Len Vlahos, director of BookSense.com writes:
Kate Whouley's piece in Shelf Awareness Tuesday, "Zip Code Blues," is long on innovative ideas, but perhaps a little short on historical fact.
When the BookSense.com hub site was first launched, it performed
exactly as Kate is advocating the current site ought to--a user
searched for a book, put it in his or her shopping cart, checked out,
and was presented with a message that the order in question was being
filled by Store X, the store closest to the consumer's zip code. There
was no prompt for a zip code and there was no extra click.
So, if this system is what authors want--and we at BookSense.com freely
acknowledge that one fewer click and five fewer keystrokes is
empirically better than the alternative--why on Earth did we switch?
First and foremost, because our members asked us to. We are, after all,
a trade association that exists to serve its members and we always try
to be as responsive as we can. But there were other reasons, too. In no
particular order:
Brand sanctity. The Book Sense brand has always been meant to support,
not supplant, each store's brand. Creating a national website with
content and commerce that placed the Book Sense brand front and center,
and relegated the store's brand to a secondary role, flied in the face
of the Book Sense mission--to promote the value of shopping at an
independent bookstore. We were just one more mega site selling books,
and because of limited resources, a mega site that was never going to
present as fulsome a shopping experience as its rivals.
Prioritizing resources. As a full-blown e-commerce site, BookSense.com
needed a significant amount of content. (Consumers expect their
commerce sites to be content-rich, with author interviews,
recommendations, newsletters, and more. What was the point of even
trying to compete with Amazon, in their arena, without those bells and
whistles?) To achieve this, we hired staff to create collateral
material not only for consumers visiting BookSense.com, but also
content for the program's participants to plug into their own sites.
While booksellers liked the content, they evinced a strong preference
for us to devote resources toward making their individual websites
better. In other words, functionality for the local sites trumped
content for the national site.
Customer service. By conducting commerce on the BookSense.com site,
consumers operated from the reasonable and natural belief that Book
Sense, not an individual store, was the entity selling books. This not
only created the need for a larger customer service staff at ABA, it
also inserted BookSense.com in the middle of the bookseller-customer
relationship. This was just inappropriate.
Fairness. Because we have only the technical ability to fill orders
from stores using BookSense.com websites, many ABA member
stores--stores that use other products, like the very excellent
BookSite, or that have developed their own e-commerce engines--were
left out of the party. While it's still true that affiliate orders do
not link through to non-participating stores, the more benign approach
of a traffic aggregating site, rather than a full-blown e-commerce
site, softens the blow.
Customer confusion. Because of the "branding," "customer service," and
"fairness" issues listed above, many customers were confused as to the
purpose of the site. What was the difference between Book Sense and
BookSense.com, and "why should I, as a consumer, care?"
For all these reasons, in 2003, on the advice of the BookSense.com
Users Council (a group of volunteer booksellers that meets annually to
provide advice and feedback on the program), and in consultation with
the ABA Board, BookSense.com was morphed from the e-commerce site Kate
is advocating to the traffic aggregating site it became and still is
today.
Is it perfect? Heck no. Is the decision not to sell via the
BookSense.com hub site set in stone? Absolutely not. While we have been
able to attract more than 2,000 affiliates, and while we do service
over 200 bookstore participants, recent trends (specifically the rise
of Web 2.0) may in fact provide good reason to revisit the idea, which
is something we'll do.
Thanks for listening.
---
Kate Whouley responds:
Len is gracious to label my commentary innovative, but as his historical narrative illustrates, my ideas are more aptly termed retro!
In fact, I am aware of the broad-stroke history of BookSense.com. I
understand the entity we call Booksense.com exists first of all to
provide a robust website template and back-end solution to its
independent bookstore subscribers. I know, too, that the earlier,
broader vision of Booksense.com has been refined and redefined, for all
the excellent reasons that Len has outlined. And for the record, I
think Booksense.com does a great job for its subscribers. I'd urge all
ABA members to check it out!
But there are subscribers, and there are customers. I'm attempting, in
this series, to view the BookSense.com option through the eyes of
potential online shoppers. Sometimes that requires me to play the
Fool--asking old questions and hoping, through the passage of time and
the exercise of earnest conversation, to arrive at new answers. In my
best-of-all-possible-worlds, I'd like to see independent booksellers
serve themselves a larger portion of the online pie, and heighten
public awareness of their importance in a changing cultural landscape.
Can this be done? I'd like to believe the Fool's journey is different
from a Fool's errand. I'll keep asking questions, but in the meantime,
here's another thoughtful response to Tuesday's commentary, this one
from Nicki Leone. Pay special attention to the last two paragraphs!
---
Nicki Leone of the Southern Independent Booksellers Alliance writes:
Your piece seems to highlight a kind of disconnect between what
BookSense.com is perceived to be, what it actually is, and what it
could be. Among the "authors and author-advocate types" you mention
(and I have had the same kinds of discussions with many of them)
BookSense.com is regarded as the "indie alternative to Amazon." And one
can't blame them for thinking this, because Amazon has defined the way
we purchase books online, and BookSense.com in its early stages was
actually marketed as an indie alternative to online retailers. I think
this was probably a mistake on the part of the creators (and I say so
as a person who completely supports the BookSense.com concept), because
after all, the two options would never be equivalent. Amazon is
Amazon. BookSense.com is hundreds of individual stores, each with
their own pricing policies, discounting policies, shipping fees,
fulfillment policies, returns policies, stock levels and even exclusive
products (signed copies or locally published books and the like). So
the author who wants to link to BookSense.com as "the indie
alternative" is linking to a kind of mirage--as if BookSense.com were
an idealized indie, one of Plato's ideal "forms" of a bookstore that
exists in our minds, but not in reality.
What those authors should be doing is simply providing links on their
site to their favorite store or stores. Instead of linking to
BookSense.com, they should just link to Malaprops, if they live in
Asheville, N.C., or Books & Books, if they live in Miami, Fla.
BookSense.com is really just a very affordable set of e-commerce tools
available to independent bookstores. For what it is, it is
excellent--there is nothing else that even comes close. But its
national marketing is minimal.
Still, what author wants to be seen as favoring one local bookstore
over another? In my town there are three or four independent stores,
two of which are BookSense.com stores. And even though we are all
friends, none of our local authors would want to be perceived as
favoring one indie over another.
So perhaps it makes more sense to think of BookSense.com as analogous
to some of the used book sites--abebooks.com--rather than Amazon or
bn.com. And if that is the case, then yes, BookSense.com fails the user
because it requires you to choose the supplier before you can compare
all the products. One should be able to come up with a list of options
and sort by price, by location, look for signed copies or first
editions or least expensive shipping options---and yet, this is not
very satisfactory either, because I don't think the powers behind
BookSense.com are interested in creating more competition among their
member stores than already exists. Besides, I don't think the answer to
the future of indies online lies in attempting to copy already existing
business models. That strikes me as reacting defensively to a situation
rather than proactively, and only highlights the areas where a small
business will never be able to compete with a large online retailer.
The shipping will often be too high, the fulfillment too slow, the
discounts too small. Indies will never have the collective purchasing
power of Amazon or a national chain, and they know better than to
attempt to compete in areas they are sure to lose.
So what do they have that Amazon doesn't? Well, how about people? Very
smart, very well-read people, with a lot of influence over the reading
habits of their local communities. What if BookSense.com changed its
focus and became not a collection of online indie bookstores, but an
online community of indie booksellers? What if it became a kind of
extensive version of every store's "staff recommendations" sections,
and the user could search for books based on the recommendations of
specific booksellers? Is that something that Amazon or Barnes &
Noble could copy? No. Would it be a more useful marketing force to
authors and publishers? I think so. Would it raise the visibility of
any participating store? Sure, if the store had a few active reviewers.
Amazon's reviews are notoriously unreliable. But the recommendations
made by independent booksellers are very well respected--they are
business owners, after all--they have reputations to maintain.
It seems to me that the Internet is a fundamentally populist
entity--the success of things like Youtube, eBay, Wikipedia, Flickr,
etc., makes this evident. In this kind of climate, independent
booksellers actually have an advantage over large corporations--they
are populists themselves, after all, or they wouldn't be in the
business. I'd like to see BookSense.com find a way to tap into this
vast, untapped potential. All that is wanting is the platform to do
it.
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