The imminent pandemic winter may or may not be as bad as last year, but it will be bad, and bookstore owners, publishers, authors and consumers alike should be thankful that Bookstore.org will be there to relieve some of the strain.
GBP 1.7 million ($2.3 million) went to indie bookstores in Bookstore.org’s first year of operation, and most UK bookstore owners were impressed. Not so James Daunt, CEO of Waterstones in the UK and Barnes & Noble in the US.
Marking Bookstore.org’s first anniversary in the UK, CEO Nicole Vanderbilt spoke of an “incredible year” in which – helped of course by lockdown – the online bookstore working with the UK distributor Gardners sought to give independent bookstores a competitive edge in the online book sales arena.
480 bookshops shared in the £1.7 million bonanza, so an average of £3,500 each, although of course the actual dividend depended entirely on the amount of traffic generated by the independent bookstore, but given the lockdown year the operation may well have been the difference between survival and closure for some.
Bookshops could drive traffic to the Bookstore.org site and visitors to the Bookstore.org site could choose a local bookstore to benefit from the 30% commission on offer for each sale.
Head over to The Bookseller for glowing testimonials from indie bookstores that benefitted from Booktore.org but be warned one powerful industry voice was less than impressed.
Waterstones and Barnes & Noble CEO James Daunt opined to The Bookseller,
From the perspective of an independent bookseller, I would be very reluctant to hand over my customers—and indeed didn’t. If you’re not doing anything with those customers then of course that makes sense, because something is better than nothing, but you are giving your customers away and you’re not getting much for them.
You can affiliate with anybody, but obviously if you’re an independent bookseller you would rather keep your customer and sell them the books rather than get a very small percentage from somebody else doing so. To represent it as something that saves you as an independent bookseller I find fairly curious… it simply doesn’t work unless you’re very small. I think, perhaps, if you’re a slightly larger independent bookseller you’d be much better off keeping your own customers and selling books to them.
This from the guy who, on the bright side, saved Waterstones and appears to be saving Barnes & Noble. But also this from the guy that criminally dropped the apostrophe from the iconic Waterstone’s brand, so lets treat Daunt’s comments with the respect they partially deserve.
The big question hanging over Bookstore.org is how well it might have fared – and will in the future fare – when the pandemic is no more and shoppers are comfortable browsing high street shelves once more.
Because while the Bookstore.org website unquestionably offers any and every customer a catalogue many times more massive than any bricks and mortar bookstore can match – the real appeal of bookstore.org was being able to shop online at all. The antidote to Amazon meme, while no doubt playing in the minds of some consumers, was unlikely to have been the driver.
But as Covid-19 cases soar in the UK – and it’s still only early autumn – the likelihood shoppers will want to revert online this coming winter is high, even without actual lockdown returning.
The imminent pandemic winter may or may not be as bad as last year, but it will be bad, and bookstore owners, publishers, authors and consumers alike should be thankful that Bookstore.org will be there to relieve some of the strain.
