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How many books should be facing out?
To boost sales, retailer Borders Group is taking a simple but radical approach, our colleague Jeff Trachtenberg reports in today’s Wall Street Journal. Borders is increasing the number of books that it displays with the cover facing out (rather than the spine facing out), even though this shelf-space-eating approach will require cutting inventory at each store up to 10%. Says one analyst: “Breakfast cereals are not stocked end-of-box out. […] It’s a little bizarre that it’s taken booksellers this long to realize that the point of self-service is to make the product as tempting as possible.”
The link is here. I understand the basic model as follows. Superstores first invest in high inventory and a tony reputation. You start thinking of them as "the place to go" for books, or in an earlier era, for music. They then devote more and more of their space to non-book items. The number of greeting cards and chocolates stocked by my Borders has risen steadily over time, as have the size of the coffee shops. Having more books "face out" -- at least they are books -- is one of the lesser aspects of this more general problem. It's related to why most trendy restaurants peak in the first year and a half of their operation, followed by decline and then stagnation. Once they have a high enough (and sticky enough) reputation, it is time to cash in and lower the quality of the product to the informed and more sophisticated buyers.
Posted by Tyler Cowen on March 16, 2008 at 07:50 AM in Books | Permalink
Comments
But in the case of bookstores, wasn't the whole process driven by internet sales?
The boom in mega-bookstores happened before amazon had really taken off. At that time, the stores could win customers by having the biggest selection around. Now, online bookstores are "the place to go" for books and there's no way physical stores can ever compete in terms of number of titles. So they're forced to go a different route.
You're right that non-book diversification and having the books face out are part of the same trend, but I really don't see any parallel with the restaurant business.
Posted by: Michael Yuri at Mar 16, 2008 9:00:58 AM
I wonder if this is likely to work (if at all) to different degrees in different genres. The cover of a book for the books I buy is almost never of any interest to me. These are mostly non-fiction books where the title, author, and (to a much lesser degree) the press is all I need to get some idea of whether I want to look at the book or not. I can get all that from the spine. What's on the cover almost never gives me any more information, and it's the total number of books available to consider that draws me to the store. So, if fewer books are made available because the store has decided to devote space to something I (and, I'd guess, most people who buy the sorts of books I buy) don't care about at all, the cover, it would seem to be a pretty stupid idea. Things might be different with fiction, perhaps, where the cover might be important for giving you some idea of what the story is like, though even there this is often of dubious value.
Posted by: Matt at Mar 16, 2008 9:40:54 AM
Let's face it, the bigger problem here is that most of the public does not read books, has no desire to start, and the number of biblio-abstainers is growing over time.
Posted by: Dennis Mangan at Mar 16, 2008 9:43:12 AM
Michael Yurl is right. There is an emerging division of labor.
See http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=400940
and
http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=995647
Posted by: A student of economics at Mar 16, 2008 10:04:51 AM
So your solution would be what? A stock room full of books, but customers who were handed only a pages upon pages of book listings, title and author, to choose books from which to purchase?
Go ahead Tyler try it. Start your "high quality" bookstore today.
Posted by: The Great Observer at Mar 16, 2008 11:03:18 AM
The reading public is declining as the primary and secondary schools fail miserably in reading. The schools are unable to whet young appetites for books. Not surprising since the schools are mostly unionized and the quality of education is in decline as in all other unionized industries.
Posted by: jorod at Mar 16, 2008 11:30:38 AM
The Public definitely still reads, I'm part of it, I should know. But yeah, the composition of what they read is probably much different than what old fogeys consider "reading" to be. E.g. books and newspapers are being replaced by websites, blogs and what have you.
The real problem for bookstores is that every person under 30 buys books solely online, more or less. I don't really get bookstores or their appeal at this point. It's easier to sample, compare and find books online and the only thing a bookstore has going for it is the off-chance I need a given book right now, as opposed to two days from now.
Posted by: Johnny Debacle at Mar 16, 2008 11:44:24 AM
I'm confused as to why books facing out is a "problem" or has anything to do with any sort of "decline" or automatically "lower quality". Books being shelved with their cover as opposed to spine visible is, almost purely, an added convenience to the customer: it makes it easier to find a book you're looking for, and easier for a book you might not've been looking for to catch your eye. When you think about it it's pretty stupid that in order to find a book we might want to read, we have to basically enter a giant warehouse where they are stuffed spines-out and find where it is stocked ourselves. (Or do you enjoy having your head tilted 90 degrees for hours at a time?) We've all taken this for granted as "normal" but it is essentially a big inconvenience forced on bookstore customers due to economic concerns - it's as if restaurants had evolved so that each patron had to go into the kitchen and leaf through a recipe book and tell the chef which ingredients to use and how to combine them.
In an ideal world, all books would "face out", seems to me. The only reason not to do this is space consideration. So if shelf space has become less of a premium that bookstores can afford to shelve more books facing out, this is a good thing, not a bad thing. If this is being made possible because bookstores are selling other things, so be it: other people buy $5 lattes and I have an easier time finding books I want, what's not to like?
Posted by: Sonic Charmer at Mar 16, 2008 12:49:29 PM
I came here to say what Sonic just said. I can't understand why Tyler considers it a problem. Maybe he needs to overcome his "old-style" bookstore bias.
As an aside, I was in The Strand in NYC last week, and they have lots of tables and bins where the books are displayed face-out, and they're about as bilbliophile-friendly as they come.
Posted by: bartman at Mar 16, 2008 3:06:50 PM
My local Blockbuster has also recently made more movies face out. I agree that the internet probably has added some impetus to this movement for the following reason. If I know what book I want to buy or what DVD I want to rent, I go to Amazon.com or Netflix, respectively. If I want to go and rent an as yet undecided movie, I want fewer and more tantalizing choices. Isn't the fact that fewer choices lead to greater sales well established?
I wonder also if that as the baby boomer generation ages, it is more important that book options are more easily readable. Perhaps we will also see larger font on book spines.
Posted by: Michael at Mar 16, 2008 3:07:07 PM
I wonder how long it will take Borders to start charging publishers fees to shelve their books facing cover side out?
Posted by: Jason at Mar 16, 2008 3:26:28 PM
Jason,
They already do.
Posted by: Ryan Holiday at Mar 16, 2008 4:52:40 PM
I completely agree with Sonic, especially the whole "90-degree-head"-thing.
I wish displaying more covers would be something taken up by German bookstores as well...
@Jason: It's not so much about older people - I'm 23, and I still prefer to have a convenient look at the books.
Posted by: Finja at Mar 16, 2008 5:17:04 PM
The boom in mega-bookstores happened before amazon had really taken off.
Yes -- it happened before Amazon even existed. You might reasonably date the start of the mega-bookstore boom to when K-Mart bought Borders with the intention of rapid expansion. That was in 1992. Amazon wasn't founded until 1995.
Borders has been only marginally profitable for a while now (ditto B&N) --I'm not sure if the mega-bookstore model works long-term in the internet age, and I guess I really don't care very much either. Fewer titles with more covers facing out? Why not -- makes no difference to me.
Posted by: Slocum at Mar 16, 2008 6:16:43 PM
This is an entirely good and welcome development. In the early years of the Borders/B&N expansion their value proposition was clearly massive selection. A Borders would carry something like 100,000 titles, which, unless you were one of the tiny handful of people to live in Manhatten, D.C., Cambridge, Chicago or a few other places was 2-5X as much as you had ever seen in a bookstore.
But Amazon does the deep catalog much better. Much much beter. So the only value propositions left to the chains are
1) Get it now and start reading today (as opposed to waiting at least 24 hours, and much more than that if you're not willing to pay top dollar
2) Browse for something you don;t know about yet under pleasent conditions.
The Chains' move allows them to better meet criteria #2 without seriously undermining their ability to meet criteria #1. Its clearly a smart move. Actually, they would be better off killing shelf space entirely in favor of more tables. The few tables in a Borders today take up maybe 20% of the floor space but always seem to have 50% of the customers.
Posted by: sd at Mar 16, 2008 7:30:18 PM
Has anyone addressed what this really points to? A hundred years ago such a policy change would've rendered what would look
like a continuous-flowing quilt, with brown, green, maroon, and dark blue solid covers with some gold or black lettering for
titles/authors. Now that's all been replaced by artwork - so that they've become the victors in this, and Borders will have
the feel of walking through a gallery of colors and fancy designs. And for me, I'll now have to tax my wrist's range of
motion from 90 degrees to a full 180 to read the back of a book and see if I'm truly impressed ;)
Posted by: TomG at Mar 16, 2008 8:10:40 PM
Ryan,
That's funny. I wonder if the "cereal box" idea was something the PR department cooked up. Maybe Borders just wanted a way to cut inventory costs and increase income from fees and needed a cover story.
Posted by: Jason at Mar 17, 2008 12:37:11 AM
Evaluating my local Borders store, they don't need to cut inventory to face books out -- they just haven't been bothering.
I used to work at other bookstores in the past, and I cannot browse a section with (say) 5 copies of a paperback all spined-out, without compulsively facing out some of them.
And while I'm ragging on Borders (a store I love precisely b/c of its substantial backlist inventory, which apparently they are now trying to eliminate in an effort to look just like Barnes & Noble), why do they think that biographies and studies of literary figures should be shelved under the names of the biographers and critics, rather than of their subjects?
If I want a biography of Virginia Woolf, I should be able to find it shelved by "Woolf," not under Bell and Lee and whosoever else.
Posted by: Anderson at Mar 17, 2008 11:54:29 AM
Anderson: in the English-language section of one of the bookstores in Abu Dhabi, where I used to live, the books are shelved in alphabetical order of the author's first name.
That took a bit of getting used to.
Posted by: bartman at Mar 17, 2008 1:43:51 PM
Of course, the difference with cereal is that you rarely have a case where the store only has one or two boxes on the shelf. This is much more likely in a bookstore. Stocking 7 boxes of cereal end-to-end doesn't make much more sense space-wise than stocking them facing forward.
It's funny, I was in circuit city noticing the same thing about DVDs. Circuit city has all their titles facing forward, while Best Buy has a bookstore-like mix of titles forward and titles spine-out. I prefer some spine-out rather than having to thumb through every individual bin of DVDs (there's almost always more than one title of DVD in the bin).
Posted by: Patrick at Mar 17, 2008 11:36:11 PM
What we need is the physical equivalent of Apple's cover flow. Unfortunately, Amazon or B&N are more likely to have it online before someone comes up with a way to do it in a bookstore.
I still browse bookstores when I don't know what I want. When I know what I want, I just order it online.
When big box bookstores started their big expansion publishers took the stocking risk. If I remember the book business correctly, a bookstore ordered the books and put them on the shelves, effectively on consignment. When a book was sold, then the publisher got a return on its capital. Sometimes books were not returned, but the bookstore would simply provide proof that they had been destroyed. Fraud was a problem. Many books had a little note on their title page warning buyers that books sold without covers were likely books reported destroyed, but sold despite this, and that you were buying stolen goods.
Since books didn't cost the book stores anything to stock, it made a lot of sense to stock a lot of books. You could move down the long tail, and people would spend more time browsing the extensive collection. Some would even take a latter break and go back to browsing.
I am guessing that publishers aren't as eager to serve as bankers for the bookstores anymore, and that the terms of the trade have changed. If nothing else, most books are sold by big box general retailers like Costco and Walmart, and they stock only a handful of titles. I know that these retailers have their own deals. Have the terms of the trade changed for the other large chains? They want to be able to match the general retailers in price, but otherwise they are selling a long tail product. Are the publishers as willing to put up the capital as they once were?
Even a slight change in the cost of stocking a book store and a small movement of the risk could result in big changes.
I think restaurants have a different cycle. For the first year, restaurants expect to run in the red. The hope is to attract enough of a clientele in that year so they can move into the black in the second year. The restaurant business is surprisingly tricky, and can be rather arduous. Details of table placement and reservation scheduling can make the difference between red and black ink.
(For example, the staff would like to stack all the diners as early as possible so they can go home early. This "stacking" tends to strain the kitchen leading to uneven customer waiting time and often a bad experience. A naive owner or manager might not even recognize what is happening as they start to lose repeat business.)
As the first year ends and the second begins, the typical restaurateur starts tuning things to get into the black. Portions may be changed, tables moved, reservation policies change, ingredients may be substituted. The chef, on a one year contract, may be replaced. A great restaurant the first year may not have been a viable financial entity, at least not under its current management. As it struggles into the black, quality may decline.
Of course, a lot of restaurants don't even make it past that first year. Some do, and some go through a rough period as the owner learns and applies the lessons. It takes a lot of knowledge to get into the black and stay there. That is one reason you find chains of restaurants run by a single chef/entrepreneur. They can apply the lessons learned from one restaurant at a number of restaurants. In Seattle, we have Tom Douglas (Dahlia Lounge, Etta's ...) and Christine Kef (Flying Fish & Fandango). This isn't franchising. The restaurants are not clones, but it does let the entrepreneur leverage his or her knowledge in restaurant operations which are surprisingly knowledge intensive. (I think restaurant operations are even more sensitive than book stores to these kinds of things. You CAN run a book store on love of books. You cannot run a restaurant on love of food.)
Posted by: Kaleberg at Mar 18, 2008 12:10:24 AM
I'm not sure that making the books "face out" will really do too much to increase sales. Granted, I like books that face out because it makes them easier to find, and they catch your eye more easily than scanning the spines, but in the long run, if you already know what book you're looking to buy, you will know where to look. However, I do like to browse bookstores to see if I can find a new book to read that might spark my interest, but if I'm going to look for a book, I'm willing to take the time and browse the titles on the spines and select a book that I think I will want to read. I guess, the joy in the hunt, in my opinion, is also exciting, which is why I don't like shopping online for books unless I know exactly what I want to buy.
Also, I don't think that the rise in other items besides books in bookstores really effects book sales, because if you're in the market for a book, a box of chocolates is not going to distract you from buying that book, it may make you want to buy it, however. This desire to buy the chocolates will probably be in addition to a book, so this would make their sales increase. I'm sure a portion of the money goes to the chocolate manufacturers, but still, sales, no matter what, should aid in the appeal of the company.
Posted by: Nicole at Mar 18, 2008 11:10:09 AM
I am a author who wrote two books both dolls like us books and for some reason you don't carry either of my books . You use to carry my first book but you droped it recently I have a 291 page website with my pin name on it you should check it out . I illustrate with dolls .
I published my first book under my maiden name and my second book under my married name but it is still me you can see similarities enough to tell one author two books .
Posted by: dollslikeus at Mar 15, 2009 9:55:05 PM
