The grinding bullshit image machine.

I started watching a C-Span talk about the future of bookstores, with a bookstore owner, an agent, and a publisher.

Trouble was, the bookstore owner, while a high-powered Washington insider, had owned her store for less than a year.

I'm sorry.  I don't care how smart she is.  I don't care how important her store is.  She doesn't really know anything yet.  Whatever she might say will be more likely pre-conceived notions, but certainly not experience.

The only reason I bring this up, is wanting to ask the festival organizer:  "Do you actually believe a person who has owned a business for less than a year has enough first-hand experience to be handing out advice?"


From my perspective, the entire book industry seems to be split between newbies, who think they understand the new technology and how to make a transition to it.  Or how to adjust to it.  They have totally bought into the concept that they can be both a bookstore and a digital enabler. 

And a second group which are the old-time bookstores, who are both overreacting to e-books and buying into the new notions of how to do business.  These usually include having a digital component, an online presence, perhaps a book-making machine, more and more author events, a "third space" with couches and tables and chairs, and selling coffee and wine and whatever else they can think of that they think is "hip."

But no one is really challenging the conventional wisdom.  They are all doing exactly the same thing, though it is becoming more and more obvious that most of what they are doing isn't working.  Every day there is an article in Shelf Awareness about a bookstore who did all the above things and is going out of business.

No one seems to question that -- if they were doing all the 'right things' -- Why Did They Go Out Of Business?  Is it at least possible that much of what they did only detracted from their real job of buying and displaying books?  You know, selling books?

I've maintained that most of these old bookstores would be better off doing what they have always done, but try to do it better.  That is, they need to rethink what books they carry and how they carry them and how they display them, but stick to the bookselling model.

Instead, they aren't doing any of that fundamental rethinking of what books to carry, how many to carry, how to display them, how to price them.

No -- the answer, they are being told -- isn't in those fundamentals.  It's in the way they "Promote" themselves, how much "Online" presence, how many events and services they provide, and on and on with the bullshit -- IMAGE above all -- machinery.

Burnout city.  Nothing fundamental has changed, they just doubled and tripled their workload.  And why isn't it working?

Because their job isn't supposed to be a Host or a Coffee-nista or an Event Organizer.

Their job is supposed to be to SELL BOOKS!

As far as I know, I am the only one who believes this.