More lessons for stores from Caravan...

I attended an interesting meeting yesterday-- an update on the Caravan Project. There were several interesting takeaways, but one that struck me in particular was a comment by Steve Potash from OverDrive. Paraphrasing, he noted that digital content delivery is not a "build it and they will come endeavor," rather, it is an investment in the future. During other parts of the meeting we discussed how publishers have really begun to move forward, but that retailers have, by and large, not embraced digital content delivery. This, to some extent, has forced publishers to find solutions that bypass the store, and has given other potential players in the market, such as Amazon, a greater foothold on sales, which, in turn has allowed for greater strangleholds to be placed on publishers. Another good quote coming out of the meeting yesterday is that "if we don't solve our problems, someone else's solution will be forced on us." The "us" in this case was a different group than the retailers, but it applies equally to us as anyone else.

So, what are the key takeaways from stores from this meeting:

- You can't expect digital to take off overnight. If you are not already driving traffic to your site and do not have experience handling online transactions, adding digital will not change much.
- If stores continue to play a waiting game to enter the digital market, they may not be part of it. Stores must invest in their futures now, even if initially it is not profitable, so that they have a place and role as the technology and product takes off.

Finally, I heard discussion about the roles of large stores versus small stores, and what some of the different experts had to recommend. I know this has been a concern among the membership since the initial NMS pilots were announced, which includes no small stores among the initial seven. I am working on a posting for this coming week (likely Tuesday), to address this question more directly and that should raise some discussion points.

Saving the bookstore

An eloquent posting in The Platform by Peter Osnos last week. It starts with the story of a recent community bookstore that was damaged by fire in a neighboring restaurant. It turns to the common plight of bookstores of all types in an era of online competition and other competitive changes. Peter offers two strategies for stores pulled from his observations from more than two years of looking closely at bookstores as part of The Century Foundation’s Caravan Project. The strategies (focused on old-fashioned and new fangled basics) are ones that college stores should take to heart as well. These appear in the last three paragraphs of the posting, which I will replicate here:

Old Fashioned: Service. Service. Service. For a variety of now seriously out-moded reasons, booksellers are reluctant to take customer’s cash or credit cards until the books ordered actually arrive at the store. That uncertainty no longer satisfies in competition with Amazon and the other online retailers, where you can close the sale with a date for delivery. Customers should never leave the store, having asked for something, without buying it, unless, of course, it can’t be found anywhere. One of the biggest complaints book buyers have is the difficulty of finding what they are looking for. Something in the culture of bookselling reinforces the sense of erratic supply. “It’s out-of-stock” and similar explanations from clerks inevitably grate when the competition customers can access from home says they’ll get what they want, even if it takes awhile.

New Fangled: Stores should invest in the relatively simple upgrade of their Web sites, which virtually all now have to include shopping carts for ordering e-books, downloadable audio, and print-on-demand versions of all kinds of books, including large print and out-of-copyright titles. Backing up the brick-and-mortar premises with the vast array of books in various formats now available from distributors gives even the smallest store access to the same supply as the biggest chains and online outlets. Somewhere in the store, a "kiosk” (actually a computer terminal) supported by a knowledgeable employee can make any customer conquer the fear that they won’t find the book they want. The pleasures of finding something unexpected while browsing the stacks will never be matched by a screen search, so stores should stuff as many titles as they can on to shelves, but only one copy, with the full assurance to the customer that there are many more where that came from.

What these ideas have in common is the notion of a bookstore as less a repository of goods on hand than a showroom of what’s possible. The cozy familiarity of a good bookstore and the role these stores play as community assets are cherished by readers. Updated concepts of service and supply will reinforce those facts rather than diminish them. And in the meantime, for those great booksellers who cannot overcome their troubles, we will mourn your passing.

Certainly there are other ideas out there that will help college stores remain vibrant, vital, and valuable to the communities they serve. How about some of the readers out there contribute some points of view or suggestions?

Update on Caravan Project Pilot

The following posting went out to schools participating in our pilot initiative with the Caravan Project. I am reposting it here due to other inquiries. The timing is also good as there was an excellent update and summary of the Caravan Project as a whole that appeared in the Shelf Awareness newsletter on Friday of last week.

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Originally distributed: Friday, 13 June, 2008

Hi everyone,

I am writing to provide an update on the Caravan pilot project. As we indicated back in late April and early May, just before our first meetings and the kickoff of the project, we learned that we would need to change the planned order of the project. This required moving the activities originally planned for late summer or fall (specifically, getting access to the digital assets) up by several months. In attempting to gain access to the Caravan digital assets other positive developments occurred.

First, one of the companies holding Caravan digital assets (OverDrive) informed us that they were not particularly interested in working with us to provide only the Caravan titles. It would be just as much work for them to provide us the 60-90 Caravan titles as it would be to provide all 60,000+ digital assets they provide. Having the larger set of titles and content to work with should make this project more robust. However, it also led us to realize that we could move up the proposed timeline on several other initiatives as well (more on that in a moment). Second, the other major company holding the Caravan digital assets (Ingram) has been less responsive. However, we have scheduled a meeting with them for the last week of June and we expect to make progress at that point. We expect their position to be similar to that of OverDrive.

These required changes in project scope, required some rethinking to determine what is best for both participating stores and the industry so that we can yield a successful result. The exploration into how to deliver the content in multiple formats, coupled with the sudden potential access to a much wider range of content options, has led us to several exciting new possibilities. In addition to the 14 stores currently participating in the pilot, over a dozen others have requested to participate in the past 6-8 weeks. Many of these inquiries would provide a broader range of participants, leading to a more robust pilot. Many of these other stores do not sell many university press titles, and thus might not gain much from the project as originally conceived. However, with access to the larger digital asset inventories, the project becomes more interesting and viable for other groups of stores to consider. In many ways, just by trying to launch the Caravan pilot project we have realized several outcomes of benefit. In addition to getting wider interest in participation than we hoped, we also found methods to provide a wider array of content via an equally wider array of delivery mechanisms and formats. It resulted in discovering a path to implementing the digital content strategy approved by the NACS Board in February that we had not foreseen as possible in the short term.

As noted above, our having access to a much, much larger set of digital assets opens up several other opportunities for this pilot project. It also speeds up several other timelines, encouraging us to rethink our direction. Following several discussions, we have a proposal going before the NACS Board at next week's meeting. If that proposal is approved, this project will take a different direction that will provide participating stores access to a wider array of digital content options, and some additional technical options and assistance. I am limited in the information I can share at this time, but following the Board meeting next Friday and Saturday I should be able to provide additional information and have a clearer indication of the direction this pilot project will go.

The developments in this project all represent positive opportunities for the pilot stores and the college store industry as a whole as it relates to digital content delivery. We are still working toward having working pilots in place by mid-to-late fall. Which direction we go with those pilots will depend somewhat on what the NACS Board decides at their meeting next week. Any stores currently participating in the Caravan pilot project will have the option of stepping out if the new direction is of less interest. As soon as I have more information to share, I will certainly be in touch. In the interim, please feel free to contact me with any questions you may have about the current or future state of this pilot project.

The Caravan Project

One of our projects this year is with the Caravan Project. We had our first pair of kickoff calls over the past week. Our work with the Caravan Project is being sponsored by the NACS Foundation. The goals of our work with the Caravan Project are to help develop educational and marketing materials that help college stores sell digital in multiple formats. Fourteen institutions are participating in our pilot project.

The founder of the Caravan Project is a very interesting fellow named Peter Osnos. He writes a regular column for The Century Foundation called The Platform. A recent column entitled A New Paradigm for Publishing is relevant to this list and worth a quick read.