ABSTRACT
Book retailers are the crucial distribution link between publishers and readers. In contemporary times, book retailing has served as eCommerce’s testing ground since the founding of Amazon in 1994. The retail market was highly diverse in that the stock offered by any independent retailer reflected the owner’s personal interests. As this thumbnail sketch implies, such stores operated along old-fashioned business lines with razor-thin margins, often teetering on the verge of bankruptcy. The chain bookstore’s key selling point is its vast inventory, which is far greater than any independent bookstore could afford to accommodate. Centralised ordering creates economies of scale and means chains are able to pass deep discounts for bulk orders from publishers on to customers. The layout and atmosphere of the chain bookstores proved to be their ‘killer app’ in the bricks-and-mortar book wars of the 1990s. They were universally clean, well lit and familiar in their standardised fit-outs, with long opening hours and an inclusive and welcoming ambience.
