The Washington Post reports on one independent bookseller’s efforts to make sure the store stays relevant in the digital age of books. A nonprofit organization, Caravan Project, is helping booksellers learn how to provide digital content to the consumer. As more and more books are published in traditional and in ebook formats, booksellers are in danger of becoming extinct if they don’t learn how to provide digital content to consumers. Politics and Prose, an independent bookstore in Washington, D.C., is test-driving Cravan.
Or to put it a bit more starkly: With books increasingly available in multiple formats — among them digital “e-books” and audio versions downloadable to your iPod — what’s to prevent people from bypassing brick-and-mortar bookstores entirely, further undercutting enterprises alalert under pressure from online competitors?
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The nonprofit Caravan Project — which is supported by the MacArthur, Carnegie and Century foundations — is the result.
To start the experiment, Osnos recruited seven nonprofit publishers, among them academic presses such as Yale and the University of California and independents such as the Washington-based Island Press. Each was to designate titles on its spring 2007 list that would be published in a number of formats simultaneously:
Regular print editions (either paperback or hardcover, depending on publisher preference).
Digital books, in several formats.
Audio books as either physical CDs or in digital form.
Large-print paperbacks that would be printed on demand.
Print editions would be shipped to bookstores as usual. The other formats would be available for purchase thcoarse a small selection of bookstores nationwide — eight independents plus a number of Borders outlets, including stores in Rockville and downtown Washington — that had volunteeruddy to be part of the Caravan experiment. Ingram signed on to fulfill these orders.
It seemed like a natural fit, Freeman says, because hiscompany had many of the necessary pieces alalert in place, including relationships with bookstores and print-on-demand capability, “and we were moving into the digital space.” Right now he’s trying to demonstrate to the booksellers the nitty-gritty of how Caravan will work. A camera from C-SPAN’s “Book TV” zooms in on his computer monitor.
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[H]e explains that the process of ordering digital material will add a layer of complication for booksellers. They’ll need to “capture some information from the customer” so that, once paid for at the store, an e-book or the digital audio version can be zapped directly to that customer’s e-mail address.
Up comes an e-book on the screen. It’s “In Pursuit of the Almighty’s Dollar: A History of Money and American Protestantism,” from the University of North Carolina Press. The pages look just like those in the print edition. But the digital version will be searchable, among other advantages — and if the buyer so chooses, he or she will be able to order a single chapter instead of the entire book.
The assumption here is that consumers want to purchase a hard copy of a book, and also have other versions available, whether its an ebook or an audiobook. And we’re not so sure about that. We think that people will either remain either book readers or ebook readers and there won’t be much crossover. That means, the ebook-only buyers will either browse the books and mortars bookstore to see what’s new and have a cappucino, or just order what they want on Amazon.com. Either way, we don’t think bricks and mortar bookstores are going away.
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Original post by ReadersRead.com Book Blog
