The litter in littérateur.

Vanishing New York collects some news on a shake-up in Manhattan bookstores: Biography Bookshop in the West Village, which you might know because it’s across the street from Magnolia, is moving. Left Bank Books, which has a wonderful selection of collectible and signed editions. Finally, Skyline Books in Chelsea is closing.

NFI Research has compiled a list of the independent bookstores with the most Twitter followers. Powell’s of Portland comes in first, by far, with 9,880 followers as of October 13, 2009. New York stores dominate the list, and only one Bay Area store, Booksmith, even makes an appearance on it. This is a sharp reversal of the state of things earlier this decade when notable stores, such as Coliseum and Gotham, were closing in New York, while Cody’s and Book Passage were expanding in San Francisco. A revival of indie bookstores has taken place in New York over the past couple years with successful openings of Idlewild, Greenlight, and Word, among others.

One reason why independently owned bookstores have a tough time competing with BN is that they have a higher cost of equity. In this lecture, Aswath Damodaran of NYU estimates the cost of equity for a New York indie bookstore to be around 14%, while it’s only 8% for BN. This analysis makes the manner in which Kepler’s raised money from 20+ investors in 2005 look smart. The investors provide the diversification that Kepler’s can’t get from the public market like BN does. If you want more reading on the subject, click here, though I recommend the watching the lecture over reading the linked chapter.

The Capitola Book Cafe is launching a membership program similar to the one used by Kepler’s.

The Book Cafe is instituting a membership program, in which they’re asking their customers to pay an annual fee in five levels from $25 to $250. Those fees will entitle them to a number of benefits — free food and drink, shopping sprees, tickets to events and other discounts — but they’re also needed to keep the Book Cafe in business.

Unfortunately, it looks like this membership program will, like Kepler’s, offer no accountability or provide donors—that’s what they are, not members—any insight into how the bookstore is using their contributions, which is a shame.

I’ll buy a Kindle once Amazon’s device can win in a longevity comparison with a traditional book. As you can see from the PowerPoint slide above, it still has a long way to go, as the Kindle lasts about 14 months, while the 1766 edition of Thomas Paine’s pamphlet has lasted 243 years and counting. In the meantime, you can pre-order the new Kindle 2; just don’t expect it to last more that two years.

The San Francisco Chronicle recently ran a story about the recent success of Booksmith on Haight in San Francisco.Preveen Madan and Christin Evans acquired the store in 2007,

Evans said they think of their staff as “book concierges,” gently nudging browsing shoppers toward books they might not have considered. They group books in unusual categories on shelves. A recent favorite is “Long Dead Writers – Read Them Before You Meet Them.”

That’s something that most bookstores don’t do. And it’s not a bad thing if their edit or selection of books is strong. However, most stores depend on the books selling themselves, which, in the absence of such a selection, will never work.

Okay, so they really called it an Autopsy. Whatever, it’s the same thing. Business Week has an article chronicling the rise and fall of Cody’s Books in Berkeley. I loved this store when I was in college and thought it was the best new bookstore in the Bay Area. Their selection of literary journals was unmatched, except, perhaps, by Gotham Bookmart in New York. Oh yeah, Gotham is now out of business too. When Cody’s owner Andy Ross opened his San Francisco store on Stockton, I sort of knew intuitively that it was a huge risk and a bad idea, but I remember wanting to see it as a triumph of Cody’s. In this article, Ross calls the opening of the San Francisco store his “fatal mistake.”

Cody’s did many things right. They kept an excellent stock, made new and unheralded books discoverable and desirable to their customers, and held great author events. I believe that they happened to be in a bad location on Telegraph and in a business that, with such slim margins, doesn’t do a particularly good job of weathering long downturns. When business and the weekend tourists abandoned Telegraph Avenue during the late 1990s and into this decade, so went the fate of Cody’s. I only spent a couple years living in Berkeley, but I went to Cody’s almost every day that I did live there, and I miss it terribly. In the BusinessWeek article Ross cites the figure that 10% of all copies of Walter Banjamin’s Illuminations sold in the United States were sold at Cody’s. This isn’t evidence of Benjamin’s obscurity, but rather the display of Cody’s brilliance in attracting its customers to a certain type of highbrow criticism. It’s that sort of intellectual rigor or forcefulness that you’ll never find at a store like Amazon or Barnes and Noble. Sure, they both carry Illuminations, but neither cares or pretends to care if you buy it or the latest Stephanie Meyer novel. And, in case you’re wondering, my copy of Illuminations came from Cody’s on Telegraph in 2002—Where else?

Amazon has posted their picks for the 100 best books of 2008. The Northern Clemency by Philip Hensher claims the top spot. Honestly, I wasn’t planning to read this novel, but now I am. I find that one of Amazon’s most useful features is that it helps me discover new books better than most physical bookstores. And that, to me, is the value of a bookstore—how good a job it does of introducing me to books I didn’t even know I wanted. Every store will promote 2666, but how many will compel me to buy The Northern Clemency?

A couple months ago, Inc. magazine published the second in a series of stories about the revival of Kepler’s Books in Menlo Park, CA. I responded with a blog post and a letter to the editor, which appears in the June issue of Inc. and is reprinted below.

It’s telling that Part Two of Bo Burlingham’s story about Kepler’s, a bookstore, doesn’t once mention a single author or book title ["The Plot Thickens," March]. Burlingham also fails to include views from anyone outside of the store’s management team and its consultants. I couldn’t imagine him writing a similar story about a software company without mentioning an engineer or views from outside industry observers.

If Anne Banta and Clark Kepler want to revive the business, it’s essential to pay more attention to their primary product and how customers relate to it. Banta may know good business, but without knowing good books, her efforts will be futile.

Cody’s Books on Stockton Street in San Francisco will be closing on April 20, reports the San Francisco Chronicle.

The 22,000-square-foot store on Stockton Street, between Union Square and Market Street, will close on April 20. It will send 20 percent of its inventory to the last remaining Cody’s location, on Fourth Street in Berkeley.

Cody’s President Andrew Ross, who mortgaged his house to open the San Francisco store, said it has been losing $70,000 a month.

When Cody’s Telegraph location announced its impending closure last spring, Ross asserted than the San Francisco store was doing quite well, and on pace to be profitable. Obviously and sadly, that didn’t happen.

A few months ago, I posted about what was, at the time, an upcoming screening of the film Indies Under Fire sponsored by Kepler’s. Based on the film’s trailer, which I watched online, I wrote that it looked to be “another sentimental, corporate-bashing look at indie bookstores that refuses to do the hard work of pointing a critical eye at indies themselves and asking why the independent bookselling business has been stagnant and so incredibly slow to innovate or pioneer new business practices over the past few decades.” I recently received a comment from a reader who thought I might not have written that had I actually seen the film.

I did attend the screening, and though the film is slightly more nuanced than I had expected, its implied argument is that Borders and the corporate booksellers led to the demise of Printer’s Inc. in Palo Alto. I grew up down the street from Printer’s Inc., and must note that it wasn’t a particularly good bookstore. When compared to the other big indie bookstores in the Bay Area–Cody’s, Kepler’s, ACWLP, Book Passage, Green Apple, etc.–Printer’s rated very low in my book.

Although the sentimental view of the indie bookstore getting killed by the heartless, bland corporate bookseller certainly appeals to people’s emotions, it seems that indie bookstores are really responsible for their own survival. Berkeley’s Nydia MacGregor wrote a paper in which she argued that the presence of chain stores has little effect on the sales of independent bookstores in the same area as long as the local community is engaged and the independent store provides them with a unique identity. She writes:

Independent booksellers link consumers with an identity that connects to a more differentiated self-concept, that fits within a narrower social group. Given the complementary nature of the relationship between these two organizational forms and the differentiated resources that they demand, branch store openings will not negatively affect the baseline survival rates of independent stores, even when they enter into the same community.

In short, the relationship that Indies Under Fire suggests between Borders and Printer’s Inc. is flat out wrong. Printer’s Inc. killed itself.

The second part of Bo Burlingham’s three-part series on Kepler’s appears in the March issue of Inc. magazine. Burlingham recounts the struggles that Anne Banta, Clark Kepler, et al have had over the past year or so after the store reopened in October 2005. It seems that Banta has finally come to some conclusions that she should have reached a long time ago. She’s quoted, “I feel hopeful about how it’s going. But the idea of people from high tech coming in to save the day—it was so naive to think that we could. We have to find other people who know the industry–an advisory board or something. If we can tap into some industry experts, it would make a big difference.”

The only problem here is that the sort of industry experts she seeks out are people like Michael Hoynes, who recommend diversifying product lines, targeting the store to families, and other marketing nonsense that has nothing to do with books or how to reach people who care about books and are willing to spend money on them.

In September of 2005, I wrote a letter to the San Jose Mercury News criticizing the composition of Kepler’s board of directors and suggested that they include someone from the literary community on the board. They still have not done this. (You can read the letter reprinted below, if you click on the “more” link.)

Burlingham’s article definitely provides some hope that the store is on the right track and that Banta and Kepler have finally realized that the store can’t be everything to everyone—that it needs focus, and having focus inevitably means alienating some people. At one point in the article, Burlingham quotes Banta when she exclaims, “But I don’t know what we want [the store] to be!”

I obviously love the store quite a bit. I still buy most of my books there—about 100 a year. I claim at least some responsibility for the store’s revival, and yet I also understand that in order to reshape itself to survive, Kepler’s may, in fact, alienate me. I sure hope they don’t, that they beef up their literary fiction section, stop cutting back on periodicals, and find some way to finance doing so. If that means selling ridiculous games and diaries and DVDs and Christmas cards, then so be it. But I think they still need to figure out a) How are we going to make money? and b) What are we going to invest that money in? What is going to give us the greatest return? And what is going to be of long-term, literary value to our customers? This is a decision that you can only make with strong leadership and leaders who are interested in books and business. When I used to travel more and visit new bookstores on a regular basis, I had two tests for whether the store was good or not: 1. Did they stock all books by F. Scott Fitzgerald? (He died at 44, after all, and only has about a dozen books.) and 2. Do they have The Recognitions by William Gaddis. Fail both, and you’re out of the running. Those tests have not changed in years, and I don’t expect them to.

On a final note, the article mentions setting trackable benchmarks for the staff, which I completely agree with, but the question is this: Can a metrics-driven business model be compatible with an art form that is not. Seriously, if the literary business was entirely driven by sales, we would have only be able to choose a bunch of crappy best-selling novels by John Grisham, Michael Crichton, et al.

As Banta had come to realize, Kepler would have to learn an entirely different management style if the company were to be turned around and set up to last for another 50 years–the goal set by Méndez and the board. He would have to put managers in place, give them real responsibilities, and hold them accountable. He would have to commit to a plan with realistic projections, quantified goals, and specific benchmarks. Banta and her colleagues had already identified the key areas to concentrate on. They were the six imperatives that made up her “bubbles of focus.” The first bubble was the core: doing the things that defined Kepler’s mission of being the local area’s community and cultural destination. The second: sell more effectively to current customers. The third: expand and diversify the customer base. The fourth: expand and diversify the store’s product line. The fifth: develop an employee culture of empowerment with total customer focus and an understanding of person-to-person marketing. The sixth: reduce costs and improve efficiencies. Banta wanted the participants in the meetings to lay out all the ideas they had for addressing the imperatives. She then wanted them to decide on the three to five most promising ones in each area, estimate the costs and returns, assign responsibility, and settle on the measurements they would use to monitor progress.

While I was living in New York four years ago, I ran into a former Kepler’s employee, who recounted Clark Kepler’s ridiculous rules for his employees, which included not being allowed to sit down or read while on the job. Burlingham seems to suggest that these rules were actually legitimate.

As a manager, he was a one-man band. Every significant problem came to him. He wasn’t even willing to delegate responsibility for checking the suggestion box. On top of that, he had an elaborate set of written rules governing everything an employee might do. Aside from contributing nothing to the business, the rules sent exactly the wrong message to the staff: You are not empowered to think for yourself.

This, generally, seems like a poor way to manage a business, but, hey, what do I know? I’m just a writer. (more…)

Stacy Mitchell’s book, Big-Box Swindle, opens with an anecdote about the resurrection of Kepler’s in the fall of 2005, and in which this blog played an instrumental role. Her book, which is a well-researched diatribe against chain stores, received coverage in Business Week last week. I haven’t read the book yet, but judging by the review, it doesn’t seem like Mitchell’s research really offers anything new:

While chain stores were already a presence by World War I, changes to the federal tax code in 1954 turned them into tax shelters. Within three years, new shopping center construction had increased more than 500%; Wal-Mart, Target, Bradlees, Kor-vettes, and Caldor are among the retailers that soon appeared. These days, local governments lure the chains with generous subsidies and tax breaks, thinking the stores will bring jobs to town. Mitchell, building on her own and others’ research, counters that the boost “is nothing more than an illusion.” The stores do create hundreds of jobs, but eliminate just as many by forcing other businesses to downsize or close. The tax dollars they generate are offset by lost sales and property tax revenue from local business districts and shopping centers. A 2006 working paper by the Public Policy Institute of California examined several markets and found the opening of a Wal-Mart resulted in a drop in countywide retail earnings of 2.8%.

Coliseum Books in New York will be closing before the end of the year, according to the New York Times. I lived in New York when Coliseum reopened in 2004, and it was my third-favorite store in Manhattan behind Gotham Book Mart and St. Marks Bookshop.

It looks like Gotham Book Mart in New York is in trouble once again. This is my favorite store in the country, and I hope something can be done to keep the store open.

From the New York Times story today:

In the last six months, the owners of the building have moved to evict the store and its owner, Andreas Brown. Friends of Mr. Brown’s say the building’s owners were only trying to help Gotham get on its feet. They say that Mr. Brown, who hoped to buy the building eventually, fell behind on his $51,000 monthly rent, and owes at least $500,000 in rent, taxes, interest and other fees.

Whether he fell behind because he lost momentum during the difficult transition after the move from the old building or because — as some friends say — he devoted his money to his first love, buying more books, and to paying his employees rather than his rent, the Gotham is fighting for its life once again.
….
What is clear is that a judge has authorized a city marshal to seize hundreds of thousands of items worth, perhaps, millions of dollars; that the store is closed, though employees are still allowed inside; and that Mr. Brown, who is 73, is no longer living there.

Mr. Brown’s lawyer, Lawrence D. Bernfeld, said yesterday that the current owner of the building, listed in real estate records only as 16 East 46th Street Property L.L.C., was willing, for just a brief time, to entertain offers to sell the building at below-market price to a new owner who would continue renting to the Gotham. “Should such a contract go forward, enlightened capitalism will be at work,” Mr. Bernfeld said.

I spoke with Andreas in the spring of 2005 for a story and posted previously on this blog about my love for his store.

Kepler’s is sponsoring a screening of the film Indies Under Fire about the decline of independent bookstores in America. The screening will take place at 7:30 pm on September 30 at 700 Santa Cruz Avenue in Menlo Park.

If the film’s trailer is a good indication of its actual content, it looks like the documentary is yet another sentimental, corporate-bashing look at indie bookstores that refuses to do the hard work of pointing a critical eye at indies themselves and asking why the independent bookselling business has been stagnant and so incredibly slow to innovate or pioneer new business practices over the past few decades.

Japanese bookseller and publisher Yohan, Inc., has acquired Cody’s Books. Yohan is the largest distributor of English-language books in Japan. Cody’s, which closed its Telegraph Avenue store in July, has locations on Fourth Street in Berkeley and on Stockton in San Francisco.

The press release announcing the sale does not disclose the terms of the deal and is, generally, rather vague about Yohan’s interest in the Berkeley-based Cody’s:

Cody’s will retain both its Fourth Street store in Berkeley and its Union Square store in San Francisco, its extensive author appearance program, its school, library, and corporate book services, and its expert staff. Ross will remain president of Cody’s Books, and Leslie Berkler will become vice-president, focusing on store operations, as well as rapidly growing off-site programs including book fairs, schools, libraries, and corporate sales. Cody’s will operate as a wholly-owned subsidiary of Yohan.

Cody’s, founded by Fred and Pat Cody in 1956, is celebrating its 50th anniversary this year. Andy Ross acquired the business in 1977, and then opened a second Berkeley store in 1997 and a downtown San Francisco store in 2005. The flagship Telegraph Avenue store in Berkeley was closed earlier this year due to declining sales. Ross notes, “With Yohan’s support, Cody’s will continue to be both an essential voice in the community while exploring a number of growth opportunities around the corner and across the globe.”

Hiroshi Kagawa, CEO of Yohan, says, “I’ve loved Cody’s ever since I first visited the store in 1983.” Founded in 1953, Yohan is the largest distributor of English-language books and magazines in Japan. It owns 18 bookstores in Japan, including the art and design-focused Aoyama Book Center, as well as the publisher IBC Publishing. “It is our ultimate mission to promote culture and communications worldwide,” says Kagawa. Yohan also owns Berkeley’s Stone Bridge Press, run by Kagawa’s longtime friend and colleague Peter Goodman. “Hiroshi loves books,” says Goodman. “Yohan and Cody’s share a sensibility that venerates the written word.”

Kepler’s is selling books online for the first time since the store closed in August 2005. However, it appears that the store is using the same BookSense template that is used by many other independent bookstores to create a sort of token online presence. Why it took them a year to put up a site that is nearly identical to the one the store had before it closed is beyond me. One of the major problems with the BookSense sites is their lack of metadata, including reviews and reader comments.

Cody’s Books on Telegraph is closing today.

The Contra Costa Times summarizes and laments the state of independent bookstores in the Bay Area. In their article, a local writer, Linda Watanabe McFerrin, is quoted as saying, “A bookseller like Cody’s or Book Passage doesn’t just participate in the scene. They help create it. They are actually generating the literary culture. They’re not just serving it, and that’s very, very different.”

This, unfortunately, seems to me the exact opposite of what Kepler’s is doing these days with their market research, trying to find out what customers want so the store can be everything to everyone. The consequence, of course, is that they still have yet to establish a clear voice in the literary landscape. What does Kepler’s stand for–i.e. what kind of books does it stand for? I’ve been shopping there for a decade, and I have no idea.

Some out of town news:

Tattered Cover in Dever has moved to a refurbished theater.

In developments reminiscent of what happened with Kepler’s last year, Brazos Bookstore in Houston has been bought and will not close.

ACWLP in San Francisco will be closing as soon as the store can liquidate its inventory. The store’s owner, Neal Sofman, has posted the following message on the store’s website:

Dear Esteemed Customers and Friends,

We deeply regret to announce that we will be closing A Clean Well-Lighted Place for Books as soon as we can liquidate our inventory.

Beginning Friday, June 16th we will be selling our stock at 20% off regular price.

Our hours will change to 11am until 7 pm beginning Monday, June 19 th .

We thank you all for the wonderful support you have provided A Clean Well-Lighted Place. It has been our great pleasure to work with you and be part of the same community over the years.

Many will ask why this is happening. The reasons are many and complex. The simple answer is that the book buying market has moved on, either geographically or culturally.

Thank you for your many years of support. We had a great run. We will miss you.

Neal Sofman

Owner

The meeting on Thursday, June 8, will be at Trinity United Methodist Church, 2362 Bancroft Way, at 7 pm. We look forward to seeing you there.

As reported in the Oakland Tribune and elsewhere, the Berkeley City Council has approved a plan to revitalize Telegraph Avenue. This action seems to be largely in response to the impending closure of Cody’s.

However, David Lazarus expresses skepticism about the City Council’s plan in the San Francisco Chronicle. Lazarus suggests that the City Council is only working on a short-term fix, and he proposes the more radical idea of transforming the four-block stretch of Telegraph near UC Berkeley into a pedestrian mall.

Andy Ross has been in talking with investors interested in saving the store. If you are a qualified potential investor, please email me.

On June 8 at 7pm, there will be a community meeting in Berkeley to discuss the prospects of saving Cody’s. The meeting location is still to be determined. We will post any updates as they become available. Andy Ross will attend, and I encourage everyone to do the same.

Paul Collins asks this question in his Village Voice article, which is essentially a review of Laura J. Miller’s new book, Reluctant Capitalists: Bookselling and the Culture of Consumption.

Collins writes,

Today’s field, though, may not be the future’s. Superstores live and die by generous zoning, massive inventory, co-op money, and deep discounts. Zoning laws may stiffen, return policies change, or price controls curtail loss-leader strategies. All these possibilities, however unlikely, have precedents; indeed, it was the owner of Nantucket Bookworks who last month spearheaded a chain store ban in that island’s downtown. Ultimately, though, the greatest vulnerability of chains may be their muscle-bound nature. If print-on-demand technology, though still poky and faintly disreputable, ever achieves the availability and quality of traditional books, the need for overstock returns, remainders, and huge retail spaces may evaporate.

Tyler Cowen has an article in Slate that makes the case against independent bookstores. I, of course, disagree with him on multiple counts, but his argument is well worth reading. Cowen seems to write from the vantage point of someone who has little interest in small titles or publishing houses. I’m willing to bet that his assertion that “if you’re looking for Arabic poetry you have a better chance of finding it at Barnes & Noble than at your local community bookstore” isn’t based on personal experience with a niche interest.

What’s disturbing about the essay, though, is that Cowen blindly accepts the decreasing attention span of Americans.

It was easy to finish Tolstoy’s War and Peace when there were few other books around and it was hard to find them. Today, finishing it means forgoing many other options at our fingertips. As a result, we tend to consume ideas in smaller bits, a proposition that (in another context) economists labeled the “Alchian and Allen theorem.” Long, serious novels are less culturally central than they were 100 years ago. Blogs are on the rise, and most readers prefer the ones with the shorter posts. Our greater access to books also means that each book has less time to prove itself. A small percentage of the books published account for a large share of the profits, thus setting off a race to track reader demand.

Somehow, people still read War and Peace and Anna Karenina and even some long books published in the last 50 years: The Recognitions, Infinite Jest, and Gravity’s Rainbow to name a few. Perhaps, Mr. Cohen isn’t aware of this. Cohen seems all too willing to accept current trends; perhaps, it’s because he isn’t actually a reader because readers, serious readers, are defined by their willingness to question what is normally accepted, to stand in opposition to the zeitgeist and say, “Everyone thinks this is good, but it’s kind of bad” or the inverse.

Of course, Cohen is correct in his implication that if independent bookstores are reacting to the cultural climate rather than creating it, they will most certainly be doomed.

There is the possibility that Cohen actually has read Tolstoy and Pynchon and Foster Wallace, and he’s just making big generalizations for the sake of being provocative. If so, it’s a shame because writing, as anyone who’s ever read those authors knows, can express deep moral ambiguities and raise difficult questions that go unresolved. In other words, it can do so much more than Cohen demonstrates in his essay.

Many people have asked me about this subject over the past couple days because of my involvement in saving Kepler’s. However, there seem to me significant differences in the situations of each store. In the campaign to reopen Kepler’s, the major objectives were to a) raise capital b) renegotiate the store’s lease and c) implement a new business plan. The objective for Cody’s to reopen seems to be a complete revolution of the business climate on Telegraph Avenue where sales for many establishments have dropped off over the past 10 years and the city of Berkeley has done little to revive the area. For Andy Ross or supporters of Cody’s to bear that burden seems like an impossibility.

According to our sources, Ross is not open to the possibility of outside investment in Cody’s to keep the Telegraph store open. (The money raised by outside investors and Clark Kepler’s receptiveness to them allowed Kepler’s to reopen.) He is, however, willing to listen to offers on the space on the corner of Parker and Telegraph, as he has control of its lease.

Cody’s Books on Telegraph in Berkeley will be closing on July 10 after being open there for 43 years. According to owner Andy Ross, the Telegraph store has lost over $1 million and its sales have declined by two-thirds since 1990. Cody’s stores on Fourth Street in Berkeley and Stockton Street in San Francisco will remain open.

In the press today, the owner of a Great Good Place for Books in Montclair was quoted as saying, “I can’t believe it. It’s a real indication that the climate of independent bookselling is really changing in the Bay Area. The fact that something we considered a mainstay will no longer be there—to me it’s saying good-bye to a friend. It’s like a death.”

It all sounds rather similar to the reaction that Kepler’s closing produced last summer.

I went to Cody’s four or more times a week when I lived in Berkeley from 2001 until 2003, and the store will be missed. I can say that I really only went there because I lived within walking distance, not being a big fan of Telegraph, in general. I think many of the concerns raised by Andy Ross and then echoed in the Mercury News article are legitimate and not just a cop-out. Of course, I was an anomaly–a Berkeley student who bought two to five books almost every week.

Was the problem that students don’t buy books or that Cody’s was in a place that was frequented largely by students?

Press coverage of the Cody’s closure:

The Mercury has followed up with an article about the closing and its relationship to a deteriorating Telegraph Avenue marketplace for businesses:

The owner of iconic record store Amoeba Records said Wednesday he has no immediate plans to close his Telegraph store but didn’t rule out the possibility.

“Our stores in Los Angeles and the Haight (in San Francisco) are doing well, despite what’s happening in the industry,” Mark Weinstein said. “But our Telegraph store is hurting. And given the political climate in this city, I don’t see that changing.”

Likewise, the Chronicle also has an article about the decline of business on Telegraph:

Telegraph’s image problem — the street between Parker Street and campus is often littered and dirty, and homeless youth often loiter outside businesses — is hardly new, and the city has over the years made various efforts to clean things up.

….

But Telegraph Avenue is also not alone in its economic woes, with downtown businesses hurting almost as much…. The entire city has seen sales tax receipts stagnate or decline, with the notable exception of the trendy Fourth Street shopping district that has seen almost consistent growth since the 1980s, he said.

From the blogosphere:

The San Francisco Examiner reported last week that Kepler’s may be in financial trouble once again.

Six months after community supporters fought to bring Kepler’s Books back from the brink of bankruptcy, the bookstore is still struggling to make ends meet.
….
The bookstore had one of its best Christmas seasons on record and has raised money through a new customer-membership program, but already that support is waning….

Update: A brief piece in the San Jose Mercury dismisses the rumors about Kepler’s closing again.

After a brief encounter with the people at the door who refused to let me into the store, I attended Kepler’s second member appreciation night yesterday. Some of the employees presented their current book picks, and Al Jacobs gave a brief reading. People from Common Ground gave away plants. Obviously, the theme was gardening.

The store’s chief marketing officer, Anne Banta, said that Kepler’s Q1 revenue for 2006 is down from last year. Looking around, it wasn’t particularly hard to see why. The average age of people in the audience was over 60. That is a minor exaggeration at most. Relying on an aging population as your core customer base is a big problem for a bookstore–an independent bookstore with wildly fluctuating resources. This wouldn’t be a concern if Kepler’s sold hearing aids or walkers. People may become deaf or diasbled after they retire. They do not, however, become serious readers. Research shows that most people become serious readers in childhood and adolescence. Now, the question is, what, if anything, can Kepler’s do to create and hook these people on its store?

When I lived in New York, my two favorite stores were the Gotham Book Mart and St. Marks Bookshop. I can’t think of two more different independent bookstores in the country.

During the two years that I shopped at Gotham, I recognized every employee who worked there, and everyone recognized me. The store itself is fairly small, and is home to a cat named Thomas (after Pynchon) and a mess of books, which includes every significant work of fiction published during the past 100 years, and basically any literary journal you can think of. If they are missing something, it’s because it recently sold. (You won’t find twenty copies of the same title that’s only going to sell two.) You might not be able to find what you’re looking for, but I’ll guarantee you that the employees can.

The employees are largely what make this store great. (John Updike has called it his “favorite bookstore in North America.”) Although I think of myself as fairly well-read, the employees at Gotham must read about five times more than I do that because I would always walk out with books that one of them brought up during conversation and that I hadn’t even heard of when I entered the store. These people have recommendations and lots of them. Their literary prolificacy makes them trustworthy. They rave about books that haven’t even been released yet and then let you borrow the store’s advance copies to see for yourself. These people know their books, and they want to proactively share them with their customers. Did I mention that Gotham doesn’t even have a website?

Of course, the Gotham way of highly personalized customer service is not the only successful model I’ve observed in independent bookstores. About 10 minutes by subway from Gotham in the East Village is St. Marks Bookshop. This store is clean and well-lighted like Kepler’s. All the books there are on shelves, i.e. none are stacked on the floor. While Gotham closes early, St. Marks is open late. I have never seen a pet inside St. Marks. The management’s instructions to its employees can be summed up like this: “Customers know what they want. Do not talk to them. Do not approach them. Do not bother them. If they have questions, they will find you and ask.” The employees at St. Marks know their stuff, they just won’t share anything unless you ask them. The store has one of the best selections of fiction, art books, and critical theory that I have found anywhere. It does not carry self-help books, sports books, or computer books. It does not sell board games or toys. I’ve found the selection at Kepler’s increasingly disappointing, and it was not uncommon for there to be no copies of The Great Gatsby or the USA Trilogy or Pale Fire on the shelves for weeks at a time.

I don’t think that Kepler’s will or should adopt one model or the other entirely, but there are lessons to be learned from each about how you can build a loyal customer base. Kepler’s seems to think you can do this by letting people take our PBS-style memberships that will supposedly make them feel good about supporting a local institution. I have no problem supporting Kepler’s, and would gladly write them a check if I felt like the store was moving in the right direction. However, the literary journals that once lined the shelves between the front registers and the magazine racks have been replaced by children’s games. (Again, this–all these non-book items–seem to me a bid to compete with Borders in Palo Alto, which is probably a bad move. To stock items that have higher profit margins than books is an excellent idea, but to do so at the expense of your primary product is not such a good idea.

Moreover, in its expectation that customers–or members–treat it essentially as a non-profit, Kepler’s should adopt more of the responsibility and transparency to its members (donors) that comes with being a non-profit. Banta’s report that the store’s Q1 revenue for this year is below last year’s is vague, lacking hard numbers and unexplained. Are people buying fewer books? Fewer magazines? Is it because the store isn’t open as many hours during the week? Is it because the events have been poor?

Oh, the events. Last night a four-page market research survey was distributed to members. On it, I ranked events as the most important thing I want improved at Kepler’s. I’m aware that the store won’t compete in selection with Stanford or Cody’s or Green Apple, but they can–or at least could–compete on the strength of their author events. Last year at this time, I was looking forward to seeing Jonathan Safran Foer, Kazuo Ishiguro, and Phil Lesh all read at Kepler’s. I have looked at this year’s events calendar, and have essentially no interest in all but maybe–just maybe–one of the events. Meanwhile, I will be attending events that I am interested in at Booksmith, A Clean Well-Lighted Place, and Cody’s.

Of course, I should point out that my survey probably has very little value to people like Banta because I am 24 years old and spend thousands of dollars a year at independent bookstores. In other words, I am an anomaly. However, on the other hand, who better to listen to when deciding how to shape the future of Kepler’s than someone like me who is a serious reader–someone who buys and reads a large number of books; someone who has been to a lot of author events and bookstores all over the country; someone who has worked for both bookstores and book publishers–someone who cares deeply about Kepler’s? When I started this site to help save Keplers, I envisioned the store using its reopening as an opportunity to remake itself. I’m aware that not even half a year has elapsed yet since the reopening, and that to judge its progress at this point is probably unfair. However, to not judge at all would offer no chance for the improvement that I hope is still possible.

One final note, the April issue of Inc. magazine has the first in a series of articles by Bo Burlingham about the resurrection of Kepler’s. Burlingham was at the event last night and passed out copies of the magazine to Clark Kepler, others, and me. The cover slug for the story says, “Can the Best Minds in Silicon Valley Save an Old-Economy Business?” It’s nice to be called, hyperbolically, one of the best minds in the Valley, but I would much rather have Safran Foer or Ishiguro or Eggers or Lethem reading at Kepler’s.

I managed to miss posting the link to this interview with Jonathan Lethem, which is required reading for everyone who cares about literature or art or anything, or, well, just anyone.

The IHT/NYT blog reports that tomorrow at the World Economic Forum, Bono will announce a multi-million dollar corporate backed campaign for The Global Fund.

Courtney Love is Paula Fox’s granddaughter? And Gabriel Garcia Marquez has stopped writing?

Nicholas Kristof reviews two new books about genocide in Sudan in the current New York Review of Books. The highlights:

You expect that from time to time, a government may attack some part of its own people, but you might hope that by the twenty-first century the world would react. Alas, that hasn’t happened. Indeed, the Armenian genocide of 1915 arguably provoked greater popular outrage in America at the time than the Darfur genocide does today.
….
The most feasible option is to convert [African Union Forces] into a “blue-hat” UN force and add to them UN and NATO forces. The US could easily enforce a no-fly zone in Darfur by using the nearby Chadian air base in Abeché. Then it could make a strong effort to arrange for tribal conferences—the traditional method of conflict settlement in Darfur—and there is reason to hope that such conferences could work to achieve peace. The Arab tribes have been hurt by the war as well, and the tribal elders are much more willing to negotiate than the Sudan government and the rebel leaders who are the parties to the current peace negotiations.
….
Some organizations, like Human Rights Watch and the International Crisis Group, have also produced a series of excellent reports on Darfur—underscoring that this time the nations of the world know exactly what they are turning away from and cannot claim ignorance.
….
Once again, the international response has been to debate whether the word “genocide” is really appropriate, to point out that the situation is immensely complex, to shrug that it’s horrifying but that there’s nothing much we can do. The slogan “Never Again” is being transformed into “One More Time.”

Perhaps, the media should devote less coverage to James Frey and more to Sudan? Or at least to J.T. LeRoy, whose work and fabrications are far more impressive than Frey’s.

All this should be balanced by a little levity: The Worst Job Ever.

Garrison Keillor tears apart Bernard-Henri Lévy’s new book, American Vertigo, in this weekend’s New York Times Book Review. Levy responds in the New York Sun.