It made us think how things have changed since 1998 when Meg Ryan and Tom Hanks starred in the movie, You've Got Mail.
As other ODs will remember, the story related the face off between a small intimate book shop and a massive impersonal chainstore. Typically bittersweet, while Fox & Sons Books (the mega chain) handily dispatches The Shop Around the Corner, the two owners ultimately become an item. Good ending for romantics -- Not so great for small business owners.
What dawned on OD was the renewed poignancy of this movie, and we envisioned a possible remake. The new movie's title could be "Retributive Justice" and would star Jeff Bezos (Amazon.com) and another Meg, Meg Whitman (formerly of eBay and Half.com). The plot line here would be how on line booksellers push bricks-and-mortar chains out of business and steal their customers. The cost and inventory advantages of the digital stores is simply too great. As if that weren't enough, the exponential growth of e-books entirely eliminates the need for conventional bookstores.
But there is also a subplot creating a twist to this story. While on line booksellers thrive at the expense of Borders and Barnes & Noble, small intimate focussed bookstores may be exhibiting a renaissance.
Old Dogs are finding that the intimate bookstores of their youth, once the victims of mega stores, are beginning to regain some lost ground, filling a niche in the market.
Small bookstores are at a distinct disadvantage when comparing breadth of offerings or cost advantages. However, they offer a number of economic characteristics that have been identified as ways to effectively compete in the expanding e-commerce world.
Kevin Kelly, a founder and former executive editor of Wired magazine has written about certain services for which vendors can charge and customers will pay in an internet world where much is exchanged for free. Kelly explains, "A generative value is a quality or attribute that must be generated, grown, cultivated, nurtured. A generative thing can not be copied, cloned, faked, replicated, counterfeited, or reproduced. It is generated uniquely, in place, over time. In the digital arena, generative qualities add value to free copies, and therefore are something that can be sold."
Kelly lists the 8 generatives as: Immediacy, Personalization, Interpretation, Authenticity, Accessibility, Embodiment, Patronage, and Findability. While not equally valued by consumers, each trait offers something that is, as Kelly puts it, better than free. Maybe boutique bookstores will once again find commercial support due to the generatives they can uniquely provide.
One other interesting observation was triggered specifically by the movie title, "You've Got Mail." Where is AOL headed these days? The questionable logic of their most-recent acquisition of Huffington Post appears almost straw clutching. Writing about the future of this once-powerful service, one critic stated, "You've got irrelevancy."
On that note we close with a poem learned in our youth that seems to resonate today.
Seth, I think the boutique book shop might be doomed in the digital age. But I know of a few which still exist. Perhaps the Strand in NYC will remain for years to come, but I doubt it. The sales pitch "2 miles of books" might someday be lost on a new generation who don't think of books as having physical substance :). Great thought provoking post. I can't wait to hear what you have to say about smart phones!
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