In many smaller cities across America, the Borders and B&N megastores represent the first time there’s been a decent selection of books available.
I myself am an Amazon affiliate it’s earning me about $100 a month which just about covers the cost of all the books I buy at Amazon ? Īnyway, no matter how much I love independent bookstores, they just weren’t getting the books to the people. Doc Searls changes his bookstore from Amazon to Wordsworth and sees his revenue plummet to $0. In the online world, the same thing seems to be happening between Wordsworth and Amazon. I would miss them, if I could think of a single thing they offered that B&N didn’t. They hung on for a while but eventually closed down. My guess is that Shakespeare was undercapitalized and couldn’t afford to compete on the same basis as B&N. Sometimes true, but not in the case of Shakespeare and Co., who were hiring the same local entry level workers that B&N did.Īt the time, Shakespeare had limited floor space to expand their inventory - but a giant store that would have been perfect for a large bookstore was vacant, right across the street. Indies “claim to fame” is that they have more knowledgable staff and they do better selection of interesting books. Their selection was much smaller than B&N - for example, I wanted a book about bicycle touring - B&N had a whole shelf of bicycle books Shakespeare had one book. I liked Shakespeare and Co., but, you know what? They just weren’t doing what it takes to be competitive. Here’s an example I can think of… a famous bookstore here on the Upper West Side, Shakespeare and Co., closed down when a Buns and Noodle’s SuperDuperStore opened up practically next door. I suspect that is because the types of people who love books enough to be indie booksellers are not necessarily the best businesspeople. I love the concept of independent bookstores, but in many cases I think that they are just not “doing what it takes” to be competitive - online or in the stores. My rather extensive reply to Sanj… more of a rant about independent booksellers in general:
The only reason I can come up with it the same reason Wordsworth books has never tried to “chain” itself…we are an independent store that tries to keep the “community store” ethic and we were afraid we would loose that. Our error, we had the vision we just did not execute. Did we envision that the web would be this big for books? We knew it would be very big, we did not think it was going to be this HUGE. We have put very little in terms of monetary resources in it and we are every marketer’s nightmare.Īre there days where we don’t kick ourselves? I’d be lying if I said no. Our website does fairly well, in spite of us. I have no qualms with what you say, though I must add that folks have heard of us (not to the extent they have heard of Aaaamaazon, but there are folks out there who know us-largely because of our reputation in the physical world). … A customer of ours pointed out and after the appropriate period in which I agonized over your comment I thought I might write back. I was happy to hear back from Sanj Kharbanda over at Wordsworth, who wrote: If you are looking for a cute and inexpensive set of hardback classics, this one will suit nicely.If you’re going into a market with no existing competition, lock-in, and network effects, you better use the Amazon model, or you’re going the way of, which started two years before Amazon, and nobody’s ever heard of them. The images below show a bit of closeup of the boards (which are covered in textured card), a sample of the cute quotes and images on the back cover, the binding, and the decent text size.Įarly books in the series (first released in 2018) were children’s classics, but later years have seen an expansion to more adult titles (still appropriate for a child audience), including the Brontës in 2019, numerous Jane Austen novels in 2020, and a set of Sherlock titles in 2021. The books are compact editions (trim page size is 178 x 129mm) which is nice for kids to hold, with an original retail release price of under £7. They come in attractive bright colours with matching coloured end papers, and feature embossed gold and coloured blocking to enhance their beautiful, bespoke cover illustrations. These British Wordsworth Collector’s Editions are very affordable volumes (hence, glued bindings, so perhaps not a long-term investment). Newly released last month is another delightful collection of hardcovers to add to my long list of publishers of classic children’s literature and other classic novels.