. (Will area book lovers want to patronize Kepler’s—not just buy books but frequent the paid events? Will the rent expense remain manageable?)
The other strand of the conversation, about the model for community bookstores in general, leads me to think about another set of key principles that I’d want to add:
Stop Worrying About Amazon
While I hate Amazon as much as anyone, it is totally counterproductive for indie booksellers to let Jeff Bezos get their dander up. It’s just silly to consider some sort of political action or grass-roots campaign to educate people about unfair advantages Amazon has over the indies—something I heard at Kepler’s 2020 and from lots of indie booksellers. Why? It’s tone deaf. What many book readers hear in this argument against Amazon is: “Help us! Big bad Amazon uses predatory pricing strategies and because of this you have to pay less for your print books when you shop online and you get them conveniently delivered to your home the next day and, soon, same day.” Really? That’s the row you wanted to hoe? Instead, amplify what you do best and uniquely and forget about Amazon.
Sell E-Books, Platform Neutral
While some of the folks at Kepler’s 2020 were open to the idea, the general attitude among indie booksellers is to do whatever they can to discourage their customers from buying e-books from Amazon. While the American Booksellers Association is looking to field an e-book solution to its members soon, I don’t think anybody believes that the solution will be good news for existing Kindle customers (70% of the e-books market, or is it more now?). Why can’t indie booksellers acknowledge Kindle’s market dominance and serve its customers with easy ordering in-store and via indie bookstore websites, securing an affiliate fee.
Sell More Books
So much of what I heard at Kepler’s 2020 (and elsewhere) was focused on how to raise revenues in ways that don’t have much to do with selling books. Instead it seems to be all about:
- More events (in store, for a fee)
- More non-book items
- More serving of self-published authors for a fee via the Espresso Book Machine or some other POD solution
While there’s nothing wrong with any of this, I have to ask if it’s really wise for bookstores to plan to survive by selling something other than books. Is that really the future of the bookstore? Indies’ main strategic partners are publishers—who have a vested interest and commitment to supporting this influential sales channel. But as the cost of servicing the indies goes up and up, bookstores need to focus on delivering value to publishers—selling the same or fewer books while focusing on other revenue streams, bookstores aren’t going to serve that strategic partners.
Direct Marketing, Please
Many if not most indie booksellers seem very hesitant to take full advantage of their relationships with their customers via social media and email. I subscribe to several bookstore email lists and follow a number on Twitter and Facebook. By and large, the outreach is purely informational, focusing on new books being released or in-store events, trivia, etc. The proven techniques of direct marketing could be adopted to drive sales via indie bookstore websites, expanding their potential reach. It seems to me that if you’re going to sell online, you need to invest some effort in direct marketing.
Post-Kepler’s 2020
On the way home to Boston from San Francisco, after the Kepler’s 2020 gathering, I asked myself the following question. “What does the community bookstore of the future look like in eight years?” I spent some time really turning this over in my mind. All I could come up with in the end was, “Well, that doesn’t look much like a bookstore to me.”
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22 Responses to “The Future of the End of Bookstores”
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Of course I would say that the missing link in the thinking you described here is the author. What does the author lose when bookstores go out of business? In terms of how I’ve been treated by many bookstores, not a lot. As a reader, I lament the end of the bookstore; as an author I do not. Bookstore events featuring authors are often lackluster, poorly marketed and an insult in many ways. My ideal future involves an increase in libraries and library funding and an increase in book clubs and author participation with book clubs. The only way I’d get excited about bookstores surviving is if they, like a few have done, see themselves as centers for AUTHORS — with resources, book club lists, an atmosphere of intellectual and artistic debate — no more discussions about marketing. The ideal bookstore is where something that transcends the marketplace should be happening and ironically that something will stimulate the market for books.
Kate Horsley
Thank you, Kate. So glad to see you contributing to the conversation from the author’s point of view–a voice that does seem to get often overlooked, even by me! My apologies. Your stark comment, “as an author I do not . . . lament the end of the bookstore.” While I do think the best community bookstores are more than happy to work with authors on events, it does often seem like the draw is so small and the number of book sold so few it’s not really worth the effort. Is there a model you can imagine, off line or on, that would get you excited as an author?
Peter Turner
Reading events around themes with other authors have really worked for me. For example, for a few Valentine’s Day events, I got several authors to read erotic passages from their works with me at an independent bookstore. The bookstore provided wine and goodies. There are loftier topics, and I know some poets and writers organize group readings around political and social causes. Very good idea — but bookstores need to push these kinds of things, and authors need to make it interesting — refraining from hogging time, for one thing. This means being willing to be controversial and even radically engaged in some issue or topic. For example, would it not be great to have a venue in which Buddhist authors read passages from their works about non-violence? Authors need to give up the ego-based reading. And so do bookstores. It just makes sense that more authors will attract more people and that issues and topics reach more people than a mid-list name.
Kate Horsley
I’d hate to think of a world without bookstores, where one can go and discover something new or just while away an afternoon browsing.
That said, as long as there is a section devoted to books with enough of a selection to fit that bookstore’s clientele (and perhaps an EBM to supplement what they don’t carry, and for full disclosure purposes, I am the VP of Content at On Demand Books, the company behind the EBM), there’s nothing wrong with selling other things to bring in more traffic. I love the idea of cafes in bookstores and you can even extend that to community centers having niche bookstores.
Karina Mikhli
Thanks, Karina. To my way of thinking, anything booksellers can do to sell more books (POD or otherwise) is healthy for bookstores in general, the book business, and book culture.
Peter Turner
Thanks, Peter, and definitely agree. I wish I’d have a community bookstore where I can get to know the staff and they my reading preferences. A store that would care enough to call me when a new book or author they thought I’d enjoy came in is one that would win my loyalty–and buying dollars.
Karina Mikhli
Hi Peter,
It was a pleasure working with you at the Kepler’s Future Search, and thanks for your thoughtful response to the results.
While I don’t disagree with your notion that bookstores must sell more books and that employing more direct marketing techniques is wise, I don’t think you’ve addressed the issue of why one would even go into a bookstore–that’s where the 7 principals come in.
I too am a fan of the platform agnostic approach to ebooks. Not, however through an affiliate relationship with a company that won’t allow sales directly to its eReader. The biggest reason to sell ebooks is to hold onto our print book customers. Sending them off to buy ebooks from someone who is trying to sell them every imaginable product under the sun just doesn’t seem like the right approach.
Finally, you seem to object to bookstores selling products other than books. The reality is that very few of the still-standing indies would be here if we didn’t sell a lot of other things. When we began 32 years ago “sidelines”, as non-book items are referred to in our business, accounted for about 10% of the revenue from most stores. For successful (meaning still existing) bookstores today, up to one third or more of their revenue comes from non-book items.
I, like other booksellers, are looking for “out-of-the-box” approaches. That’s why we’ve been selling ebooks for as long as it’s been possible. It’s why we were one of the first bookstores to add an EBM machine. And it’s why we keep going to events like Future Search, looking for new ideas. There are likely no silver bullets so we keep piling in as much other ammunition as possible.
Chuck
Chuck Robinson
Thank you, so much, Chuck, for your comments. Yes, it was a great gathering and I hope I didn’t give too negative an impression in my post of the value of the event. I have to admit, my main reason for attending was less to do with Kepler’s and more with the hope that some innovative ideas would emerge.
In terms of the seven principles that came out of the process, the very first item was a commitment to a viable business model. Getting people to “go into a bookstore” doesn’t in itself contribute to a viable business model, as you know much better than me.
I confess, I’m a bit baffled by you comment about being a fan of “the platform neutral approach.” A vast proportion of existing eBook customers are Kindle customers as are many of your print book customers. I don’t understand how not serving this segment at all (and making it difficult for Nook customers)–as Google Books did and any ABA “solution” is likely to do–is a wise strategy for retaining customers. I don’t mean to sound contentious, really, I just feel like the hatred/fear dynamic of Amazon doesn’t serve anyone well. I feel like focusing on what booksellers do well and/or do uniquely is better than trying to compete with Amazon over the sale of a format that is largely lost to indies. That said, though I was a bookseller years ago, I don’t have any skin in this particular game–so it’s easy for me to offer free and unsolicited advice.
In terms of selling sidelines, I think I may not have been clear. I don’t object to it at all. One has to do what one has to do. My point was that the Kepler’s event seemed to focus too much on ways of increasing “non-book” revenues and that it’s not something your publisher-partners have much direct interest.
I do feel booksellers could be more effective at direct marketing, driving sales off of their website and in-store. Perhaps “Selling More Books” could be the focus of some future indie bookstore event–an event hosted by ABA, with leading direct marketing experts advising booksellers on best practices. I don’t know the practicality and politics of any of this but I know if that were the focus “I’m in.”
Thanks, again, for your comments on the post.
Peter
Peter Turner
Hi again Peter,
I think you misunderstand my reaction to Amazon. I neither hate nor fear them, in fact we hosted McKenzie Bezos at a reading for her first novel. I think being an Amazon affiliate is a bad business plan. This is obviously something on which we disagree, but given the world of business there’s a lot of disagreement about what makes sense for a business to do.
While I certainly believe that having a strong online selling presence is important, I think it is naive to believe that one can be competitive in that arena with the big online retailers. Thus, the empasis has to be on what makes the bricks and mortar buying experience valuable to the customer.
The community partnership approach is not simply about a feel-good program with local businesses and non-profits. It involves selling books at organization’s events and affiliate links to the store’s website.
Again, I take seriously your admonishment regarding direct marketing. We were early advocates of one-to-one marketing, but have lost our way a bit in the years since. Your comments have motivated me to re-examine our direct marketing efforts.
Thanks once again for your engagement on this.
Chuck
Chuck Robinson
Thanks, Chuck, for your reply and further comments. In terms of the issue of the dynamic of “hatred/fear” of Amazon, it does seem like the widespread feeling among indie booksellers is that they don’t want to send eBook business Amazon’s way–even if it means loosing income and frustrating customers. That does strike me as “fearful.” But, as you said, we can agree to disagree.
If I may, I might want to leave you with one last thought. I would never recommend “competing” with large online retailers. That would be naive. But, that doesn’t mean you can’t sell a lot of books online. I used to work at a small/medium publisher that got 10% plus of its revenue from direct sales while never compete with Amazon on price (or anything else, really).
Peter
Peter Turner
Hello Peter (and Chuck),
Good to see you both at the Future Search. I’m determined to find ways for independent booksellers to sell more books in their stores while also developing techniques that will help indies leverage their strong customer relationships into online selling. I’m in conversations with Ingram, the ABA and a number of people within the Workman group to develop this, and will let you know what we come up with next.
Best,
Bob
Bob Miller
Thanks, Bob, for joining in on the conversation and I’m really delighted to hear that you and the folks at Workman are invested in being innovative. I’m curious to hear what you come up with, especially in terms of online sales.
Cheers,
Peter
Peter Turner
Chuck Robinson’s comments, along with a dialogue I got into with another major indie bookstore owner over this whole Amazon issue got me thinking. The point Chuck and this other bookstore owner seem to want to make was that indie bookstores have to tread a fine line between amplifying the value (in the broad sense) they offer customers as distinct from what Amazon offers their customers. The hope, I’m guessing, is that the market for Amazon and for Kindle eBooks is growing but will have a definite ceiling, that it will top out. The remainder–maybe I should use that word–the remaining market of book buyers will be loyal if they’re not guilted too overtly.
The palimpsest-like nature of blogs makes it hard to avoid being a revisionist even of one’s own writing. But, maybe indie bookstores can make a distinction between amplifying the value they offer customers while reminding folks that Amazon undermines this effort–kind of like explaining that the devil just had a bad childhood, or something. Maybe it’s a way to go that they can make work. And, if they’re going to take this route, they can’t actively send off customers to Amazon, even for an affiliate fee–that’s the revisionist bit.
Peter Turner
I’m still hopeful that independent booksellers will find a way to sell e-books to their customers in ways that are friction-free, possibly in combination with their physical sales. But I think that the bigger opportunity is in bookstores selling physical books online. We’ll see…
Bob Miller
Bob, your comment makes me curious. Given the high referral rate (at least as self-reported by book consumers) on where the discovery of their purchases first occurs, wouldn’t you expect that the source of discoverability (bookstores) could meaningful convert those to sales, if they were platform neutral and promoted the “service” to their customers? Or are you saying, given the anti-Amazon sentiment that the market for eBooks for indie booksellers is too small to chase too hard?
Peter
Peter Turner
Hi Peter,
There are a lot of issues overlapping here, too many to handle in e-mails. We’re talking about e-books and online physical selling simultaneously but they are different animals. Another layer here is the vast–but rarely discussed–difference between fiction, which can be easily discovered anywhere and then ordered as an e-book from somewhere else, and illustrated non-fiction, whether it is a cookbook/gardening book/crafts book/children’s book/coffee-table gift book/etc., which is often best discovered and purchased in physical form. The indies that are changing their title mix toward the latter are seeing increases in sales in those categories. So, how to take that further, both in-store and online from those stores to their customers?
Bob Miller
Interesting. Are you thinking of allowing booksellers to bundle DRM-free eBooks with the sale of print?
Your comment on the impact of eBooks on the nature of what booksellers actually stock strikes me as really important. I wonder if coordinating a database of images, page spreads, etc. on a password protected WordPress site wouldn’t be a way to allow retailers to pull images as wanted to distribute with links via their social media and email lists. What would be great is if each file could have an embedded track back to the title page at the retailers site. You’d have to set up a way to embed a bookstore-specific title page url on the fly as chunks of data are being linked to the out going email or shortened to be added to posts. I think that’s a relatively trivial programming problem and would leverage booksellers access to readers with compelling content that would convert to sales for delivery or pick up. You could experiment with one or two highly motivated bookstores who were especially interested in devoting some time to this content marketing strategy.
Peter Turner
Hey hey, author here.
I agree to a certain extent with Kate. However, I do think that the indie bookstore does have the big advantage in hosting authors. The biggest problem is they don’t have any money to make it where an author can afford to come. We go to bookstores on our own dime usually and when the bookstore only has 3 people that they have managed to pull in for the event….well, it isn’t worth it.
Now I work with my local bookstore a lot (so local they are 1 mile from my house) and they bring through a lot of authors and do well at getting folks out, but my events work the best and are the biggest attended, even though I am not on any lists.
But I go out and promote it myself. Being local I have the knowledge of the area to drop flyers and I bring with me other authors. I had a book release party there on Tues for my newest book BLOOD AND SILVER and had 4 other authors there to share the spotlight. We had 60 people in attendance.
Multi author events and utilizing the local authors is a big tool in the indie wheelhouse I think.
Also, I like the idea of some specialization. An indie cannot compete with Amazon or even B&N when it comes to selection. They just can’t. But they can work with specified genres and seek out the good books in those genres (mystery, crime, horror, sci fi, etc) and connect them with fans who want that kind of thing…it would take a lot of work, but that’s what owning a business is (I own a small business too).
And I totally agree that indies have to get off the hate of ebooks. It is the way of the future. Paper books will never go away but they will dwindle to a point that you cannot make a profit on them alone. It’s the same thing that happened to the music industry. When something creative begins to go digital it is impossible to turn it back.
Good post!
James R. Tuck
Thanks, James, for joining in the conversation. To be frank, I feel like it’s the author’s voice that is often lost amid all the blather about the future of bookstores and the future of publishing in general–my own included. To quote some unremembered scribe, “Without you all this would not be necessary.”
One thing I’ve heard from booksellers, which frankly was a surprise to me, is that many if not most author-events are money-losers for booksellers, that is unless the author is a marquee name and the bookseller can then charge entrance fees or require attendees to buy signed books.
What disturbs me about this is that it reinforces established authors while not being able to support up-and-comers. It also turns booksellers into event hosts.
I do hope you keep at your efforts to find readers while working with booksellers. I have a feeling that the future is brighter for readers and authors and that new forms of intermediaries will emerge.
Peter
Peter Turner
The reports out of the Kepler’s gathering depressed me more than anything the book trade has done in a long time. Having a meeting about how to save an industry is an unambiguous portent of the end. You might have given your post the less hopeful title, The End of the Future of Bookstores.
One problem with bookstores is that we seem to believe our own marketing, that we’re special cultural institutions that play by rules different than our neighbors on Main Street or in the strip mall. We’re not. We’re retail merchants selling bits of paper and drops of ink. If bookstores are failing, it means we are failing our (former) customers, the same as JC Penny or Yahoo or any other business in decline. Marketing oneself as special is fine; buying into it is fatal.
As for the possibilities of reinvention, I look at Apple for inspiration. Apple made computers that had the aura of superiority without the sales to support that view. Somehow Steve Jobs took the key elements of what was special about the Mac and spun it into a related but entirely new business (iPhone, iPad, iTunes) that has proved even more influential than the founding products. I don’t know what the iPhone of bookstores could be, but I’m pretty sure it’s not T-shirts, artisanal coffee, vanity presses, or a revival of the Chautauqua circuit. Those goods and services are already provided by other retailers.
I don’t have any great ideas for the reinvention of retail bookselling, but I do have a few thoughts about what publishers could do to buy bookstores more time to figure it out. (And publishers, more than anyone else, need bookstores to survive as showrooms for their products).
1. Stop putting prices on books. Print is virtually the only product in modern life that comes with a preprinted price. Every other product has a wholesale price – the shop owner sets the retail price. The current practice hugely benefits discounters who can tell customers exactly what they are saving. The reason Amazon has to promote its price comparison app for electronics and other products is that customers don’t know how much a Samsung Insignia NS-46E480A13 (that’s a TV, BTW) is supposed to cost.
2. Stop allowing proprietary eBook formats. Compact discs work in every CD player because there’s an industry standard. Publishers have handed the eBook market to Amazon (which is bad for publishers and arguably for customers in the long run). They should take a stand for customers and starting in (say) 2014, only license eBooks in a standard format building upon ePub. Device makers can provide better interfaces and shopping experiences and software developers can build enhanced books (much like app developers provide improved functionality for Twitter). That would allow bookstores to sell eBooks for Kindle or Nook or iPad or whatever comes next. Independent bookstores have no chance to sell eBooks if the formats are proprietary.
3. Embrace the paperback original. I know all the financial arguments for hardcovers, particularly the royalty benefits for authors, but the differential between the online price for hardcovers and the in-store price is very large. More than anything, I think the hardcover price differential gives bookstore customers the idea that bricks-and-mortar bookstores are expensive, and it drives customers who want to read the latest titles to eBooks, pushing the industry’s best customers online. And most customers don’t like hardcovers. They buy them because they have to. At our store, we sell a lot of used books, and most of our customers will not buy a used hardcover, even if it is cheaper than a used paperback of the same title. In fact, we are more likely to sell a new paperback at $15 than a used hardcover of the same title for $7.50. If anything good is going to come of the 50 Shades phenomenon, let it be that.
4. Provide special products to bricks-and-mortar stores that simply aren’t available to Amazon. There are lots of precedents. Walmart has exclusive versions of products, available nowhere else. In the UK, new bestsellers are available as paperbacks in airport bookstores but nowhere else. Lots of retailers have private label goods, etc. Publishers could work with the ABA, for example, to develop Indie-only versions of books, with additional content or fancier covers, or I don’t know what, exactly. But I do know that if we offer a worse selection at higher prices than online retailers, there is no hope for bookstores.
Our shop is located in a building constructed in 1879. We have a photograph of the building taken in 1905, when it housed a newly-opened store selling carriages and tack for horses. I look at that picture each day and think about the folly of starting that sort of business even as the first automobiles were rumbling down the street (and our own apparent folly in pursuing a similarly quixotic business). I’m sure the owners thought that with horses a part of everyone’s daily life, that there was no way a machine could replace a living animal. After all, horses were special, part of the culture of America for centuries. It was surely inconceivable that within 20 years carriages, liveries, and stables would be gone and largely unlamented. I don’t know that bookstores can avoid that same fate, but focusing on anything other than selling books is definitely not going to work.
Scott Brown
Scott Brown
Thank you so much, Scott, for joining the conversation–for your incisive comments, but especially for your ideas on what publishers could do to be of support.
First off though, as time has gone on I find myself feeling a bit different about the Kepler 2020 project. As a model for “The Future of the Community Bookstore,” it may have been a weak collective effort. As an attempt to galvanize a community of supporters and get their specific commitments for support, it may be successful. We won’t know that for some while.
Your comment, “marketing oneself as special is fine; buying into it is fatal,” strikes me as spot on. This, along with the tendency to cast blame on to Amazon, the DOJ, the lack of governmental support for minimum retail pricing–however justified–are all distractions.
I do have a few questions about your thoughts on “what publishers could do to buy bookstores more time to figure” out the “reinvention of retail bookselling.”
1. You’re notion of removing prices on books has been kicked around for a while, I think? Are there any legal obligations? In any case, in this era of smart phone price checkers, is this a horse that’s left the barn? Or am I misunderstanding your notion here?
2. In terms of not allowing eBook retailers from using proprietary formats, I don’t think there is anything publishers can do to prevent it–without going DRM-free (as Macmillan/Tor) did recently. I confess I don’t quite understand why publishers are so slow to move on this front. As you point out, it just gives over control of the eBook market to retailers. Is the concern that if once DRM is removed there’s no going back and the implications are impossible to predict? Is it an issue having to do with the contractual requirement to protect copyright on behalf of the copyright holder? I don’t know. Like I said, I find it a bit baffling.
3. The idea of moving more toward trade paperback originals is problematic, at least for fiction and best-selling narrative non-fiction. As you know, eBook wholesale pricing is based on the least-expensive print edition. So, lowering the price on the original publication (regardless of format) would have a very negative effect on publisher revenues. To be frank, anything that would significantly effect publishers revenues is probably a non-starter, given the pressure publishers are under to invest in innovation while supporting the existing business model.
4. I love your idea of having publishers provide special editions, exclusives for bricks-and-mortar stores only. My thought would be for publishers to work with a third party packager and the ABA to license specific rights with limited distribution.
Your last paragraph is wonderful and the concluding sentence says it all. Thank you, again, Scott, for taking the time to offer your thoughts and insights.
Peter Turner