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Why You Should Go To a Bookstore

posted by PAUL CONSTANT on THU, DEC 4 at 2:45 PM

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Village Books, up in Bellingham, has never been on my list of favorite bookstores—I always thought the inventory was a little shallow—but Village Books owner Chuck has written a great little blog postexplaining exactly why bookstores charge so much more than Amazon.com. I used to get the Amazon thing a lot when I worked in a bookstore—"It's fifteen bucks less on Amazon! Why are you so expensive?"—and this would have been a great resource to show those customers.

Thanks for your note and the chance to let you know a bit about book pricing. The publisher sets the suggested retail price of a book and bookstores and other resellers buy the books for a discount off of that price. Our discount is in the range of 40 - 45% off the retail price. Regular discounts that we give, such as our frequent buyer program, school discounts, our birthday card discounts, etc. pare that margin down to below 40%. The costs of operating a bricks-and-mortar retail establishment—occupancy, personnel, etc. eat up most of what remains. In the most profitable days of retail bookstores bottom-line profits were about 2%. Stores have struggled for several years to get back to that point in spite of low compensation (including that of owners—Dee and I make less than we would if we had stayed in education) and controlling every possible expense.

Amazon and other online retailers have created a very low-cost delivery system, though it's still unclear whether they really make money on the book part of their business, given all of the other products they sell. We simply cannot compete with those vendors on price. What we believe we do deliver is a contribution to the quality of life in the community that remote mail order businesses cannot and will not provide. Each reader will make his or her choice on the basis of what is most important to them. Retail bookstores may well be the buggy whip stores of a previous century. In 1992, when I was president of the American Booksellers Association there were about 4500 independent bookstores. Today there are fewer than 1500.

It goes on and you should read it all. Really: Unless Seattle shoppers really make a point of hitting up a few local independent booksellers this Christmas, we might have to say goodbye to one or two of them in the very near future. I know a lot of them are suffering financially this year.

*To the best of my knowledge, Amazon has never attacked bookstores with bees.