On Twitter I recently asked the following question: “If you could buy digital books in a physical bookstore, would you shop there?”
I asked because I saw a eReads article about digital book kiosks in physical bookstores, an idea I would LOVE to see.
I’ve been thinking a great deal lately about how I shop for books, what I look for when I go buy a book, and I realized, I seek a specific title when I go make a purchase. I haven’t browsed a romance section in a bookstore in a very, very long time. Yet I have a very difficult time when I browse online bookstores, and even with the best of recommendations, the best of purchase history suggestions, and the reviews all over the internet, I still sometimes miss that experience of seeing the bookcase of romance spread out in front of me, of discovering something surprising. Even when I went into a bookstore with a list of, say, 2 or 3, I’d end up buying maybe one extra, if the budget and time allowed.
I confess: I am one of those annoying people who likes to see everything on the buffet before starting at the beginning to make my selections.
But because I read digital books, I have learned to shop differently. In other words, I don’t browse as often, if at all. While I like the freedom to shop wherever I am, even at 10:30pm in my pajamas on my couch, I miss the experience of shopping without a specific product in mind in front of a selection of unknown books I can pick up, look at, and try. The physical browsing experience is very different from the virtual one, and I’m not sure it is possible to replicate the randomness of being among bookshelves. As fast as my internet connection is, I’m faster in a physical bookstore picking up and looking at physical books one by one. In other words, even with recommendations, user data, keywords, and metadata refining the choices I look at in digital stores, there is value in bookstores, one that I wish could more easily welcome the digital shopper.
I am aware that with the nook and nook Color, Barnes and Noble shoppers can browse physical books and buy them in the store using the BN wifi – one reason why I wish the nook and the nook Color worked for me. Also, I know that Canadian bookstores like Chapters and Indigo allow readers to buy Kobo ebooks inside the stores. I suppose this is one more question to ask when considering a digital reader: do you want to be able to shop in a physical bookstore but buy digitally? Then get a nook or shop with Kobo in Canada! Heh.
But the larger questions of how I shop still make me ponder and I wonder if I am alone in noticing the change in my shopping habits. Have other digital shoppers learned other ways to browse or simply do less of it? Do they shop like I do, based on recommendation or hunting a specific book online? Is there anyone else who, like me, misses the serendipity of discovery in a bookstore, but feels like a douchebagel shopping in a physical store then going home to download online?
I don’t think the way we shop that leads to the discovery of new books has changed irrevocably, and I do think it’s possible to get digital book readers back into physical bookstores. Digital shopping options in physical bookstores would rock my world because they’d allow a store to reclaim and build more communities of reading customers while also engaging in fun and PROFIT (yay, profit!). We’d just have to be welcomed there, somehow.
Some folks on Twitter expressed doubt that digital book readers would want to go to physical bookstores, that the convenience of shopping any time without going outside in the cold would be much preferable to the experience of browsing an endless bookshelf or doing any live interaction with other book customers. Others said they’d love to shop in a store – and experience the chance to chat with other customers perhaps – and buy digital books knowing that the store they shopped in profited from their purchase. As much as the random and inefficient bookstore search for something to read can be daunting in a well-populated romance section, sometimes I, and it seems other people, miss the browsing.
Curious about the logistics of installing kiosks, figuring out customer service and streamlining all the methods through which to load content on various readers (Time yet again for another round of… Where’s My Venture Capitalist?™) I went hunting for any other retail outlet that adopted digital sales of its product in the physical store. I couldn’t find one. Would music stores, for example, be in a more robust position if there had been in-store downloads? With DRM and individual devices that weren’t wireless, perhaps not – but with wireless reading devices, a person could conceivably be able to load content from inside a bookstore on a number of devices, and not just the nooks in the BN stores.
On a larger scale, with increasing numbers of Facebook connections and users, and a whole mess of different niche networks online devoted to books, is it possible to also recreate physical connection (heh) with real people while browsing in a store? Do we, in short, still want to talk to actual people? In the discussion about Borders and bookstores, many people had suggestions as to what brings them to a physical bookstore. Would digital buying options make that more likely?
I’m still questioning whether my book shopping habits have changed irrevocably, or whether I would browse in a physical bookstore’s romance section without feeling like a complete heel for then buying digital copies, such as from Amazon or from an Indie’s online Google bookstore.
(Note: I talk about shopping and whatnot in this entry, but I also want to point out that this operation could conceivably work in libraries, too: browse physical, borrow digital.)
So, let me ask you, with a simple poll (above), and, if you like, in the comments: would you like to shop for digital books in a physical store? Or is that idea just not of interest to you?
Well, yes and no. When we lived not so far from civilization, it used to be that our night out would usually be dinner and Borders. We’d spend a couple hours there on a Friday night (yes, we’re geeks). Of course, those were grad school years, so usually I’d just be making a list of things to look for at the library – I didn’t buy much. Now that I can afford to buy books, I only have one little tiny Borders Express available. It’s not on the close list, and the staff are generally helpful and nice, but it’s not the kind of place you want to spend a lot of time – it’s just too cramped and crowded.
That’s one reason I bought the Kobo – if I’m ordering books online anyway, then I might as well buy the kind that are delivered instantly!
But if we still lived somewhere near a nice big bookstore, good for browsing and with some comfy chairs, it would be awesome to go up to the register with a pile of books and have them loaded to my account (I wouldn’t even mind waiting until I got home to download them). Or to go to a kiosk and buy book one of some series that I’d missed out on.
There’s something about looking at all the covers, and paging through the books that is just more satisfying than buying online. I hardly buy anything online if I haven’t read at least one review from a site I trust. But in person I can skim through and see if the book grabs me – I take more risks. Or at list different kinds. Maybe I just need to get more in the habit of downloading samples.
spamword: series93. Now that’s TOO many books in a single series!
I think you’re right. We must be related. Publishers have made all kinds of profit from me off authors that I tried on a whim at the library.
I tried to buy ebooks while browsing in Borders – it would have been rude to buy from other sources while there though and their ebooks were not available/did not exist. This is before the most recent last-ditch push to ebooks that Borders made, but they were definitely advertising their reader in the store while I was shopping. I couldn’t buy a digital version of the books that I was interested in. I have their apps, I would’ve been able to read it on my iPod if they had actually had their selection available.
That was the AOL-Time Warner building. There may be some irony about a bookstore in the AOL-TW being unable to effectively deliver an ebook to an actual shopper.
I use the Barnes and Noble app to shop, but their samples sometimes end before the book has started – they start at the very beginning, so you may get pages of blank paper/title page/reviews of the author’s other books. I have had one that stopped halfway through the first page of the story. Since I don’t have a Nook and don’t want a dedicated reader I see that area of the physical store as wasted space. I haven’t tried to see if I could access the samples on a different device, if it is possible they have not made it super-obvious.
For non-fiction how-to books, I still need to browse and I don’t buy digital. I do use digital patterns but for techniques, I want photos that stay put while I try out the stitch/recipe/whatever. Actually, I end up printing the digital patterns out anyway.
I love the card idea, especially if the actual samples of the book were available at the same time. (Even something as simple as having url’s printed on the card so I could read the sample on a website would work as long as there was internet access at the same time.)
I think the Overdrive Library sales function may eventually play a role in my book shopping. I only recently regained access to the public library ebooks, but there is something magical about “buy it now” juxtaposed with “you are 35 out of 52 patrons on the waiting list”. The library has some methods of sorting books that do help me browse online (I also don’t care for most of the website formats if I want to browse.) Reading through “recently returned” and sorting all new books by the date that books were added to the library seems more like physical browsing.
I have a nook and a B&N less than a mile from my house. I have taken my nook there and in theory really like the idea of browsing in store. OTOH…why? Why go all the way there to shop when I can do it without getting off my couch?
On a slightly unrelated topic, I have been a B&N member for over five years. This year I dropped my membership. By not allowing any member discounts for nook books, I find there is no reason to pay for a membership any more. When I was buying physical books my membership paid for itself within a short time. But now? No. I think unless B&N starts adding member discounts to nook purchases the whole membership program is going to go down the tubes.
This was the original plan for Borders and actually went into action at a few stores before the poo hit the fan financially. Unfortunately that didn’t happen at my local Borders. They went digital too late, plus there were some issues with the hundreds of different eReaders out there, so I heard.
I have long advocated this. B&N’s Nook having this function was actually a great idea, as was the ability to read any book they carry for free while in the store, just as if you picked up a physical book off the shelves and parked your butt in a chair.
What I do now is go to the local Borders or the B&N about an hour away (there’s a closer store, but it isn’t as nice in regards to staff who read and know books), browse, talk to customers and staff, then go home to buy online from whoever is cheapest. I feel kind of bad about that, because the store doesn’t get the credit. I wish there was a way that I could buy through the Borders.com website and give the credit for the sale to my favorite store (currently closing).
Ago97 – Hard to believe that I didn’t have my Sony eReader so long ago as 1997.
I’ve just gotten into digital reading in the past year, but since one of my unbreakable habits is to take a book into the bath with me I still fly through all the print books the library lets me check out, or that I can pull from my ever-increasing stack by the side of the bed.
To me there’s nothing like browsing in a physical bookstore (or library, which is where I do most of my browsing now) for discovering that perfect book you didn’t even know you were looking for. Staff recommendations, hand-curated displays—I’ve spent years working in bookstores, too, so being able to physically pick up and look at a book as well as read the blurbs and the cover copy help me decide when a book seems worth my time and when it’s trying too hard to sell itself as something it’s not. (This is a particular issue with nonfiction books, which can talk a good game on the internet but then you flip to a random page in the print book and you realize the prose falls apart or it’s half blank space and you’ve wasted a good fourteen bucks.)
I still remember that day in high school when I walked into a B. Dalton and a flash of a purple cover caught my eye from the new arrivals shelf. Normally I just made a beeline for the sci-fi/fantasy section, but something about that shade of purple all the way across the store made me turn and see what it was about.
It was the first Harry Potter book. As soon as I touched the cover I knew I would love it. I’ve never had that kind of serendipity happen on the internet, despite ten years of online book-buying.
Captcha: might98—Scholastic released the first Harry Potter in the US in 1998.
You can usually get a sample of the ebook, so why would you need to browse physical?
Where I find browsing physical very useful is in looking for new authors (hard to browse a nook for an author you don’t even know about) and for remembering authors at a glance. “Oh yeah! Cool! She has a new book out!”
I so love browsing physical books my Kindle is thick with dust. I love the bookstore experience and I’ve found myself gravitating towards physical bookstores more often than not these days. I loved the idea of Kindle, and I love the convenience of it for certain situations, but I actually enjoy reading a Kindle book less than I do the same book in a physical format.
If I could browse physical books and then purchased to my Kindle on the spot, maybe I wouldn’t feel this way, but I am forced into the either/or of it all and, in the long run, I choose physical books over ebooks. I am not willing to forego the physical bookstore experience, I guess, for the small amount of convenience and barely-there savings Kindle affords me.
I love bookstores. There’s definitely a sensory experience that comes with wandering around bookshelves.
But, because of my limited budget, I rarely actually buy. Usually, I make note of promising titles/authors and then see if I can get ‘em from the library. I confess I haven’t quite made the leap to ebook yet, even though I myself am now epublished.
If—big if—ebooks were priced reasonably (i.e. lower than print), I might be tempted to buy if the bookstore made some kind of kiosk available.
So the short answer would be “maybe.”
I live in Canada and don’t have the KOBO/Chapters love. The KOBO can be iffy, you either get a great one or a lemon (friends experience and on-line reviews). You also need to register a credit card to download anybook, even free ones (a friend works there and has seen a few come back when people discover the need for a credit card).
I bought an inexpensive tablet and downloaded the Kindle app for android. No trouble downloading free stuff from Amazon, just register and account.
The tablet can read pretty much any format, so I’m avoiding Chapters. I’ll buy “real” books or magazines there but the electronic’s I’ll avoid.
Oh, and does anyone know, if I download in the US on my Canadian e-reader will it still be on my machine when I cross the border???
B&N already does this via the Nook (NOOK?). Indeed with the Read-In-Store feature they function like a library, albeit a Brigadoon library!
With many Indies signing up to Google ebooks some might offer something along the same line. Believe some are putting up shelf talkers with barcodes that can be scanned for the ebook option.
Unfortunately if you have a Kindle you are out of luck. Amazon and physical bookstores do not go together. (Amazon’s strategy with the Kindle has many targets and one of them is to push physical bookstores over a cliff as fast as possible).
I’m doing my version of shopping in a retail store while looking for digital content, I’ve just downloaded the Book Catalogue app for my android phone.
And since my phone is grafted to my hand. I may as well make use of it. A better option will be when my nookcolor comes with a bar code app that does the same thing.
I’ll let you guys know how that pans out.
I don’t know, I find myself browsing using my Nook quite a bit. I also do a lot of browsing at Amazon.com, though I don’t own a Kindle. I find Amazon.com a lot more user friendly than Barnes & Nobles online.
I read a lot of the Harlequin Presents line, which isn’t really available in the store anyhow. I don’t see a reason to go into the book store anymore unless the title you want isn’t available in digital formation
I LOVE MY NOOK!
I would defnitely do it – but it would have to be well set up and readily available. Also I’m not sure that I would want to have to carry my eReader with me and I don’t think you would have to. Surely they could rig it so that it would just go to your online account (if you don’t have the eReader or whatever device you are using) available and you can download it when you get home.
I like the gift card idea. I love collecting things so that would be cute – and not take up much space cos for me the point of the ereader is to not take up much space.
I find browsing for books online rather painful. It’s great for authors you love or for something specific like someting you saw in the book store (i write down titles and authors) or was recommended. But i find it difficult for picking out new things at random. The recommended lists are good but can be limiting.
Whereas I love browsing bookstores and libraries. Admittedly I’m a judge a book by its cover – well i get drawn into the book by its cover, read the blurb and occasionally do the first page test and pick books out that way. At the moment I do that at bookstores then go to the library or now buy the ebook version. But if i could support the bookstore by buying it there (and not to have the eReader handy cos i don’t carry it everywhere) then I definitely would
One of the biggest music chains in Australia, Sanity, installed digital download kiosks for music in their stores.
Funnily enough, they’re one of the few left who are not only surviving, but thriving.
I have a BN membership that I’ve been loyal to for years but this past Christmas I got a Kindle. I love the portability of my Kindle and having access to so many books at any time but I do miss browsing through the bookstore. I find that I prefer to find my Kindle books online on my laptop rather than using their Kindle Store on the device itself. Despite how much I love my Kindle, I still love going into BN though. I’ve been more generous about trying new authors and buying new books on my Kindle, but when I read one that I really love, I want it in hard copy too, so I still buy some books to have on my shelf. Also, the series that I already own I still buy in hardcopy, not wanting to have different versions.
I have been guilty of browsing at a BN, finding a book I want to read but don’t want the hardcopy of and buying it on my Kindle there in the store (they do have free Wi-fi—it works with the Kindle just like any other computer device)…I always feel bad when I do though, like they might kick me out of the store, lol.
I HATE it when publishers include only an ittybitty sample of a book—-don’t they understand that the more into a book you get for free, the more likely you are to PAY to find out what happens?! I could use the nook read-in-store feature to read more when the sample was too short to even figure out what a book was about (for heaven’s sake), but that is obviously not an option at 2am.
I enjoy browsing for stuff at BN and Borders and the library. Bookstore cafes and the comfy chairs at the library reading room make them relaxing places to spend time.
Olivia said
This story is magical and reminds me of how I found a favorite book or two of mine.
I already do this. I rarely go to Borders on purpose to buy a book for myself, but if I find myself there because one of the kids is buying a book, or shopping for someone’s birthday, or for whatever reason, I always take a whirl through the sections I like, and if I see something interesting, I download a sample on Kindle, standing right there at the bookshelf. I did it yesterday in fact, for my daughter, who expressed interest in Cassandra Clare’s Clockwork Angel. I guess that’s probably rude, what with the big Kobo display at the front of the store, but whatever. Maybe Borders should have built a better ereader.
Not really. 🙂
freedom42 – I have the freedom to download 42 books to my Kindle while standing in a physical bookstore.