There’s a post over at The Digital Reader where Mike Cane invokes an old Seth Godin post to say that bookstores are now catering to the ‘rats.’ Rats are, in Cane’s interpretation of Godin’s analogy, what’s left when everyone else has jumped the sinking ship (the analogy is pushed too far and breaks down in both cases, i.e. the rats are red herrings). In this case the rats are those customers for whom books are a once in a while casual purchase, maybe one or two a year, consumers with little overall investment in literary matters as a whole. Rats, to Cane and Godin, are the people who don’t matter to bookstores because they don’t generate stable retail income, and, as soon as book stores begin to die, they are the people who will find new amusement without a second thought for what came before, as evidenced by said lack of purchasing power: if you’re committed you will buy. In short, rats don’t put up a fight for any industry, they cannot be turned to in order to abate an inevitable decline.
iTunes and file sharing killed Tower Records. The key symptom: the best customers switched. Of course people who were buying 200 records a year would switch. They had the most incentive. The alternatives were cheaper and faster mostly for the heavy users.
Amazon and the Kindle have killed the bookstore. Why? Because people who buy 100 or 300 books a year are gone forever. The typical American buys just one book a year for pleasure. Those people are meaningless to a bookstore. It’s the heavy users that matter, and now officially, as 2009 ends, they have abandoned the bookstore. It’s over.
(from Godin, cited by Cane)
When the ‘best’ book buyers have headed off to Amazon and the Kindle, or now to Apple and the iPad, or to Barnes and Noble and the Nook, etc., then it’s only the dregs-ish book buyers that remain, right? The ones that have no effect, the ones that are no use?
Well, apparently Amazon only have a 6% equivalent of the print market in Kindle ebooks (we’re talking about 2009, let’s ignore the other industry players for the moment, I don’t think things have changed too drastically this year, or at least we’ve yet to see). I think, to judge by the amount of people who jumped the music industry ship, that they as an industry had a lot more heavy users who were a lot more motivated to jump. But maybe that 6% equivalent that Amazon have acquired represents the cream (retail figures-wise) of the print book buyers, and those people each rack up 500 book sales a year, and the remaining rats only buy one book, and the entire book selling industry is screwed… Well, not according to the 2009 sales figures (American figures, just to keep in line with Godin) which stayed essentially the same, bar a few low-to-mid single digit percentage drops here, and some similar raises there, compared with 2008. These figures come after two years of Kindle sales poaching the ‘best’ readers. These figures come in the midst of a recession felt world-wide (where uncommitted rats might tighten their book buying belts). These figures come in a year with no Harry Potter or Twilight (surely the rattiest of novels?). In fact ebooks in general only accounted for 1-3% of total book sales in 2009, suggesting that the defection, if it is of the elite reader/buyers, might not be such a crushing blow to the industry.
Imagine if it was true, imagine if all the hardcore book buyers had jumped ship…it didn’t matter at all. The industry stayed just about the same. It would have turned out that the rats, en masse, are its bread and butter (because I think the whole rat metaphor’s condescending as hell I will mix it all day long).
I think it’s strange to suggest that hardcore book buyers (read ‘book lovers,’ read ‘bibliophiles’) would leave behind the bookstore for the Kindle. That, to me, sounds like a kind of ratty thing to do. If I just bought one or two books a year, but I was (for the sake of argument) a lover of shiny novelty, then maybe I’d check out one of these ereader things everyone’s talking about and buy a few more (e)books on it once I had it too (i.e. I would contribute to overall ebook sales, at least in years one or two, far more than I used to contribute to the print book industry which has lost my sales). If I was (I wish) able and willing to buy 500 books a year I would imagine that nothing could drag me away from doing such a thing. You don’t buy hundreds of books a year because you like words, or stories, you do it because you like books. The music industry analogy doesn’t really hold because it’s relatively easy to get over the mediocrity of CD packaging (bar some high level examples of the form). But when you have to hold an object in your hands every time you interact with it then it can lead to some…intense emotions.
But all of this is broad brushstrokes (of course). We have no figures to tell us how readers (and what kind of readers) move this way and that. We have no way of knowing whether people that buy 100, or 300, or 500 books a year are reading good things, or bad things, new things, or old things, whether they’re bibliophiles or merely prolific readers. We have no way of knowing when and if they’re going or have gone. And as for the rats, we have no way of knowing when they’ll jump ship, or if they’ll be pushed, and if they go then where they’ll land.
Whatever though, these people on one book a year aren’t rats. Their one-or-two-books-, one-or-two-albums-, one-or-two-DVDs-a-year is what keeps everything afloat because they’re legion…which does make them sound a bit like rats I guess, with their power laying in their numbers. And in fact, if you look at my bookstore buying then I’m a rat, I buy one emergency present there around Christmas, but otherwise it’s all libraries and The Book Depository. And I love music, but yeah, I’m probably a rat to HMV, because I try and buy straight from the artist where I can. I jumped from the high street ship years ago.
Sometimes the people who appear to be rats by some skewed indicator of retail capitalism (which Cane and Godin both seem to play into: “if you don’t buy enough, you’re a rat, you’re not important to the industry we care about” (even though, as I’ve argued, you probably continue to drive it with your couple of sales)), sometimes these are the people who care the most, but they’re simply driven outside of the systems which were meant to provide for them, but instead did anything but.
*Update*
Why did the music stores disappear? Why did the video stores disappear? Why did Blockbuster just file for bankruptcy? Why are Barnes & Noble and Borders both closing stores?
I think he takes exception to the term “rat,” really. Blame Godin for choosing the metaphor. The fact remains, changing the terminology, that when your best customers leave, you can’t support a business with casual customers.
I offered the following in a comment:
I can’t lie, I found the ‘rats’ term to be loaded, and the more I thought about it, it seemed to be reflected in the sentiment, that those left behind are the unsavvy ones, that if you don’t buy enough then you’re not ‘good’ for the industry everyone else is escaping anyway.
I agree, a business built on casual customers struggles to get going, but I’m not so sure that it can’t be sustained on them. Casual customers support supermarkets for instance (there’s not so much loyalty to a particular brand that people will travel for them, people tend to transition quite well), and I think this is a useful analogy to what music and book stores became long before digitisation.
Barnes and Borders and Blockbusters and Tower, I believe, are all in trouble because they never catered to a hardcore clientele, they catered to the supermarket crowd, those who wanted cheap and easy, not to the real ‘best’ customers who would stick with them when times got tough, but those who, when the money ran out, went for cheap, free, and easy elsewhere.
If Tower had cared for people who really loved music they’d have made long term sustainable profits on a small scale, rather than the short and explosive gains that late stage capitalism prides. Tower is boom and bust, Borders is boom and bust. Local bookstore and music stores are sustainable and dependable, bar the threats imposed on them by the wider market. Local indies suffer when they’re driven out of business by the big names, which then themselves die on the features they were built on (cheap, easy) when digitisation takes over. Then the indies can’t come back because now ‘free’ (or even just ‘non-physical’) is normalised.
I wonder how many bibliophiles with a great local bookstore have switched to the Kindle?
The conversation is continuing in the comments over at Mike’s blog if you’re interested in taking a look.
The conversation is continuing in the comments over at Mike’s blog if you’re interested in taking a look.
Editor’s Note: Matt Hayler is a PhD Researcher at the University of Exeter. He is interested in all forms of resistance to the digitisation of the written word, but particularly resistance stemming from human neuropsychological and phenomenological interaction with physical objects and the widespread idea that technology is ‘unnatural.’ He blogs at http://4oh4-wordsnotfound.blogspot.com and you can follow him on twitter – @cryurchin
I agree with you about the poor “supermarket” content of some bookstores. I would barely bother to go to many bookstores because I know there will not be a single thing I would want to read, and in fact I told my family years ago not to give me bookstore vouchers for presents as I would have difficulty finding something to buy (well, apart from the odd dictionary or similar). However, I noticed the same thing happening to CD shops as the digital download became the method of choice for most music – crazy because the classical and jazz fans would probably still buy the higher quality CDs rather than MP3s. Perhaps they thought that by selling complete trash they could hit some mythical (and unfortunately nonexistent) “popular” market.
Really, Mike (and Seth) got the metaphor reversed.
The old cliché goes that the rats are the first ones to leave a sinking ship. (Showing that they’re usually smarter than the humans, who continue to stick around—or at least are better about knowing when a ship is going to sink.)
So if anyone is catering to the “rats” of the bookstore world, it’s the e-readers, because the e-reader users are the ones who jumped ship first.