KatG, I don't know if you've mentioned this elsewhere, but can you elaborate on the difference between book retail and regular retailing? Oh, I think it'd be neat if someone resurrected the original Borders in Ann Arbor as a local bookstore just like it was originally.
Book retailing is weird. Fiction publishing is even weirder. It's small, works on narrow profit margins with no real cash reserves, slow growth, minimal marketing and no demographic research and other geegaws that other industries use because there's no money for it and most of it doesn't work for books. Book publishing uses ancient accounting, distribution and sales systems that even magazines no longer use, principally the return system with print for booksellers. They use them because booksellers have continued to want them as a commission guarantee, and because they actually have worked better for the industry than trying to adopt methods from music or other industries.
Books supplies two tracks -- entertainment (fiction and some non-fiction; ) and information (non-fiction.) This makes it different from music and movies (nor does it share many business practices with those industries, including e-books.) Non-fiction is author-based, partly directly competitive, and readers are marketing oriented, but not entirely and reliably so, with some symbiosis, browsing and variety factors. Fiction is book-based, not directly competitive, and runs thoroughly through symbiosis, variety and browsing. Fiction readers are marketing resistant and the chief marketing impetus is word of mouth recommendations by those they know, which cannot be rigged. Awareness of a fiction work can be done through marketing, but it may not translate reliably into word of mouth.
Merchandising off of books is erratic, particularly for fiction. Books do not have reliable merchandising channels to turn their books into other products. Except for the slice of celebrity book publishing, books are not status marketable very much. You may buy the clothes your favorite actor wears or go to a club or store that is announced hot and trendy by "trend setters", but this doesn't happen reliably for books. Books are not "in" things for the most part. Books can do some of it, depending on the audience, such as business books by leading business people, and for fiction, a film or t.v. adaptation means a large increase in sales, but that's a tiny percentage.
Books have a reliable small audience who keep buying books despite competing technologies and entertainments. Younger people read fewer books, reading increases as a person ages. This is the reverse of the music, t.v. and movies industries, which rely on young people and disregard older people. Women buy more books and more fiction than men. This is the reverse of movies, music and games, where men buy more than women.
The electronics industry, which completely owns us as consumers, is completely alien from bookselling and has enormous piles of money, which has made for interesting interactions for e-books. Tech predictors keep trying to predict what will happen to book publishing according to the tech industries, which is not going to happen because that's how people buy gadgets, not books. This is how we got the meme that it was Amazon and e-books that killed Borders.
Regular retail has all sorts of proven points of operations, such as sales, advertising, status marketing, demographic and design research, etc. that don't necessarily work for books. Regular retail is not able to return unsold merchandise to suppliers for a refund, like you can in books. Regular retail has lots and lots of cash and sells its stuff far more widely. Weird little bookstores that should not be able to exist somehow do, if they can manage the rent. Bookstores often end up providing other functions such as community centers, performance spaces, etc., functioning in some ways like public libraries. The book industry is increasingly international and most of the big publishers in the U.S. for instance are owned by foreign corporations, but it is less international than most other industries because it deals chiefly in the written world, which runs into translation requirements that limit it.
As Margaret Atwood explained (emphasis mine):
People sit there putting words on the page, and some of them make a lot of money for their publishers and others create huge losses because the publishers placed their bets wrong. When people say publishing is a business – actually it’s not quite a business. It’s part gambling and part arts and crafts, with a business component. It’s not like any other business, and that’s why when standard businessmen go into publishing and think, “Right, I’m going to clean this up, rationalize it and make it work like a real business,” two years later you find they’re bald because they’ve torn out all their hair. And then you say to them, “It’s not like selling beer. It’s not like selling a case of this and a case of that and doing a campaign that works for all of the beer.” You’re selling one book – not even one author any more. Those days are gone, when you sold, let’s say, “Graham Greene” almost like a brand. You’re selling one book, and each copy of that book has to be bought by one reader and each reading of that book is by one unique individual. It’s very specific.
