How Technology Can Contribute to the Revival of the Local Bookstore

After struggling for many years to compete against Amazon, bookshops are expanding their physical footprint in the United States following a boom in book sales during the pandemic. Barnes & Noble, the large US book chain, opened 16 new stores last year and wants to open another 30 in 2023, according to the Financial Times. Hundreds of new independent bookstores have opened in recent years. In the case of Barnes & Noble, the chain store has thrived by acting more like independent shops. Store managers there are given the freedom to stock the kinds of book they believe will cater the best to local tastes and preferences.

How might bookshops employ technology in creative and practical ways to continue to power their revival and bring new readers through their doorways?

Where Technology Can Help

Live-Streaming Special Events

This trend has been growing since the pandemic hit in 2020. Many physical businesses, which previously betted mainly on activities happening within their walls, reconsidered their strategies during Covid lockdowns and adopted the power of live-streaming events through social media and videoconferencing channels.

For instance, some art galleries experimented with live-streaming during the lockdown by using their physical spaces as media channels projecting content out to collectors, such as presenting shows about artists and artworks, “direct to camera,” as one gallery owner put it.

Since 2020, bookstores have also been adopting the live-streaming model to connect authors and readers. For instance, Barnes and Noble started live-streaming events to enable book launches and live readings, allowing authors to introduce their books and speak to their fans in real-time.

Other notable examples of harnessing the power of live-streaming from the physical bookstore are Malaprops Bookstore, which has been hosting live-streamed literary events and recorded conversations with authors since the pandemic, and Politics and Prose offering P&P Live author talks.

Although physical stores are accessible again, live-streaming is still a good strategy since it allows stores to broaden their exposure, engage audiences online as well as in person, and connect authors to their fans from a distance. Live-streaming in-store events that connect authors from afar, such as virtual book launches, can work well too. For example, an author could offer signed stickers (instead of an in-person book signing) and send them to the store before the event. Then, readers who participate in the virtual book launch at the store can purchase a book that comes with the author’s signature in the form of a label inside the book.

Offer Personalized Sales from Anywhere in the Store

In late 2020, Marks & Spencer became the first UK food retailer to launch an on-the-spot payment solution — Pay With Me — to make shopping quicker, easier, and safer. With this solution, customers waiting in line could pay for a few items and process the transaction with the help of shop assistants and Honeywell devices.

A similar technique may be used to improve the in-store book experience. Typically, it involves a mobile app or a POS device with a system like Celerant or Lightspeed, which allows dedicated readers to consult with expert staff for recommendations and purchase a book right away via instant checkout. In turn, staff can both advise customers and be involved in the selling process from anywhere in the store, further enhancing the personalized nature of the bookstore experience for customers.

Boost Communication Between Staff Members and Customers Using Live Chat

According to Zendesk’s 2023 CXb Trends Report, 72% of customers want immediate service. These expectations can be addressed via Live Chat, integrated into the bookstore website or app. Communication through Live Chat is fast, convenient, popular with millennials, and provides a more personalized experience. Besides, it reduces the number of customer emails and calls, helping increase customer satisfaction and sales.

Live Chat can be used as a help centre tool like on the Blackwell’s Books website, where the customer can speak to a bookseller, check details of their online order, leave feedback on the bookshop, or escalate any issue.

Obtain Better Insights About Their Readers

By investing in data and analytics solutions to capture sales data by store or region, bookstore management can identify the most popular kinds of books by locality and use the information to help store curators offer the right books in the right places and understand their local readers better.

NPD Books is one of the prominent technologies on the market that can help address this need. NPD solutions specialize in POS tracking for the publishing market and cover about 85% of trade print books sold in the US through direct reporting from all major retailers, including Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Walmart, Target, and independent bookstores. By leveraging insights into cross-industry opportunities, bookstore owners can benchmark and track brand sales trends over time and understand the formats, pricing, and categories that perform best.

Customer membership programs built into POS systems can also help bookstores to get to know their customers better. Many of these systems allow bookstore owners to support customer loyalty and membership programs, collect data on customer purchases, provide insights into customer spending habits and interests, and help bookstore owners come up with further customer engagement strategies.

For instance, Vend POS system offers loyalty software that allows store owners to build a customized program, create customer profiles, and observe how their most loyal customers spend. Or, with Lightspeed’s loyalty program, stores can create tiered rewards programs and send in-store and online promotions.

Empower Bookstores as Community Hubs Through Social Media

“People are really looking for a community where they get real recommendations from real people,” states Nyshell Lawrence, a bookseller in Lansing, Mich. “We’re not just basing things off of algorithms.”

Local bookstores work best when they feel like community clubs that foster culture, curiosity, and a love of reading. Even through the lows of the pandemic, physical bookstores remained popular gathering spots for artistic and literary-minded locals, working professionals, retirees and young families, where enthusiastic readers can meet and consult expert curators, interact with and share their reading interests with a community of devoted readers, and get tailored, expert recommendations.While social-distancing measures enacted early during the pandemic presented challenges to bookstores, they also forced them to be creative and more organized, with the likes of curbside pickups, home delivery offers, outdoor pop-up stores, and bookmobiles being rapidly introduced to keep their readers connected and loyal during the pandemic. In time it turned out that as more people shifted to working remotely more often, demand for print books rose and the growth in sales continued into 2021.

Many independent bookstores discovered the power of social media during the pandemic to broadcast events and new book promotions, recommend books to readers, build an interactive community of book lovers around a store and thus keep their readers and customers further engaged. For instance, stores like Norwich Bookstore and Libros Bookmobile used their Facebook and Instagram accounts to share important updates, stream live videos, and provide their audiences with essential resources. The recent and rapid rise of Booktok as an enormously popular social media channel for book recommendations, reviews and discovery has further enhanced the power of social media as an invaluable resource for purveyors of books. The magic of such social networks in the independent bookstore use case is that it can extend the social character and trademark personal touch of the local bookstore experience into the online realm, expanding their footprint without compromising their social importance or essence as local community hubs.

Capture Readers’ Topical Interests and Reading Preferences

Not many bookstores offer mobile apps to their customers. Those who do, however, leverage the power of their apps to keep their customers engaged and informed about in-store events of interest in their area, help their customers discover new books, and get valuable insights into the reading preferences of their audience.

For example, Waterstones app, launched a decade ago, allows their customers to discover and buy their next favorite read, create, manage, and share wish lists, and check book availability and events in their local bookshop. One more nice example is an app by Barnes & Nobles which provides readers with an opportunity to browse through new releases, best sellers, and book recommendations curated by B&N booksellers as well as access to the bookseller, editorial, and customer book reviews.

Support Readers’ Feedback

A bookstore app or website can be a helpful platform where customers can share their feedback on staff members they consulted with and rate their customer satisfaction with book recommendations and in-store experiences.

An app can also be a space where customers share the joy of reading and their book reviews. A Canadian-based retailer of books, Indigo, uses an app to help people discover, share, capture, and discuss books, building and nurturing an online community of book lovers focused exclusively on finding and sharing great literature.

Using Augmented Reality (AR) to Enhance the Bookstore Experience

During the years between 2010 and 2016, there was a notable decline in the number of children reading for pleasure, a drop of nearly 10%. Night at the Bookstore, an AR project for bookstores, demonstrates the potential of AR to help solve the problem and increase the engagement of the younger readers by bringing characters to life and connecting children to stories. According to Big Motive, the company behind the project:

“By enabling kids’ experience of books to be greatly enhanced at the point of purchase, we imagine a future where bookstores become magical worlds filled with talking books that invite children to engage with content, characters, and stories.”

Introducing an element of gameplay into bookstores in one more way to explore AR’s potential appeal and has been adopted before by bookstores.

For example, games like Pokémon Go, Harry Potter: Wizards Unite, and Minecraft, which contain AR elements, drove gamers into public spaces. Avid Bookshop in Athens, Georgia, even hosted a crossover event for children and teens back in 2016 that combined Pokémon quests with the allure of coloring.

As smartphone AR technologies evolve further and the number of locations that feature indoor AR navigation and immersive views increases, bolstered by significant investments from Google, use of this technology in stores and bookshops may become more widespread. Bookstore AR may be primed to become an accessible, perhaps even a “mainstream,” reality.

Using QR Codes in Books or on Merchandise to Further Engage Readers

QR codes can be applied to help customers while browsing bookstore shelves to learn more about a book or access exclusive material on it, such as more extensive biographical details about the author, recorded interviews, published book reviews, or ratings from staff and bookstore members.

Another way to use those codes is by printing them on related merchandise as opposed to books. The owner of Green Feather Book Company, who wanted to make books banned from local classrooms more accessible to students, put QR codes on special merchandise available in their bookstore that linked to open copies of banned books.

One more interesting example of the use of QR codes in books to better engage readers is a BBC creative campaign last year promoting their new drama show “Conversation with Friends.” To raise awareness about the show, BBC Creative published limited-edition books with QR codes and, according to a BBC creative director, ‘sneaked’ them onto the shelves of independent bookshops in Northern Ireland, where the show was filmed. The QR code linked readers to the trailer for the show on BBC iPlayer.

Conclusion

The recent resurgence of bookstores, especially independent stores, has been propelled by the formula of the local bookstore as a place for conversation between avid book readers, where the discovery of great books is facilitated by recommendations from staff who reflect an aura of people of love books. There are many ways that both mainstream and emerging technologies such as POS systems, live-streaming events via videoconferencing or social media, AR, and Live Chat can help bookstores to continue to thrive under this formula, attract and engage with new readers, deepen their understanding of their customers and local markets, and elevate their role as magnets for active readers and proponents of the joy of reading.

Author: Doron Fagelson,
Vice President of Media and Entertainment Practice at DataArt

Originally published on https://www.dataart.com/blog.