Hey, you.
You over there in the aisle in your neighborhood bookstore. Yes you, crouching down with your smartphone in your hand as you scan the barcode of a Walter Mosley novel. You want to see if you can buy it cheaper online rather than at the cash register of the very store you’re standing in, don’t you?
The owners of Atlanta’s 18 independent book stores might be too polite to tell you this directly, but they want you to know something: They see you.
And they don’t like it one bit.
“We are taking umbrage with people coming into our store, scanning the ISBN number, then telling Amazon what we’re selling it for, essentially being their price checker,” said Doug Robinson, a 30-year veteran of the book business, and co-owner of Eagle Eye Bookstore in Decatur. “We’ve even had them bring a Kindle in to an author event and have the author sign the Kindle. That’s the height of rudeness.”
Book proprietors such as Robinson are struggling to find a way to stay profitable as shoppers increasingly buy their novels and biographies online. Even those who have weathered the era of the big box bookstore and witnessed its decline (See “Borders, Bankruptcy”), are trying to come to terms with this new breed of wired-up, bargain-hunting bookworm. The owners are also trying to sort out what this purchasing trend means for their businesses and the intimate community experience they have worked hard to provide, some for decades.
It’s a hard road ahead that may require some detours.
Last month, Outwrite Bookstore and Coffeehouse in Midtown, a mainstay of Atlanta’s gay and lesbian literary community for 15 years, announced it needed a new, cheaper location to do business. Since the announcement, owner Philip Rafshoon has been overwhelmed by the amount of support he has gotten from people gay and straight, across the metro area. They’ve told him to keep fighting, and that they appreciate the flavor the store brings to Midtown and local literary landscape, he said. But what he needs is for people to come into the store and buy books.
“Our landlord didn’t really raise our rent that much, but we need to find a heck of a lot cheaper space or a heck of a lot more customers,” Rafshoon said. “And whenever you shop at a brick and mortar store it puts that much more money into the community.”
Last weekend, Charles Robinson, who with his father, Doug, is co-owner of Eagle Eye, promoted a not so tongue-in-cheek Facebook campaign against their arch-nemesis: Amazon.
Dubbed “Occupy Amazon,” it was in response to what Robinson and other metro Atlanta independents saw as a cheeky weekend promotion by the online Goliath. Amazon offered shoppers 5 percent off certain purchases if customers would go to a brick and mortar store, scan the price of any item they wanted to purchase, then share the sticker price and the location of the store with Amazon. In the promotion, Amazon said doing so would allow the company to “ensure the best prices possible to all Amazon customers.”
The Robinsons suggested that in response, loyal customers should “Occupy Amazon” by turning off their smart phones and going to actual independent book stores and purchasing actual ink and paper books.
His store has been around eight years and sells new and used books, e-books and ephemera. But in an environment where local corner bookstores are fighting to survive, the promotion had a certain last-straw quality to it. Amazon’s discount enticement, even though it did not specifically name books, so riled those in the industry that the CEO of the American Booksellers Association (ABA), which represents the nearly 2,000 independent booksellers in the nation, issued an open letter to Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos last weekend calling it “a cheesy marketing move.”
“We suppose we should be flattered that an online sales behemoth needs a Main Street retail showroom,” wrote Oren Teicher, ABA chief. “Forgive us if we’re not.”
Indie book sellers from Vermont to Missouri took up the charge, offering customers even deeper discounts if they wouldn’t shop with Amazon. Or if not discounts, the increasing rare experience of old fashioned, in-person, one-on-one customer service.
Ironically, many of those small bookstores have agreements to sell some of their inventory through Amazon, usually giving the company as much as 15 percent of every sale.
Still, those online sales don’t come close to the money brought in on foot by customers off the street. Yet even that market isn’t what it once was.
“It’s not that people don’t buy books,” said Frank Reiss, 49, owner of A Cappella Books in Atlanta’s Little Five Points. “It’s that people who buy books don’t do it in bookstores and people who come into bookstores don’t tend to buy books. That makes it difficult to pay a lot in rent.”
For the past decade, Reiss has seen his in-store traffic decline. Now, A Cappella Books may be headed the same direction as Outwrite. Reiss has plans to move his landmark store from its home for the last 22 years in Little Five Points to a much smaller, much cheaper location in another in-town neighborhood. He has reduced his staff from three full timers and five part-timers a couple of years ago, to now two full-time and two part-time staffers.
For some time — long before the recent Amazon promotion — Reiss has noticed that would-be customers would meander through the stacks, find titles then look for a better deal right there on their phones.
“What do you do?” said David Schallenberger, co-owner of Little Shop of Stories, a children’s book retailer in downtown Decatur. “Do you confront people? I don’t, but I’m tempted.”
According to Codex Group, a book audience research firm in New York, people use their neighborhood stores as a form of literary dressing room: Try it on for size, but buy it elsewhere. It’s a trend that shows no sign of abating, said Peter Hildick-Smith, president of Codex.
Earlier this year, his firm surveyed 5,067 book buyers from around the country about their buying habits and 28 percent said they “showroomed.” More sobering, 39 percent said they bought a book on Amazon after having first seen it in a physical book store.
“The physical store is under huge threat and ‘showrooming’ is a real and very serious phenomenon,” Hildick-Smith said.
A showroom is not what Sara Luce Look , co-owner of Charis Books and More in Little Five Points, has intended for her feminist bookstore to become. For the past 37 years, what’s thought to be Atlanta’s oldest independent bookshop, has been successful in creating the sort of community-gathering-spot environment that endear small shops to their patrons. And among indie retailers, it’s a chapel of the “buy local” movement. The store also has a partnership with a nonprofit created years ago by the store’s other owner and founder, Linda Bryant, which brings regular community meetings, readings and writers’ groups into the space. And thus more potential shoppers. It also doesn’t hurt the bottom line that Charis owns the building it operates out of.
Still there are customers who, while they appreciate the insular experience of a niche bookstore, appreciate a deal even more. Look sees it as another practice eroding her bottom line.
“Everything in our store is really curated, collected and displayed,” said Look. “But we get people who come in and use our brains, our expertise, then they take the information and go buy it online. It’s frustrating.”
Marlene Zeiler, owner of Tall Tales in Toco Hill, operates perhaps the second oldest bookstore in the metro area. She has been at it 32 years. And though she has accepted the digital age, she believes no amount of online “Also Recommended For You” referrals can beat her smile, her voice and her one-on-one consultations with customers.
“I’m not under the illusion that my customers don’t have Kindles or buy their books online, but I think that if you’re in my store you could just not tell me,” Zeiler said.
To keep their doors open, the father-son owners at Eagle Eye have turned to turning off the natural gas in the building seasonally to save money. They’ve laid off staff. Yet they refuse to give up on the brick and mortar storefront and insist that their business in one that’s not meant for a total digital migration.
They’ve also decided to fight back.
In his online “Occupy Amazon,” appeal, Charles Robinson listed all the reasons a shopper shouldn’t come in and bargain hunt by phone.
“We are a product of the community. We’re a meeting space. We help promote local events the you care about,” the younger Robinson wrote. “We have real, live people that you can interact with.”
And if all else fails, Robinson wrote, “We have bookstore dogs that you can pet and maybe get a kiss from.”
Definitely not something you can do online.
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