Bookstore Keys: The Future Price of Physical Books“I think that there will be a 50% reduction in bricks-and-mortar shelf space for books within five years, and 90% within 10 years. Bookstores are going away.” (Mike Shatzkin, Ideal Logical Co., The Wall Street Journal)
Obviously with Borders bankruptcy, much shelf space will be eliminated quickly. Now when you go into B & N you see book shelf space already vanishing into other non-book products. The new kid on the block, the e-book, seems to be growing up fast.
It’s tough to contemplate the price point of the physical book in the future. Lemuria, being a small bookstore, has little control over the list prices we can charge. Instead, our mission is to add value however and whenever we can by offering first editions, signed copies, and author appearances, etc. When price is discussed, I have very little control if I want to stay in business. Regarding Lemuria’s participation in the discount wars between big box bookstores and Amazon, I cannot even consider entering that competition.
Lemuria introduces the not-so-well known but award-winning author Mark Richard on February 22nd. To complement his new memoir, Lemuria has collected first editions of his early short stories, compared to Flannery O’Connor yet not widely read.
With the present climate change, Barnes & Noble, the T-Rex of the brick-and-mortar war, and the virtual Amazon, thriving in its own dimension selling an endless variety of products, are now in a Dino Dawg fight. (In the main ring, ladies and gentleman, the Nook vs. the Kindle!) I ask why should physical books continue to be discounted?
Can and will the retail price of physical books come down? Will the publisher begin to determine real value retail pricing on the books they present to be sold?
If retail prices come down and our book product can be valued properly, could we as an industry reinstate a more legitimate physical book value point? Can the price wars now be fought over the e-book? As real book selling space shrinks, we can offer more product legitimacy with more real value marketing for physical books. With cheaper retail list prices, can we create more customer confidence, causing more physical books to be sold?
Amazon is selling Kevin Brockmeier’s Illumination at 48% off the list price. Building on a years-long relationship, Lemuria hosts Kevin Brockmeier on February 23, supporting one of the most original voices of contemporary Southern literature.
When the discounting of retail list prices increased, many local community bookstores were squeezed out of the market and forced to close. For 18 years, I’ve been across the road from a box store which is erasing the value of the physical book. (I was told by mutual sales reps that the box was located across the street “to put me out of business.”)
Revaluing retail book prices could level the playing field again. Less discount influence from the big box bookstores would open the door for Lemuria to grow faster out of the “Great Recession” and our customers would see Lemuria improve more quickly in terms of becoming a more solid “reader” bookstore.
Lovers of Southern literature can buy Swampandia at Ridgeland’s Barnes & Noble for $19.96 or they can buy a signed first edition at Lemuria for the list price of $24.95 and meet one of the hottest new voices in Southern Literature, Karen Russell.
Projection: Suggested e-book prices may level off between 7 and 10 bucks. With e-book values so cheap, will book publishers begin to lower retail prices of the physical book so readers of the physical book won’t feel ripped off? By lowering retail prices, the marketing strength of the word “discount” will be lessened. Publishers please remember what too-high CD prices did to our community music stores.
Also, what about net pricing, where bookstores would get to mark up like most retailers? Our existent antiquated mark down from the retail price structure, helped caused our industry to get into this Amazon “loss leader” mess in the first place.
John Grisham books are a typical “loss leader” choice for big box book stores and Amazon. One use of a loss leader is to draw customers into a store where they are likely to buy other products. The vendor expects that the typical customer will purchase other products at the same time as the loss leader book and that the profit made on these items will be such that an overall profit is generated for the vendor, prostituting the book.
Such complexity won’t be solved soon. I believe that with retail price adjustment and fair valuing for retail pricing within our industry, Mr. Shatzkin’s forecast can be proven wrong. For the present, Lemuria will continue to add value to our books we sell, providing our community with the best services we can offer. I believe that with more legitimate retail pricing from the publishers, our bookstore can exist indefinitely.
The Bookstore Key Series on Changes in the Book Industry
Finding “Deep Time” in a Bookstore (March 8th) Reading The New Rules of Retail by Lewis & Dart (March 3) The Future Price of the Physical Book (Feb 18) Borders Declares Bankruptcy (Feb 16) How Great Things Happen at Lemuria (Feb 8th) The Jackson Area Book Market (Jan 25) What’s in Store for Local Bookselling Markets? (Jan 18) Selling Books Is a People Business (Jan 14) A Shift in Southern Bookselling? (Jan 13) The Changing Book Industry (Jan 11)
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Written by John
11 responses so far ↓
1 Susan Cushman // Feb 18, 2011 at 11:25 am
Informative post, John. Not sure if this comparison is going to hold up, but I’m thinking about my father, who owned Bill Johnson’s Phidippides Sports in Jackson from 1982-1997. Dad sold name-brand running shoes (and other sports attire) but he also sold advice. He offered running clinics, organized races, and had a podiatrist come in to train his sales people. And then the discount stores started carrying Nike (his first exclusive brand) and his business struggled. Some folks would even come to him for advice and then go to K-Mart to save $5 on the shoe he advised them to buy. But the folks who appreciated his “added value” hung around. The store wasn’t run out of business by the big chains, by the way. Dad lost a battle with cancer and had to close due to illness. Anyway, keep up the added value and the integrity, John!
2 Bill Horne // Feb 18, 2011 at 11:40 am
God help you, John! And, us, as well! If the independent booksellers go, I predict the anthropologists and historians will record the dominoes that fell, leaving us with an even more impoverished intellect and lowered cultural awareness. Your economics seem realistic. I truly hope it works this way and we see more rationale in printed book pricing. Thank you.
3 Bobby Keane // Feb 18, 2011 at 11:50 am
Grand slam, John. THIS: “With cheaper retail list prices, can we create more customer confidence, causing more physical books to be sold?” The industry needs to recalibrate their price point for the physical book and the deep discounts need to go.
4 Toni Lanford-Ferguson // Feb 18, 2011 at 11:57 am
Excellent commentary and information. Thanks…We’re with you all the way.
5 Sonny Brewer // Feb 18, 2011 at 1:21 pm
Just ’cause somebody’s from New York, or more precisely, has a byline in the Wall Street Journal, doesn’t mean he’s got a tight focus on the future, ten years out. He says, “I think…” in part of the quote at the top of John’s blogpost. So do I–think, that is. But then Mike gets down and dirty and makes an unequivocal pronouncement that bookstores are going away. Yeah, and that’s what Uncle Giz said when he saw a loaf of bread, all sliced and bagged up in hermetically sealed plastic. “Bake shops are going away,” he said. “I might not know much, boys, but that much I know!” He was wrong. Last time I swung open the glass door to Banner Hall I was lifted off my feet and floated to a bake shop counter where I got a loaf of unsliced bread to bring back to Fairhope. (Ok, so I got a cookie, too, and some quiche and soup–but I’ve got a Round Man’s figure to keep up.) Point is, sliced and bagged bread sells well, but if you want something warming in the oven that really deserves its place alongside a little mound of pure creamery butter, homemade blackberry jam, a steaming cup of Joe that just dripped through fresh-ground beans from Costa Rica, then, it ain’t going to come machine-sliced. You feeling me here? And if you want a book to be about more than virtual ink devils on a digital page, then you will go stand before the sagging shelves at a bookshop where you might overhear an author telling the bookseller what selection she’ll read tonight, and what questions she might answer for readers–after she’s sat in the corner booth and used the same hand and fingers she used to write the story to sign her name on a page at the front of the book that holds her story between its cloth-covered boards. I’m telling you, a real book is better than sliced bread, and John Evans sports a mighty broad baker’s hat. Does this make any damn sense? Where’s my byline?
6 Lynette Hanson // Feb 18, 2011 at 6:49 pm
Thanks be to the gods–surely long-term lovers of books whose pages they can linger over then turn ever so slowly, sometimes feeling the very air stir with the movement of the page and on the page–for men like John Evans and Sonny Brewer. Each has clearly expressed himself on a monumental topic in such ways as to enlighten those who read. Count me in, guys. I do not want the wasteland that would be a printed-book-less world to come about. Therefore, I continue to buy myself splendid reads from Lemuria and have them shipped up to Portland, Oregon. I am like the proverbial kid in the candy store when a package filled with individually brown-paper wrapped books arrives.
7 paul // Feb 18, 2011 at 8:30 pm
I used to work in the music business for a large after market distributor. I was there when the first cd’s arrived. I’ve already seen this movie. Digitalization killed the music business model. It is now doing the same to the book business model. Borders is under, B&N is next. Like you, I am trying to add value to my library by getting signatures, hoping they will at least retain the value of what I bought them for. I will only buy a hardcover book if it can be or already is signed.
8 Jeanie Clinton // Feb 19, 2011 at 11:29 am
Good points made by all of the above. I want to comment on Paul’s last statement, however.
I have a Kindle and iBooks and rarely use them. They simple don’t do the trick. They don’t feel like a book to me. While it’s nice to have something to read on the devices while traveling (now I don’t feel quite so compelled to carry a book bag with five or six books every time I go on a trip) they do NOT replace the feel of a book in my hand…whether or not I can get them signed. (And I do love signed first editions!) There are too many people who are already gone to place that restriction on myself.
9 Wendy // Feb 20, 2011 at 10:32 pm
I will never read a story from a Kindle or a Nook to my children while they sit on my lap and I will never curl up in bed with one either.
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[...] Time” in a Bookstore (March 8th) Reading The New Rules of Retail by Lewis & Dart (March 3) The Future Price of the Physical Book (Feb 18) Borders Declares Bankruptcy (Feb 16) How Great Things Happen at Lemuria (Feb 8th) The [...]
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