Bookstore of the future- a double expresso

Some time ago I wrote about the disruption that the Internet was causing in the book publishing industry as more and more writers decided to self publish. What was known sneeringly as "vanity publishing" has rapidly become, in the last decade, a burgeoning industry. Not only were books being replaced by e-books that one read on Kindle or Ipad, the content was increasingly being created by writers who spurned the poobahs of the publishing world. No more need for agents or self important publishers who treated manuscripts as a refuse bin and declined to answer queries for months on end. Now the writers could quite simply bypass them and get to the same audience through the Internet bookstores like Amazon. The only drawback they faced were the brick and mortar bookstores who refused to showcase these selfpublished books. But no more. As ebooks have taken off, it is now these very same bookstores that are in trouble.

Last year the Borders chain folded, closing 800 bookstores and removing millions of books from our communities, and so far this year not a week has gone by without the announcement that an indie that’s been around for over a decade is either closing or up for sale. Important stores like R.J. Julia and University Press Books are both looking for new owners, and if new owners aren’t found, University Press Books is likely to close. The downward spiral of the bookstore in America seems to be increasing in speed. Last year, right before Christmas, Amazon urged customers to go to brick and mortar stores and compare the physical store prices to Amazon’s prices. Amazon even paid people for reporting those store prices back to Amazon. Bookstores called the practice “Showrooming” and noted the inherent unfairness in providing an important service for the book community without receiving the actual sustaining sales. With ebooks, pirating, and predatory online booksellers, it seems only an idiot would suggest bookstores even have a future.

It seems clear at this point that the relationship that publishers have with indies has to change, writes Tony Sanphillipo, who is willing to bet that bookstores have a future, albeit in a different form. It is increasingly becoming clearer that  with bookstores closing and libraries cutting staff, hours, and even the number of books actually in a library reducing, perhaps a new approach is in order. A new type of bookstore needs to replace the fuddy duddy places of the past.

Let us begin by focusing on the clientale of people who actually like to read. The old and the retired, the very young and the upwardly mobile. So why not design a bookstore that actually meets their needs.

Let us have a section where one can sit on a comfortable sofa, read the newspapers and magazines and sip a cup of coffee in a brightly lit atmosphere. Another section could be devoted to the very young, who could look at books even as they played with various toys while hired book/baby sitters kept a watchful eye. A third section would replicate a café for the adults but with a continuous parade of shows to keep their interest- new authors promoting their books, some coming from the same community, thus assuring at least a minimum sized audience, periodically sparsed with major names in the world much like Poetry and Prose bookshop in Washington DC.

Adding to these reading places would be a side area where you could actually print your own books for a modest fee. With the books on demand now growing rapidly, these book printing machines, which some called Expresso Book Machines, could be located right inside the book store. If you are a budding author, just bring your book on a usb or cd, and within minutes you could get your book printed and bound, ready for its readers. And that at a price comparable to what you would pay for any other book in a normal bookstore. Indeed anything in the public domain could  be printed and bound for you at roughly the printing cost, and many copyright books can be printed here as well. Or you could simply provide your usb or cd and they could transfer any book you want to it so that you can go home and continue reading it on your favourite IPAD or Kindle.


The bookstore would have a collection of books that readers could rifle through and a few TV screens providing a virtual bookstore where you could search for the latest bestsellers or for long forgotten gems of literature. Booksellers can thus still have shelves of hardcovers for those who want them, but by having titles available for immediate printing they can do exactly what they all say is now impossible—compete with Amazon’s immense catalog.


Pricing in such a bookstore would be simple. You can buy stuff outright as you would in any bookstore or you can rent or borrow books as you would from a library. Or another way of charging would be to get people to buy yearly memberships to the new book store. Members would not then have to pay for rentals, though like non-members, if they don’t return the book eventually, the cost of the book is charged to their credit card and they can order another. But with that membership you can borrow any book in the store for free. In most cases you can also request that they acquire a book for you to borrow and they can also print it for you using the Espresso Book Machine.

The idea of this kind of a bookstore is that it becomes the modern place for getting together for the entire family but with a twist- it is focused on books and reading- a combination of expresso coffee and expresso book machines.