No matter if physical books are going to be replaced by digital books as the dominant form within a few years, I love the idea there will always be a place for book stores.
Places such as described by Ray Oldenburg in his very informative sociological book about american society and culture, The Great Good Place: "… Most often I refer to such places as "third places" (after home, first, and workplace, second) and these are informal public gathering places. These places serve community best to the extent that they are inclusive and local".
No matter if printed matter or virtual goods are being sold, if there are reasons to visit a store, people will always go there – be it for discovering new interesting stories (independent from being print, ebooks or audio), for getting valuable advice and service, for entertaining and informative events around stories and reading or for an enjoyable social environment.
Some challenging and thrilling questions will be:
- How can a pure "point of sale" be extended with extra services beyond sales? And how can digital enrich the real world store experience in a meaningful way?
- How can ebooks and similar digital goods be made tangible in a real world environment? How do transactions for virtual goods work in local context?
- How can exploring and shopping books in a store be linked to online commerce? How can stores benefit from online mechanisms such as recommendation algorithms, user reviews or home delivery?
- etc.
Anyway — there's a book store here in Hamburg that does a lot of things quite right, which is called Stories (yeah!). For example, they're offering a "reading saloon" with a library feel and coffee and they're organizing events around publications, authors or all kinds of topics related to reading on a regular basis.
But the most remarkable thing is how they offer a feature known from the digital world in an analog form and context: in the shelf shown below, there are not only books, but added printed reviews from different kinds of publications. They are from newspapers and magazines or things like that, but from a technical perspective, they could also be user reviews.
I'm looking forward how this place is going to evolve over the next few years. As suggested some lines above: I see a bright future for book stores – if they notice the turn of the tide and act.
Thanks for the photographs, Meikel!
