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It's more of a gallery than a bookshop. The book is on display. The theme of the book is extended into the presentation of the place. Instead of a gallery gift shop you can buy the book the gallery was themed on. It's a nice idea. Gimmicky perhaps, but nice.
I've imagined this repeatedly. When you can buy any book you want online, physical bookstores become, in practice, galleries—and their clerks become salesmen. In such times, there's not much point to having a big store stuffed to the gunnels with anonymous tomes that the clerks don't even know they have, let alone know anything about. Bookstores have none of the things that the book-buyer wants (discoverability, reco…
This seems to be a repeated theme [that I'm noticing] at present which to my mind hints at a particular flaw in capitalist society - that we end up paying for things by proxy. You want a curated suggestion for what to read but instead of paying for a curator to make those suggestions you pay for a book that poorly hints at the worth that you've received from the curators effort. Or you want a particular piece of soft…
While I might say "book gallery", the real description of the place might as well be "curator's service with a storefront serving as street-visible advertising." That the curator happens to have copies of the books they will recommend you is just an obvious extra convenience to throw in, from their perspective; the room for stock in their store is less limited than the room for recommendations in their brain. When e-books are free to pirate, basically all of the price you're paying for the book at a store (or a game on Steam, or a song on iTunes) is in appreciation of the value—including the convenience—of the curation service. If both the buyer and the seller know they're exchanging money for curation, but just both happen to call the trade "selling a book", I don't think it's really a problem.
On the other hand, in a modern economy, if you actually do want to transfer value to the creator of a piece of IP, you have to explicitly cut out the middlemen entirely. If you really like e.g. a band and want their career to thrive, you don't buy their album at a store; you buy their album online straight from them (usually this means "via Bandcamp"), and you go to their concerts and buy merch, and you support any adaptations that happen to their work so they'll receive royalty payments.
In fact, in my own life, I don't think I experience much "bundling"—I'm always either paying solely for the value of the middleman, with the creator receiving at most a pittance, or I'm paying some outsized amount as a show of appreciation to the creator of a thing. (The one exception I can think of is venue tickets. I want that money to go to the people on stage, but almost all of it goes to the people who built the building and the people who run the website that took my money and generated me a PDF of a barcode. Horrible racket, that.)
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> the 'stars' in the movie take a large cut but any one of hundreds of actors could have done that part
Actors are paid based on their "star power"—the ability to pull an audience purely by trading on the interest people have in seeing a movie with that actor in it. Effectively, they're getting their royalties for using their name in all the advertising copy, not for actually acting in the movie.
If this wasn't true, you can bet there'd be a thriving industry of "actor impersonators"—typecasting taken to an extreme, where directors could just order up "someone who can be That Guy From That Movie, for this movie", and get 100 entirely-qualified applicants. "People who made themselves look and sound like Tom Hanks" would outnumber the world population of Elvis-es.
> the publisher's executives takes a large cut of the book price but did little of value
This isn't actually a problem; it's a vestige of the old system where publishers were necessary for typesetting, printing, and distribution logistics. The old generation of authors are staid in their ways and still suffering through working with these antequated beasts, but the new generation have switched to buying the services that publishers provide à la carte, with Kickstarter for the "business loan", a contracted freelance editor, software doing most of the typesetting, Lulu for printing, and Amazon for physical distribution. You might need a publisher to get into bookstores... but—just like we're talking about here—who still shops at bookstores?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
He's only sold 2100 books in 7 months - not much of a success, at least in terms of profitability.
We'll see in the next 7. The Guardian article is 1 day old so far. ;)
And then there's the record store that only sells (and buys) the White Album: http://hyperallergic.com/65570/we-sell-white-albums/
2100 books over 6 months = 350 books per month, or 12.5 per day. Assume the books are $30 - $50, so $375 - $675. Assume a 70% cost of goods sold = $112.5 - $187.5 revenue per day. Tough to make a living unless he can push those numbers a bit. Interesting idea. Hope he can do it.
For instance our next shipment is a Genmaicha: it's a combination of green tealeaves and roasted brown rice. The first time I drank Genmaicha I didn't like it much, because it's so different from what I was used to drink. But now I love it. You have to give each tea a try: if you just drink small samples you'll never develop a taste for the more complex ones.
Very Zen. Life is really simple, but we insist on making it complicated. – Confucius
Earlier quoted context omitted.
This seems to be a repeated theme [that I'm noticing] at present which to my mind hints at a particular flaw in capitalist society - that we end up paying for things by proxy. You want a curated suggestion for what to read but instead of paying for a curator to make those suggestions you pay for a book that poorly hints at the worth that you've received from the curators effort. Or you want a particular piece of soft…
You're basically describing the unbundling problem. People aren't accustomed to (and therefore generally unwilling to) pay for news, travel-related advice, recipes, et al. but they were historically willing to pay for such when they were bundled into a physical publication or where the advice was covered by a commission on some other service (like purchasing airline tickets).
Slightly more murkily, though, we've got things like fashion advice, where you pay a "fashion consultant" who works with you to select clothes that work for you. You've also got "personal trainers" who curate your exercise experience. You've even got these things called "doctors" who don't even have any medicine in their offices(!), instead just writing down their recommendations for medicine you should buy on a piece of paper! ;)
I think the uniting factor in all those cases where we are willing to pay for advice is that the advice is very "interactive": the fashion consultant looks at how clothes fit on you, the personal trainer watches how well your plan is working out and keeps you motivated, and the doctor does a bunch of tests and schedules appointments at intervals for "long-term outpatient treatment" to make sure your medicine is working, adjust dosages, etc.
Meanwhile, it seems weird to imagine paying e.g. Netflix for the output of its recommendation engine, or iTunes for a generated Genius playlist; those are able to be created as batch processes from a bunch of data that already existed, namely your watch/listen history. You might imagine paying for the service that provides that capability (like e.g. Spotify), but not for each piece of advice from it.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
You're basically describing the unbundling problem. People aren't accustomed to (and therefore generally unwilling to) pay for news, travel-related advice, recipes, et al. but they were historically willing to pay for such when they were bundled into a physical publication or where the advice was covered by a commission on some other service (like purchasing airline tickets).
People do pay for advice, though. Financial advice in particular has an obvious unbundled market (not just in the form of "your guy at the investment bank", but also in the form of stock analysis, industry reports, etc. Bloomberg terminals are pure "advice", if you want to think of things this way.) Slightly more murkily, though, we've got things like fashion advice, where you pay a "fashion consultant" who works wit…
Outside of Bloomberg terminals which are a relative high-end niche, most individual investors get their research and financial advice bundled with transaction and management fees.
I basically agree with your other points. But, relatively speaking, things like fashion advice and personal trainers are very much a niche--and, as you say, based on very interactive service. And pretty much for comparatively high-income individuals like other personal services.
2100 books over 6 months = 350 books per month, or 12.5 per day. Assume the books are $30 - $50, so $375 - $675. Assume a 70% cost of goods sold = $112.5 - $187.5 revenue per day. Tough to make a living unless he can push those numbers a bit. Interesting idea. Hope he can do it.
His previous bookstore had also a gallery space for rent, so it may be the case that this new store's model is actually closer to a gallery---author or sponsor may pay some fee. Just guess; I couldn't find an official document stating so.