Hello World (again)
Hello World, it’s Lorem Ipsum Books (again). This is blog number three for us. Three blogs, six years. It’s hard to believe that it’s been six years since we opened, but if you do the math (like we did), you’ll see it’s true. With your continued support, we will be here sixty more years—we have our fingers crossed.
State of the Store
I’ll be honest: the bookstore is in a hard period. We’re in our teenage years as a business and are still trying to figure out the best way to bring our unique blend of books and technology to the public. Oh yeah, and if you hadn’t heard, we’re in a recession and small businesses like ours are suffering. Big time.
Over the years we’ve tried numerous strategies, and while they’ve all resonated to some degree, we think we can do better. We’re on a mission to keep community bookstores relevant, and one thing is clear, this means innovating and engaging with our community, both locally and internationally, but especially locally.
In looking back at our last three years, the most dramatic change for the bookstore is the decline of the profits from our online business segment. Even with all of our fancy computerized inventory management systems we cannot eek a profit out of a book that is selling for a penny on Amazon. This shift away from Internet selling may surprise some of the people that follow us, but if we are to survive another day, we must be realistic and adapt. To be clear, we’re not planning on stopping our online sales—we’re just going to shift resources to other programs, giving them a chance to grow.
For example, the wealth of cheap books online is great for book buyers, and so we’re going to become buyers of books on the Internet as much as we are sellers of books. We hope to be able to curate an environment that meets the needs of our local community, sourced from sellers online. Over the next year we will introduce several programs that will allow our customers to be more in control of the books that are for sale in their store. But more on that in a bit…
