61–70 of 107 posts
Harvard Square Books can't be making money with rhat custom printer. I've never seen that thing in operation. It must be the delivery model he has in place that you might want to consider.
Someone else IS innovating. They're printing out of print books for a tidy fee. What's remarkable is that so many books are unavailable once they've run. That is publishers are incentived to destroy rather than keep books which don't immediately sell due to tax laws. Research that and look around at other book stores. You'll find the one doing it. http://www.forbes.com/sites/philjohnson/2012/05/10/the-man-w...
I love Lorem Ipsum and remember when you guys moved a few years ago. (I used to live literally across the street.) I enjoyed buying used books at your store and that you would sometimes haggle over the price. But I doubt I have spent more than $80 there. I don't know anything about the bookstore business except that it is tough. I was sad when Quantum Books closed, and their books were a lot more expensive than yours…
At that point I write down the book's title and later download it for my Kindle. I've often thought that bookstores should have QR-codes with amazon referral links that make my purchases easier.
Sure, a referral isn't as much income as a physical book sale, but I really can't amass any more "real" books, since I want to stay mobile. I'm sure I'm not the only one using bookstores just for their coffee shop and easier browsing.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think there is always a need for more hacker/startup community spaces in Boston/Cambridge; especially ones that are not coworking spaces/offices. There can always be more events too. How about hosting an in-person brand/biz hack of the store?
Your comment reminds me of a segment of Urbanized, the documentary [1], in which a young woman, Candy Chang [2], creates a simple system for enabling citizens to voice their opinions on what should be done with vacant buildings in varying states of disrepair. She created vinyl stickers that read "I Wish This Was", under which is a blank white space (resembling the My Name Is stickers common to networking events, etc.…
If I want to buy a book, i'll go to Amazon and buy it. With kindle, i'll have it in 10 seconds. If its not available on Kindle with Prime i'll have it next day. You can't compete with Amazon. So its not worth trying. If you want to run a remarkable book store today, don't sell books. That's a loosing battle. This is where i'd start if I was trying to think of ways to innovate in this space. I'm sure you're familiar w…
Or maybe only sell ebooks. Offer good coffee and advice on books, get a referral fee for ebooks? Browsing on Amazon sucks. If you know what you want it is OK, but for discovery there is still room for improvement.
Any chance you'd consider making book sales a smaller part of what your store does in favor of other sources of revenue? One of the few things brick-and-mortar shops can do that Amazon still can't is bring people together, to Be A Place. You can. A few ideas to consider along those lines, either individually or as smaller pieces of a larger concept: - Become a hacker/student-centric coffee shop that enables freelance…
Doing "something else" (exercise for the reader, sorry) that offers something book-related as one of many services is probably where the future of non-Amazon book business will be.
A work-space with services ...
http://www.luminarygraphics.com/ http://outofprintclothing.com/ http://bagladiestea.com/novel-tea.html http://www.us.penguingroup.com/pages/shop/the_penguin_collec...