Month: September 2010

These books are not for you- the color coded shelves

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Anyone with a bookstore knows that half the time, people don’t read the signs anyway. You could have foot tall leters and they could be looking straight at the sign and still ask you where X is…while looking at the sign for X.

People amble around the shop and clearly aren’t reading titles, just looking for SOMETHING that tells them they’re in the right section.  And the stacks of books themselves tell them when they’ve found it.

Publishers put a lot of effort into the FRONT of the book, but you don’t really think about the SPINE being just as important, especially when shelved.

Quick, you’re looking for books to read.  Which way do you go? Left or right?

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Reading Online Books for Free

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More and more people are getting into digital reading and I have a feeling there will be an explosion of Kindles sold this holiday season. While reader’s comfort level with digital reading grows they are bound to seek out more and more digital books online and of course, if they can, would prefer reading online … Read more

A Bit of Haunted Déjà Vu

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Retail Trades is a group which meets once a month down at the art center. It is the intention of the group to attract shoppers to downtown Lamar and to promote local businesses. To do this they need a budget, and the big money-maker each year for this budget is the Retail Trades Haunted House. … Read more

Objects found inside books

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Oh the tales that can be told of the interesting things found in books… and I don’t mean the words!  People use a wide array of things as bookmarks, including some things that you really question WHY they thought this was a good idea.  There’s three things that I find most commonly in books besides bookmarks: photographs, boarding passes, and credit card receipts.  The credit card receipts are slowly fading away as knucklebuster credit card machines disappear, but they were easily the most common thing I saw for a long time.  Giving me the receipt with your credit card number on it just seems like a bad idea…

Boarding passes are fairly self explanatory.  They grabbed a book on the way on and then stuck the boarding pass of ticket stubs in the book.  Airplane passes are the most common.  I occasionally see train stubs, but usually the serious commuters have a rail pass and aren’t buying individual tickets.  Every now and then I’ll see ferry tickets, but they’re rare.

Photographs are also very common, but like the credit card receipts are fading away.  Photographs usually fall into three categories:  everyone has red eye,  a slightly blurry picture of a dog, or a child being frightened at Disney World. You’d think there couldn’t possibly be THAT many pictures of people being frightened on vacation, but probably about 20% of the photos I find show a kid crying their eyes out at Disney World or Disney Land. You can tell the location by the background architecture.  Ones actually showing the kid fleeing in terror from Mickey Mouse are a bit rarer since its the sort of thing parents keep to torment their grown children with.

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What's Your Favorite Bookshop Website?

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Shane Gottwals
www.gottwalsbooks.com

A Tour of Bookstore Websites

I spent two days last week looking at 87 different bookstore websites. After doing all that, I came to a couple of conclusions: 1. my eyes hurt and 2. bookstores do a poor job with their websites.

Obviously, most of us don’t have the funds to hire a web developer. However, I saw layouts that weren’t centered, words misspelled, and images that were of poor quality. Many of the websites didn’t have pictures of their stores at all. Isn’t this essential? If you are a brick-and-mortar only, you must have a website that will lure people into the store. I saw a story in a magazine that stated that a website is a company’s key to get customers through the door.

I did see some great sites. The ones I like, in particular, chronicle the life of the store from its inception. There’s a store in Georgia (boundtobereadbooks.com) that has great images of all the work being done, a story about the original concept, and well-places text and pictures. Nightbird Books (nightbirdbooks.com) uses something as simple as flikr to put all their photos in one place, making the interface super easy. I got the idea to put a gazebo into our store from the people at Books Plus.

In particular, I like bookstore websites so that I can keep track on how others operate their stores. I want to make sure that I’m current with the trends, trying my best to make our stores “POP”. I could probably write a book about web development using the pros and cons from the sites I’ve seen. While I haven’t used many direct ideas from other stores over the years, scanning all the web pages really gives you a good understanding of what the bookstore world is accomplishing. There are many stores that have been around for 30+ years. There are stores that are local destinations, well-known for being the best place to hang around. There are stores on islands, stores in bedroom communities, and stores in some of the most expensive areas of the biggest cities. Some stores have been around for decades; I think of The Strand in New York, particularly.

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We Move Onward! Projects With the Toolbox

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* This is an ongoing piece chronicling Sue & Caro’s bookshop creation. Click here for earlier installments. First, I must preface this by saying that I have the utmost respect for T. He’s an insanely pro-active citizen, a hard-working guy, a good father, and genuine human being, plus, he plays a mean set of drums … Read more