Prior to discovering promiscuos women in my mid twenties, books were pretty much my life. The act of browsing through a good bookshop is one of lifes great pleasures. Hopefully places like Reader's Feast and Readings will pick up the 'browse 'n buy' crowd. They tend to spend more on books than those going for a particular item.
Before my time at Shell, I used to manage a large academic bookshop in London (luckily it was staffed by many promiscuous women, so a bit of a two-fer
). The staff (largely uni grads) did all the buying themselves and only bargain books and were handled from corporate.
In shops like Borders the overheads are high and margins low and its very difficult to shift some specialty publications. If you want staff that actually know something about a particular subject, or at least books to do with that subject, you need to pay them better than Maccas staff.
Therefore, Borders was the evil empire when I left London. They were bringing in cheap American versions of popular books by the boatload and undercutting everybody. Hiring chimps as staff and using their grunt to get extra discounts from suppliers. I saw a good many first class bookshops go to the wall thanks to Borders and the like, so its hard for me to feel too much sympathy for them.
I do feel for the staff though.
I hope no one takes this the wrong way, but there just isn't the intellectual environment here to support large, eclectic bookshops.
Its sort of alien to the vast majority why someone would want to spend hours pouring over books. We want it cheap and we it want now, so we head to Amazon or whoever.
Same in the US I suppose, but they have a larger population to pick up the slack.
