Bookstore to customer: I want you for your body

An article by Robert Scoble last month has been on our collective mind again since we attended BookNet Canada’s annual technology forum. What we’ve been wondering (with no small measure of professional interest) is what’s to be done with bookstores as digital reading grows.

For my part, I don’t go to record stores anymore. What’s the point? They sell content I want at a price I don’t want to pay and in a format that’s no longer convenient to me. Buying music now means iTunes. How then will bookstores keep from entirely losing the foot traffic of people who’ve come to prefer consuming their primary product digitally?

We Datachondrians are certainly a long way off from an answer (and so far nobody’s asked) but it does seem right off that nothing will be solved by doing anything with print books. There’s no themed table, endcap, discount promotion, or membership bonus that’s going to make people go to a store that sells a product they don’t want. That stuff is for the people who showed up.

The hardest battle in retail is just getting the bodies through the door. Once they’re in, you can let your merchandising and salesforce take over — if either is worth anything at all, you’ll make some sales (and with luck, turn a profit). But when whole segments of your customers decide they not only prefer to buy what you offer elsewhere, but in fact can’t buy what they really want in your store, how do you entice them past the lease-line?

More coffee shop space?

Free wi-fi?

Or does the key to attracting traffic lie in making people want to be around the people you’ve already got?

Then how do you make the wireless and fancy-free want to hang around the same place as a bunch of page-flipping luddites*?

To be continued…

*We happen to love page-flipping luddites.

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