Super Bookstores Defining Marketplace
Professor Sam, who is probably the only person at the mall this afternoon wearing a star-dappled vest and long robe, has set up shop in front of Wills Bookstore. He makes things appear and disappear, passes a bandanna through a boy’s body “with no pain and very little blood,” and repeatedly instructs children in “the magic word.”
Professor Sam holds up a coloring book, which should go from blank to black-and-white to color, but the trick isn’t quite working out because, well, “we forgot to say the magic word.” Actually, it’s four words: “I love to read.” The children echo the magician with varying degrees of giggling, and some even drag their parents into the store.
It’s an unusual gimmick for attracting customers but an appropriate one: Only some serious wizardry will save bookselling in America. Small, privately owned independents like Wills have been ravaged first by chain-owned mall stores and now the arrival of superstores. There’s a Borders within walking distance of this mall and two Barnes & Nobles and a Books-A-Million within easy drives.
But the four leading chains, which sold a combined $3 billion worth of books in nearly a thousand superstores last year, haven’t quite ushered in “the golden age of bookselling” that the head of the largest chain, Len Riggio of Barnes & Noble, has proclaimed.
While the amount of square feet devoted to bookselling is estimated to have at least doubled or maybe even tripled in the ‘90s, sales for the past 2-1/2 years have been stagnant.
Instead of expanding the market, the superstores seem to be mostly cannibalizing what’s already there, whether it’s by killing independents or closing the Walden (owned by Borders) and B. Dalton (owned by Barnes & Noble) stores that used to be in every mall.
Don’t tell the people who used to sell books in Greensboro that this is a golden age. In the 1990 census the city had 183,000 people, and until recently they were served by 10 small bookstores: two Wills outlets, two stores that operated under the name Atticus, two Waldens, two News & Novels stores, a branch of a small regional chain called the Intimate Bookshop and a children’s specialty store.
Only a Wills, a News & Novels and an Atticus remain. But the Atticus is closing Oct. 31. When a Barnes & Noble opened next door, owner Bob Holt tried moving. “One in three customers followed us and were very loyal. But we needed one in two to make it work.”
He adds, “There’s very little choice now about where to buy books in Greensboro. That’s the tragedy of it.”
But there are many more books available to buy. Barnes & Noble and Borders have vast ranges of titles, plus cafes and places to curl up and bathrooms and music departments. The ceilings are far away, and light pours in; these are cathedrals for the printed word.
Patrick O’Rourke used to be an owner of the News & Novels stores. “The Barnes & Nobles and Borders of the world ran me out of the business,” he says, but he doesn’t blame his customers for abandoning him. “The superstores have ambiance and atmosphere and selection. I just couldn’t compete.”
Says Robert Riger, a publishing consultant with Market Partners: “Quite frankly, I don’t see how the whole thing can’t collapse. We had our boom period, and we’re going to have our shakeout. Last year was bad, but the worst is still to come.”
On a recent Friday afternoon, only one of the nine cash registers in the Barnes & Noble is open, and it isn’t ringing often.
Harriette Saunders, a nurse at a local hospital, is one of the few customers. She’s been coming here since the store opened. Before that, she bought at the two local stores. Indeed, the owner of One for the Books was a friend. “Local bookstores are friendly things,” she says.
But she couldn’t always find the books she wanted there. “I don’t think I really experienced any guilt” when One for the Books closed, she says. “It’s just the rules of the marketplace.”
Barry Kaiser is aiming to shape those rules to his advantage. The fact that Wills still has nine stores is due to his strategy of opening in towns too small for the superstores.
“You see a steamroller coming at you, the best thing to do is not hold your hand up but get out of the way,” says Kaiser, who bought control of the 90-year-old Wills firm six years ago.
There’s another problem: The superstores aren’t really buying the books. Instead they, like all bookstores, stock them on credit. If the book is sold, the store pays the publisher. If the book doesn’t sell, it goes back to the publisher. And if a store needs more credit to buy newer, fresher books? It will ship back carloads, truckloads, warehouses full of books.
In the business, this is known as the “books as wallpaper” theory, from an article by small-press publisher Carol Seajay in Feminist Bookstore News. “What do you get if you double the sales space in a low-growth industry?” she wrote, answering: “Basically: wallpaper - books that are used for decoration, books that make stores look full and rich but that can’t possibly sell.” So they’re returned. For every 10 copies publishers sent out last year, they got four back.
Says Tom Powers, a partner in Steerforth Press, a small, three-year-old Vermont outfit that specializes in serious literary and political material: “As the bookstore selling space proliferates, the return rate goes up. Already it’s at a practically fatal level.”
For a small publisher, the hardest part used to be simply getting its books into the independent stores, which had room for 10,000 or so titles. With the superstores stocking 150,000 books, the hard part is making any title stand out.
“When you have too many thousands of square feet of selling space, the books tend to disappear,” Powers says. “The readers come through and their eyes glaze over. If they really know what they’re looking for, they’re in the right place. But if they don’t, they’re overwhelmed.”