Forget the shop, I'll just have the window

Another London Book Fair rolls around. Last year, quite a few publishers had begun to embrace the digital era, albeit in some cases with the same wide-eyed stare and frozen grin you see on the faces of presenters of TV wildlife shows as they allow pythons to be draped around their necks.

I showed one publisher the Mirabilis app and demonstrated how you could buy issues from the in-app purchasing screen. “This screen could be your whole back catalogue. New books too. It’s a direct connection to your customer.”

“We are not booksellers,” she replied, as witheringly as if I’d pulled out one of those pythons and suggested a place to drape it. “That is not our core business.”

I reckon a lot of MBA students must have missed a class or two before taking up their jobs in publishing. No, indeed you do not want to distract yourself from your core business - if the business you’re in is relatively stable. But when it’s going through the biggest disruption it has experienced in over fifty years, you might need to rethink what your core business is. Possibly on a quarterly basis.

What will publishers be doing in a couple of LBFs from now? Let’s start by stripping down the whole business of how a book gets into a reader’s hands:

• An author writes a manuscript
• A designer/typesetter turns it into a book
• A printer makes copies of it
• Marketing and publicity make people aware of it
• Publishing and distribution allow an interested customer to buy a copy

We all know that the last part of the equation, the high street emporium of books, is under threat. Even if the ebook didn’t exist, I’m still not going to buy a hardback for £12 that I can get on Amazon for £8 and not even have to lug home. “Oh, but we’re an oasis of calm in a busy world,” say the booksellers, “and would you like cinnamon on your latte?” If you think that’s a sustainable business, open a chain of high street zen gardens. The rest I can get by taking my newspaper to Starbucks.

The high street remains a good place to hook people’s interest, especially the non-tribal reader. I can get 50 megabytes of furry steampunk whodunits for 99 cents with one click, but if I just want a good book that isn’t any specific genre, a window display is still one of the most effective ways to get my attention. Certainly I can browse online, but like most people I am more engaged by the real world and, particularly on the way to and from work, I am actively looking for distractions.

The window display is still useful for selling books, then. It just isn’t worth sticking ten thousand square feet of shop behind it. I already talked about how Tesco used virtual shelves – screens displaying their products – to cope with a lack of physical stores in South Korea: I’m just a bookseller and I want my corners. Freed of the need to front an emporium, “window displays”, in the sense of screens you can buy from, can be more widely distributed: on the subway, as bus stops, on buses and trains themselves, even on the wall of Starbucks. And yes, go on then, just a sprinkle of cinnamon.

“But I want my book to go,” you say? And so you can. This post isn’t really about ebooks – I’m addressing the sale of physical product here – but there’s no reason why, having bought the book from one of these virtual windows, you shouldn’t immediately get it on your e-reader. That should be part of the package. The print copy will arrive a day or two later, but you can be reading it right away.

But wait… is that the icy crawl of cold sweat down your back as you survey this glittering LCD-lit utopia? Then you must be a bookseller, and you have recognized the fatal flaw. If you pay for a bunch of virtual window displays, and you go to all the trouble to inform me there is a new Andrew Miller or Lloyd Shepherd book out, what’s to stop me shopping around to find a better price? If I can save a few quid with one or two clicks, I will.

Okay, so here’s the bitter pill. The people paying for these virtual window displays – they’re not the booksellers, they’re the publishers. See, just as long as I’ve noticed their books, they don’t much care if I use Amazon or Barnes & Noble to fulfil my purchase (though increasingly they may encourage me to buy direct, like Waitrose). There’s a poetic justice to this evolution of the business, you must admit, seeing as publishers are the people who pay for window displays even now.

So the guy that owns the wall or the bus stop will make money. London Underground will be happy. The people who make books are happy, as are the people who read them. But the bookseller? Well, in the world of 2020, will that even be a separate trade, or will it just be one of the functions of a publisher?

"I'm just a bookseller and I want my corners"

The future doesn’t look rosy for the big bookstores. Less than three out of every ten books sold last year were rung up on the tills of chain stores like Waterstone’s. And that’s print books. When you factor in the accelerating rise of digital books and comics, online book sales are whittling away at those meager profits that have so far kept booksellers on the high street. As the Economist put it recently:

“Publishers rely heavily on bookstores to bring new releases to customers’ attention and to steer them to books that they might not have considered buying. As stores close, the industry loses much more than a retail outlet. Publishers are increasingly trying to push books through online social networks. But [Brian Murray, chief executive of HarperCollins] says he hasn’t seen anything that replicates the experience of browsing a bookstore.”

So book publishers are getting squeezed? As an author, one of a group accustomed to being shoved around by the often rather bullying might of publishers, I might be expected to say cry me a river. Except that the river in question is Amazon, which owns the dominant e-reader, publishes its own books, runs a print-on-demand company widely used by small and self-publishers, and is pretty much uncontested in online book sales. That dearth of competition is bad for a lot of people, most especially the reading public.

Over the last few years, as online stores and supermarkets have chipped away at the dedicated retail bookstores, the high street browsing experience has diminished. Publishers respond with ghostwritten celebrity books and genre works of dubious quality. It is the mid-list, backed by editors with experience and gut feeling, where we traditionally find quality writing and interesting surprises. Strip that away and the future of fiction is pulp. But mid-list titles are the least likely to sell away from the high street. Online shopping pushes you ever-tighter into genre-based recommendations, supermarket shopping favors easily recognizable trash.

If bookstores close, how will publishers catch the passing trade? Tesco, a grocery company, have recently been trying an interesting experiment in South Korea. Faced with the problem of fewer stores than their competitors – and aware, as Mr Murray is, that people don’t shop so enthusiastically or so eclectically in front of a computer – Tesco put up display boards on the subway that replicated the look of grocery display cabinets. While waiting for their train, commuters can fill a virtual shopping trolley by scanning the QR codes of the products they like. Impulse buying has never been so painless.

Online stores so far have focused very much on a Microsoft (desk) rather than Apple (roving) model. Yet the exciting thing about where personal computing has been going in the last few years is that it’s out of the study and in your pocket. People like to shop out in the world, but they don’t like to lug heavy bags home. Imagine a world (it’s not far off) where the high street bookstores and comic shops have gone. Instead, at a much lower cost, publishers and booksellers put up posters and virtual bookshelves with QR codes that direct us to where we can browse, discuss and buy the books.

Publishers have done a little in this direction so far, but they don’t seem to grasp the full potential. One recent book poster on a London railway platform sported a QR code that directed customers to the book’s trailer on YouTube. Dumb, dumb, dumb. The moment I took out my phone to scan the code, the publisher should have been closing the deal – not directing me to yet more publicity material designed to hook my interest.

I’ll tell you who the QR selling model would benefit most: a would-be rival to Amazon like Britain’s Book Depository or Barnes & Noble in the USA. Currently Amazon have a Herculean grip on the Nemean lion of online book sales. But the online book market is set to more than double in size over the next ten years, so there’s a lot still to play for. Also, there really is no good reason for rivals to be scared of taking Amazon on. None of the technology involved is untried; all that is wanting is vision and ambition.

Admittedly those are not qualities often associated with book publishing, which in the last year or two has looked increasingly paralyzed by present shock. But booksellers are traditionally a nimbler breed. For the sake of the quality and variety of the books and comics we read as much as their price and availability, it’s time for the booksellers to get out there and pitch their QR-emblazoned virtual stalls in the high street space. Because that’s where the readers are in a mood to buy, whether it's a pint of milk or War & Peace.