Monobookist Bookstore Heralds The Boutique

As Borders reports that it needs an additional $50 million to reorganize, an interesting new bookstore has popped up in New York City. A so called, monobookist bookstore. This bookstore opened in a modest space, stocked with 3000 copies…of one book!

To celebrate the launch of his new book about the Phoenix Mars mission, author Andrew Kessler constructed a “monobookist bookstore”–a temporary shop stocked with more than 3,000 copies of Martian Summer.

I’d been wondering when we might start to see the rise of boutique bookstores as the eBooks become the preferred way to consume literature. These boutique bookstores would be in small spaces, about the size of a cafe coffee shop, and they would only stock a few copies of the most popular new books. A monobookist bookstore is the extreme example of this, but makes the point well. A boutique bookstore would exist first and foremost to promote the works of the featured authors.

Selling a few copies on site would be nice, but I think the ultimate goal should be to increase sales of the author’s eBook catalog. Physical books can be great marketing tools used this way, but I’d probably plan to support the shop itself more on coffee and muffin sales than on the books themselves. No long term leases here!

A boutique bookstore should be an ephemeral thing, a temporary place to launch some books, sell some coffee, and host author signings. And don’t forget the free Wi-Fi to sell those eBooks too!

We’ll always have printed books, but the new star is the eBook. The bookstore itself is only dust in the wind.

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