I politely apologize for assuming everyone else’s brain puts ‘bookstore’ and ‘used bookstore’ in different catagories the way mine does. 
They are also Satan.
I’m ECU’s monkey and a Duke fan.
This is going to be a post and run again I’m afraid, because I’m severely under the cosh at work.
But I thought I’d just respond briefly to Exapno Mapcase and js_africanus. I’d be interested in seeing what “debunking” of the Long Tail idea there has been. The Wired piece is not a journal article and I don’t take its numbers seriously, nor do I take it seriously as business advice.
What I do like about it is the simple way it shows
- the (minor) tyranny of majority tastes;
- the importance of what my niche area of economics calls margins - the costs of facilitating the delivery of the underlying product or service;
- the sort of impact that technological improvement in margins has on markets where there is a variety of products and consumers with hetrogeneous tastes; and
- in particular the idea that because some portions of margins relate to fixed costs of having a presence in a particular location, their reduction has got to be good for minority tastes.
Check the zip codes on that page. With a couple of minor exceptions they are no farther west than a strip along the Hudson River. Which puts them about five hours from western New York. Might as well be on the other side of the world. Toronto, Cleveland, and Pittsburgh are shorter drives.
hawthorne, check the technology column on the front page of the B section of the WSJ for the past few weeks.
Forgot to mention that it appears that most, if not all, those stores are used bookstores. And like XaMcQ I put those in a different category.
Add me to the list of posters who are frankly, appalled at the selection of sci-fi and fantasy in independent bookstores. And I don’t really have much respect for a book store unless it has a huge selection of those. Why on earth would I, those being my two favorite genres?
I was a manager at a Borders for many years. The store that I was at carried 175,000 book titles, not copies, titles, I think it was 210,000 titles altogether, with DVDs, CDs, etc. I do not believe there is an independent bookstore anywhere that could possible come close to this total. Many times I have tried to purchase books at indies, such as the latest Vonnegut book, only to be told that they did not stock it. The breadth of selection at the chains is huge. They carry the small press, the literary fiction, practically everything published (7,000 titles/year last time I checked). Selection is what they do and why they are able to exist. If they didn’t have that and only sold the bestsellers at their discounts they couldn’t last, see Crown/Super Crown.
However, the indies have an advantage in that they can specialize. Some of the best performing indies are the ones going after the niche market, the mystery stores, the sci-fi stores, the Christian stores, and so on. By having the smaller choice, they can become more intimately aquainted with it and thus are better able to make recommendations. Also, they are better able to know their customers. They can remember Mrs. Jones, and that she bought such and such title last time she was in, and can suggest a title to follow that one.
The staff at the chains can be very hit or miss. There is always a core of people that have been there for years, these are the book people. They know the inventory and make recommendations just as well as any indie seller anywhere. The much larger percentage of staff are merely people holding down a job. They, perhaps, would be just as happy at the Gap or Pottery Barn. If asked for a recommendation, these are the ones that can’t get past the bestsellers. Since they are the majority, these are the ones that most customers see, thus the bad reputation. If you, the customer, want a good book shopping experience, you must find one of the book people.
Both chains and indies have access to the same ordering processes and can therefore order anything in print and many titles that have gone out of print, just like Amazon.
We have several excellent representatives from both camps here in Chicago. We also have poor examples in both camps.
So I suppose, in reference to the OP, shop at whatever store you like best.
Really? I don’t know of a single science fiction (never, ever sci-fi) store in the country that would qualify as a best performer by any standard. Could you name some? Same with specialty mystery stores. They’ve both been going out of business in droves, and the remaining ones seem to be shaky.
Seriously. I’d love to know of a science fiction store anywhere in the US that makes good money. This is important to me.
There’s a store in Evanston, IL, called Something Wicked that is doing pretty well. Actually, Perhaps I overstated the case In this area, this is the only SciFi store I know of in the Chicago area, but they do seem to be making money. They’ve been there for years and recently expanded.
Granted, but the site is run by the New England Booksellers Association so it’s biased towards the eastern part of New York.
No, I’ve been to most of the stores on that list and all of them have primarily sold new books.
Then it is a nice anecdote but no more an argument in favor of the indies than, “I was in my local bookstore once and found a $10 bill on the floor.”
Well, then you have to weigh the time, effort, and expense of going to a bookstore on the chance you might find something you want against the ease and speed of shopping online. It’s just like the different philosophies my wife and I bring to shopping for anything: She, like you, enjoys the shopping experience itself and finding something she likes only improves it. I want to go in, get what I need, and leave. We cannot shop together happily because I’m done after ten minutes, so you can imagine my thankfulness when she FINALLY got her driver’s license at age 43! It did cut WAY down on my time reading in the food court, though.
For some of us, though, this isn’t an effort, but part of the pleasure.
Well, I assume that much of that is the effect of being in the greater New York City penumbra. It does those of us in western New York no good at all. Except for a few small ones in college towns (Brockport, Geneseo, Ithaca), I believe all the general interest new independent bookstores in western New York - an area encompassing Syracuse, Rochester, Binghamton, and Buffalo - have shut down. If any small ones have started or are clinging to life, none are worth driving to. Believe me: any book person in the area would know. 
Not in the U.S, but there’s a really good science fiction/fantasy store here, called Bakka/Phoenix. They’ve been around for at least fifteen years.
I humbly apologize not being able to properly quantify the often unpredictable experience of unexpectedly finding and assessing a good book in a bookstore. As opposed to, say, somehow finding the same book online, not being able to read through it to see if it looks worthwhile or not, sometimes not even being able to find a customer review of it, and then having wait a couple of weeks to have it shipped to me.
This is, like I said, why I use both. When I know what I’m looking for, I’ll often go to a chain, or order it online. Or, sometimes I’ll go to a used store, because they have the same book, but it’s actually cheaper than an online used copy.
I ain’t saying used or independant bookstores are always better than online stores; I’m saying they’re different. Different strengths, different weaknesses. And I find it handy to have different “tools” on hand to feed my hunger for books.
I like browsing in bookstores and have on, on multiple occasions, had an impulse purchase at an independent bookstore based on something I neither was planning on buying nor expected to find. It was a happy accident, and those are always nice moments.
But they’re still just moments. Often, I have an impatience that means if I have the urge to buy a particular book (and no other), I want it Now and that’s where the large chains come in. I know this is a more reliable way of finding what I want, and I have a discount card at B&N that makes it more attractive to go there with my specific “needs”.
Essentially, I’ll always go to an indy bookstore if I run across one, though I won’t necessarily buy anything. I’ll only go to a chain if I have a particular purchase in mind, but otherwise rarely do any browsing there. And as for Amazon, it’s only if it’s something I know I want and know I won’t find easily at a bricks-&-mortar location.
Fifteen? I first went there in 1973.
But there still is a huge difference between surviving and rosewater’s claim that the specialty stores are some of the best performing. Even Bakka is not a best performing specialty store, to my knowledge. It gets by, and not much more. Nobody makes real money on any of these stores. I would still like to see any evidence whatsoever that these stores are doing much more than basic survival.
I’m going to venture a guess that SpazCat wandered into an Olsson’s (if Arlington, then probably the Courthouse location), which with a grand total of six stores, all inside the DC beltway, is hardly a chain store on par with B&N, Borders, or Amazon.
I like Olsson’s. The two that I visit whenever I’m in their respective neighborhoods (that is, Dupont (along with, curse them for being so great, Kramerbooks), or Archives/Penn Quarter/Chinatown area) are very homey, and the shelves are pretty pastiche. There are staff recommendation notecards all over the stores, and they’re on books other than the bestsellers. When I’ve needed help from staff, I’ve gotten nothing but genuine help. I like Olsson’s enough that I almost never leave without buying something.
That being said, I recognize that I am blessed to be in a major metropolitan area, and I try to take advantage of it. I’ll also admit to ending up at the Metro Center Barnes and Noble at least as much as both Olsson’s combined, because B&N will have certain selections not available at Olsson’s (like the Nonfiction Sports - subset Golf - section), and in a large, well-lit megastore, I don’t feel so compelled to spend what little pocket money I carry, as I do in the smaller, more intimate Olsson’s, where I may be one of three or four customers in the store (if it’s busy) when I go midday between work appointments.
I don’t know how well they’re doing as a business, but Fat Cat Books in Johnson City is a excellent independant science fiction bookstore in western NY.
The manager’s a bit of a bitch though.
That web site says they also sell comics and games.
That means they make all their profits on comics and games. The business model of these stores, even with the present downtown in comics, likely hasn’t changed in twenty years.