David Emery OnlineWhat Can We Learn from Barnes & Noble's Surprising Turnaround?
Publishers give discounts and thousands of dollars in marketing support, but the store must buy a boatload of copies—even if the book sucks and demand is weak—and push them as aggressively as possible.
Publishers do this in order to force-feed a book on to the bestseller list, using the brute force of marketing money to drive sales. If you flog that bad boy ruthlessly enough, it might compensate for the inferiority of the book itself. Booksellers, for their part, sweep up the promo cash, and maybe even get a discount that allows them to under-price Amazon.
Everybody wins. Except maybe the reader.
Daunt refused to play this game. He wanted to put the best books in the window. He wanted to display the most exciting books by the front door. Even more amazing, he let the people working in the stores make these decisions.
—Ted Gioia
There’s a lot of interesting points in this piece, but the overriding theme for me is trust. Trust in the staff to make the right local decisions for their unique market and local conditions, and trust in the audience that they might want something different.
There’s also trust in the very concept of being a bookshop, and a focus on the answer to the question “why might someone go to a bookshop?” The answer, which seems obvious but clearly isn’t, is to buy books. Not to drink coffee, or to buy assorted trinkets, or to chase after a completely unrelated business line in the hope that it might magically bring more customers in.
Focus and trust.
Visit ➔Dowsing is a technology for intuition amplification
So my unfounded, imagined mechanism starts like this: thinking about water, and stepping into a location where there is increased water likelihood, one may become primed to look down, which is physically represented as a microscopic movement or twitch of the fingers. (Which could of course be a random twitch because that happens too.)
—Matt Webb
I am absolutely fascinated by the idea that pseudoscience ideas like dowsing could—due to the deep and strange and mysterious ways our bodies are cobbled together—actually work on some level.
See also: homeopathy. I don’t for a second think that sugar pills with a microscopic amount of something in them have any effect, but—sometimes they do. Which means that our brains and our bodies are conjuring up that response out of nowhere, because the taker believes that they do.
And maybe—to build on Matt’s point about amplifying our own bodies intuition and natural responses—paracetamol, aspirin et al often work in the same way; it’s not the active ingredients that make you feel better, it’s the action of taking it. See also: when I give one of my kids a plaster for the most minor of scrapes.
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NO THANK YOU by Little Simz
A few listens in, and this sounds like a worthy follow up to her Mercury Prize winning last album, ‘Sometimes I Might Be Introvert’.
Also a timely reminder not to collate your “Best of the Year” lists until the year is actually done.
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Active Scenes: Mix 001 (DJ Mix) by Confidence Man
Talking of DJ Mixes, this new mix by Confidence Man—whose song Holiday was The Guardian’s #19 best song of the year—is a blast.
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2manydjs present As Produced by Soulwax 2020-2022 (DJ Mix)
2manydjs—also known as Soulwax—have released a series of DJ Mixes on Apple Music. This one is a mix of some of their recent recent remixes and songs they’ve produced, and—unsurprisingly—it’s very good.
Listen ➔A community isn’t a garden, it’s a bar.
Bars are responsible for serving only so much alcohol per drink, not serving someone too intoxicated, not serving to anyone below a certain age. Keeping track of every drop of alcohol. And if they break any of these laws, they can be shut down permanently, owners can lose their license, people can go to jail. Why? Because alcohol is dangerous. With Facebook inciting genocide in Myanmar, mass shooters in America being radicalized online, the January 6 insurrection that was planned online, and nazis reinstated on Twitter, can anyone still claim that poorly managed social spaces are any less dangerous?
Derek Powazek
I could have quoted all of this, it’s well worth a read.
It feels like we’re going through a few substantial shifts in technological thinking, all at once. For a long time it felt like we were coalescing around a few large, American, ad-supported social platforms. With the rise of TikTok and—to a much smaller extent—Mastodon, and the fall in Facebook and Twitter, that seems to be undoing.
At the same time, half of my social feed is screengabs of ChatGPT. A year ago it was all terrible mass produced art of bored monkeys, so I guess that’s progress. ChatGPT—or at least, its productionised successor—as a virtual barman for a social community? That’s an interesting thing to think about…
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Replay ‘22
A good spread this year.
One of the things I like about Apple Music Replay is that it updates every week, all year round. Strongly suspect the latest Arctic Monkeys album might sneak in there before we hit December 31st.
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The Jurassic World Exhibition
There is an amazing weaponisation of consumer psychology at this end of this. You walk through room after room of dinosaur set pieces, each slowly ramping up in terms of scariness. Brachiosaurus first, velociraptor later, etc. Then, just at the point where your kids are getting a little tired after bouncing around petting anclyasauruses, in the last room—no spoilers—they terrify the pants off them.
And spit you out, tears akimbo, in an extremely well stocked gift shop.
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