http://www.sajim.co.za/training.main.8nr3.asp?print=1


   
  Info-Kultur Vol.8(3) September 2006 

Bookseller breed – threatened species? 
S. Berner 
sberner@ecognus.com 

My road to 'information as science' went through 'information as medium' long before I 
decided to tackle the more academic aspects of it. Through the 1980s I owned a small 
publishing house and an attached bookshop – my first taste of managing a business. It was 
also my first introduction to the arcane world of cataloguing, inventories, stock audits and 
customer service – experiences I took with me when I left the book-selling business for 
education and started building libraries in schools across the sub-Saharan country where I 
taught English.  

My own standard of a 'livable space' (as many well-stocked bookshops and excellent 
libraries as possible, coupled with a vibrant café-scene and enough WiFi hotspots to allow 
me to engage in creative work while not stuck inside an office) made me rather dismayed to 
find that most of my colleagues and friends considered my wish to establish a bookshop in 
Queensland, Australia as an act of madness. They shook their heads and produced piles of 
doom-and-gloom articles, from e-books threatening publishers, to recession, to eBay causing 
huge drops in prices, to bookshop chains turning the whole exercise into yet another cut-
throat supermarket experience. But what was really amazing in all this was the paradoxical 
nature of the advice. While all of them agreed that it was not a wise investment to open a 
bookstore, they all bemoaned the fact that there was not one close enough to them, and all of 
them were sizeable consumers of books themselves. 

And while they wrung their hands in dismay and predicted the very Apocalypse of the Book, 
I kept walking into all kinds of bookshops in my city: independent, second-hand, sell-and-go 
warehouses, large chains, small chains, cross-selling or specializing, bricks-and-mortar, 
online or both combined – you name it, I have been in it. If these journeys have proven 
anything to me, it was one single fact: it is a long way to the Apocalypse. 

I am glad that I did the footwork well before engaging in what I usually do when thinking of 
a business venture: read up on it. I spent six weeks talking to bookshop owners and staff, 
who were very generous with information and advice once that rapport between booklovers 
was established and assurances made that no competition will be opening in their nook of the 
world. I started reading after listening to many a story of success and demise – only to find 
out that the underlying reason for the predominance of doom-and-gloom stories is the fact 
that disasters sell better than success stories of hard work and dedication. There simply is no 
romance in such terms as 'keeping a solid, updated inventory', 'weeding your collection' and 
'trips to the diseased estates'. Not unless you are passionate about dead people's junk, 
anyway. 

So are booksellers and bookshops on their way out of the Western world? Are we ready to 
dump an integral part of what makes us civilized and cultured for the ephemera of electronic 
text? Will bookshops, with their aura of almost sanctity be replaced with mercenary eBay 
sellers often not knowing the true value of their merchandise and treating it the same way 
they treat T-shirts and plastic key-rings manufactured whole sale in some sweatshop in 



southeast Asia? Are we staring the 'bookseller bubble' in the face?

My research and footwork inclines me to say a qualified 'no'; qualified because bookselling, 
like any other business, can fail for reasons personal and external which do not necessarily 
impact similar businesses. Where I can say a strong and resounding 'no' is to the oft-
mentioned statement that the Internet (self-publishing, e-books and online selling) has been 
the main reason for the demise of the bricks-and-mortar bookshop. 

I would like to point out here that I am not at the moment interested in huge ventures such as 
say, Borders. Although I often hang out in Borders or walk into other large Australian 
bookstores (Angus & Robertson, QBD, etc.), I do so less often than I drop into smaller, 
independent, second-hand and antique shops. The main reason is that the larger chains all 
stock the same stuff, very little of which is specialized in any way, and much of which is 
targeted at the lowest common denominator of readers – one-hit wonder novels, classics of 
English literature (not many translated works there), self-help for those who cannot tie their 
own shoe laces, true crime manuals for aspiring murderers and bored wives, street directories 
and books on how to fish from the lounge in your house. The staff is often overworked, does 
not express interest in the client and their knowledge of books and reading is equivalent to 
that of a 16-year-old in a supermarket: 'You right there?' 

It is true that a few smaller chains are attempting a 'personalized' touch by adding 'customer 
VIP cards', offering discounts for loyalty and creating cafe nooks among the books. But 
whereas I would walk out of a second-hand bookshop with a backpack full of books and 
need a taxi to get home, I tend to come out of these chains with a maximum of one or two 
volumes and lighter of step and wallet despite the stack of VIP cards I own. As for buying 
anything from supermarkets that stock books as part of their merchandise, or from a 
newsagent, I would have to be seriously desperate. These outlets just do not seem to get the 
difference between 'book' and 'paper cut to size'. And as quite a few perceptive commentators 
have noticed, large chains are at a cut-throat battle with each other, selling their stock for so 
little that it would not make sense for an independent bookshop to try to imitate them unless 
they were seriously suicidal. While the dinosaurs fight each other in the large metropolitan 
centres, smaller independent booksellers can find niches in regional towns and more up-
market, intellectually oriented and yuppie neighbourhoods where class precludes you from 
buying from a plastic-feel, neon-lighted chain totally lacking in that form of sophisticated 
ambience that feeds the intelligentsia's soul.  

One of the most common complaints one hears from those specializing in obituaries for 
independent and second-hand bookshops is the advent of the Internet. Their reasoning runs 
along the lines that one can establish a bookshop online with minimal overheads, thus sell at 
lower prices undercutting the bricks-and-mortar competition. That, if anything, needs to be 
taken with heaps of salt. All of the booksellers whom I have met who still owned a bricks-
and-mortar establishment were also selling online, but saw the open door of their bookshops 
as absolutely necessary. Their reasons? 'It brings in the stock' for the second-hand dealer; 'it 
lets us get to know the local clientele'; 'it makes the bookshop visible more than any 
advertising', etc. Not to mention the mantra of most serious book dealers, especially in the 
field of collectibles, that buying a book is a 'tactile experience'. I have to personally agree 
that I find much more pleasure in browsing through shelves, reading the dust jackets and 
fingering through the pages than when I purchase my end-of-financial-year stock of 
textbooks from Amazon or ABE Books. 

So the Internet has not been the cause of the demise of bookshops. True, one is competing 
against thousands of other sellers, but one also has a potential world-wide market of millions 
of buyers. Electronic auctions, however, are a different kettle of fish altogether – here the 
sellers are not necessarily specialists in their field, as anyone can sell their deceased 



grandmother on eBay, provided she is well conserved and the customs do not mind her being 
imported. Prices can be absolutely ridiculous, from $0.99 for a paperback, and many 
perceive this as a competition hard enough to knock any respectable bookshop out of work. 

I often bid on items on eBay, but so far have only purchased one book there, a nostalgia item 
from my teenage years that is out of print and I could not find anywhere else. On the other 
hand, if I were a bookseller myself, eBay would provide me with a whole range of exciting 
possibilities – a bibliographically challenged teenager selling his granddad's stack of dusty, 
moulding books has often been unable to locate a similar copy online for price comparison 
(provided he cared) and priced a book to the heart's content of a collector or book dealer not 
so challenged. Priceless gems valued in the thousands of dollars have been known to pop up 
on the eBay charts for a price in two digits. 

So what makes an independent bookshop survive and flourish? The booksellers I have talked 
to repeat a number of important points: know your stuff, deal in what you understand, hone 
those people skills and develop trust with your clients. Tailor your stock to the readers, give 
your bookshop ambience and dare to be different, but not too much. Cross-sell, as long as the 
other items in the bookshop reflect the philosophy of your bookshop. And a philosophy it 
must have, just as it must have a system in place for inventorying and weeding your 
collection, managing your accounts and keeping up to date with the industry. All sheer 
business common sense. 

There are bookshops that go out of business – not because the industry as a whole is doomed, 
but because the demographics changed and the owner's did not; because they did not grab the 
opportunities, did not travel with their antiquated collection into the XXI century. I have seen 
a few of those and heard of others. A bookshop with books on the floor, sagging and broken 
shelves, dust and an owner behind a stack of boxes, blinking like a bat blinded by daylight 
and not very sure what a buyer was doing in his little bolt hole from the world will not 
survive, Internet or otherwise. As a good friend and dealer told me over a beer: 'Sam, lots of 
people whose bookshops fail have no people skills. They think a bookshop is a great idea for 
a place where they can sit hidden from humanity, at which they snarl when it crosses their 
doorway. Of course they close down quickly.' 

Oh, yes, one more thing: do not call your bookshop Armageddon! The Apocalypse, if any, is 
in the eyes of the beholder. 

About the author 
Sam Berner (B.Ed., Dipl. LIS, Postgraduate Diploma in Information Management) is a 
principal of the company ECognus (Brisbane, Australia). She is a knowledge management 
consultant, assisting small to medium enterprises to benefit the most from their intellectual 
assets. ECognus also provides services in the area of tailored software applications and the 
digitization of business processes.  

Disclaimer 

Articles published in SAJIM are the opinions of the authors and do not 
necessarily reflect the opinion of the Editor, Board, Publisher, Webmaster 
or the Rand Afrikaans University. The user hereby waives any claim 
he/she/they may have or acquire against the publisher, its suppliers, 
licensees and sub licensees and indemnifies all said persons from any 
claims, lawsuits, proceedings, costs, special, incidental, consequential or 
indirect damages, including damages for loss of profits, loss of business or 
downtime arising out of or relating to the user’s use of the Website. 

 



ISSN 1560-683X

Published by InterWord Communications for Department of Information and Knowledge Management, 
University of Johannesburg