Physical bookstores, can they still hold up?

Ventress also

At a time when knowledge is fragmented and online shopping is developed, opening a physical bookstore seems to be an anti-commercial law. At the moment when machine algorithms and business laws dominate, the physical bookstore is a existence that follows the needs of human nature.

In 2022, the closure of independent bookstores is no longer news.

Jagged Bookstore is an independent bookstore located in Beijing, specializing in humanities and social sciences. It opened in November 2018, a very risky time: independent bookstores everywhere are already facing a widespread existential crisis, and a year later, with the COVID-19 pandemic coming, brick-and-mortar bookstores are making things worse again.

In 2022, Jagged Bookstore Weibo marked "closed store". /Weibo @ Jagged Bookstore

The bookstore owner, August, is a 34-year-old woman with glasses, short hair and little talk — except for books-related matters.

Literary and artistic youth seem to have a romantic imagination of opening a bookstore, and August does not deny this. But the reality must be crueler than imagined, in the process of opening the store, she experienced moments of despair, but also realized some of the original ideas, met some friends who love to read.

On the last day of 2021, August decided to close the bookstore. Financial unsustainability is just one of the reasons, and she has other reasons for the decision to close the store.

Here's a read from August.

A dreamy feeling

Opening a bookstore has always been my dream, but I used to think it was difficult, so I always thought about opening it when I retired.

In 2018, I was still working as a book editor at a publishing house, and at that time, my career was in a bottleneck period, and I felt that I was repeating some of the tasks that I had already mastered, but the more difficult tasks were not competent. During that time, I was not in a very good state, and the pressure was also very high, and then I thought, it is better to simply resign and go to the bookstore that I have always wanted to do.

People around me are very opposed, and many friends have heard about it and called me specifically to persuade me that the environment is very bad now. Parents are even more unsupportive, they are particularly traditional parents, think that a girl, should graduate to find a stable job, get married and have children, they think I am "too much to read, become a nerd."

I have always been very concerned about bookstores, around 2011, I worked as a clerk in Douban Bookstore for a while, in fact, the survival of independent bookstores at that time was already very bad, and even more famous bookstores such as "photosynthesis" inevitably closed. After resigning, I went to Shanghai to do bookstore research for a while and also participated in some industry gatherings.

The more you understand, the more you find that this matter is indeed very risky. I also understood at the time that opening a store was very likely to fail, and 9 out of 10 people I met were dissuaded from quitting. But I still insisted on doing it, and always felt that when I was alive, I should do what I liked to do.

Only one friend was particularly firm in supporting me, she did the IT industry, and she was not usually a person who liked to read. But she simply wanted to support me and put together more than 200,000 yuan of start-up funds with me.

I set the address at Wudaokou, hoping to form an atmosphere with other bookstores nearby, and then find some former colleagues to inquire about the source of goods, to select books to buy, to do licenses, taxes, social security... The whole process is my own running. Later, the store opened, and almost all the work was done by me alone, because there was no extra money to hire people.

The name of the bookstore is "Jagged", which comes from Russell's saying that "jagged polymorphism is the source of happiness".

On the first day of business, I sat in the shop and had a very dreamy feeling. Although I didn't even have the books in place at that time, I felt that the bookstore had finally done it, and the dream thing had finally come true.

On that day, dozens of people came to the store. In my original vision, the target audience of the bookstore was those who already had the habit of reading, they liked paper books, they regarded books as a kind of spiritual food, and I wanted to make a bookstore for readers to help them choose some valuable books.

Beijing Jagged Bookstore. The sign on the wall reads: I read a paper book and buy a book from a bookstore. /Photo: Jagged Bookstore Weibo

But the reality is that there are very few people, very few people of the kind I imagine, and even fewer of them can come to my bookstore. In addition to some customers who were recommended to come over, most of the people who came to the store were passing by, when my store was in a more comprehensive building, next to the barber shop, training class, many parents of students are waiting to pick up their children, bored to come in and shop. Most people just look at it and don't buy books.

In the beginning, the daily turnover was only a few tens of dollars, and when it was more than a few hundred dollars. At that time, the store rent was 10,000 yuan per month, plus other costs, and it was almost 20,000 yuan to invest in every month, so it was impossible to earn back at all. In the first month of opening the store, I lost more than 10,000 yuan.

But I was still full of hope, because not long after opening, I thought that this was just a "strategic loss", which had to be like this in the early stage, and I had heard some bookstore owners I knew say before, they all said "one year investment, two years loss, three years flat" or something. After three years, it is possible to start profitably little by little.

In May and June 2019, the bookstore briefly reached a profit of several thousand yuan, but most of the time it still could not make ends meet. I've also tried a lot of things: collaborating, planning events, updating my public account, and even getting some drinks in the store. At that time, I thought that there was a training class next to me, and some parents who picked up their children might want to come in and have something to drink. But the drinks only lasted a short time, on the one hand I was not very professional at making coffee, and on the other hand, it would interrupt me to do other things. For example, sometimes I am writing a public account, I am choosing a book or checking out, and suddenly someone says that he orders a drink, and then I have to run to get this for him, and the store is on my own, and I feel very busy. Later, it was found that it did not help sales much, so it was canceled.

There were fewer and fewer people, and the bookstore diary I wrote during that time was recorded: many times it could be a day or two in a row, and there was no one.

For "The Encounter Between Man and Book"

When I was a child, my parents didn't buy me much books. I started reading books, probably because when I was in elementary school, I would read every issue of the magazine "Learning and Play" ordered by the school; sometimes when I went to relatives' houses, they would also give me books that their children did not read; and later, they would save their own pocket money and go to the bookstore to rent or buy.

But after reading books really widely, I read Wang Xiaobo's complete works in the library, because he introduced a lot of books, and I later followed the people he introduced, and looked at Calvino, George Orwell, etc., little by little, and accumulated my own reading system little by little.

When I opened the bookstore, I was very concerned about selecting books, mainly choosing the categories of literature, history and philosophy, and the standard was quite personal- that is, I thought it was good or not, and whether it was worth reading. I even read the version of the book, the translator, the paper, the design and so on. In fact, many shopkeepers now choose directly through the bibliography, but I usually go to the scene to see it, unless I am familiar with the appearance of the book.

At first, I made a plan for myself to buy new books every week and then update the list of new books on the official account, but then I didn't keep it up, because I had already filled the store, and I had stuffed books behind the shelves, under the table, and even the aisles. The purchase volume of the same book is getting smaller and smaller, at first there will be 5 or 10 books, but until now it has not been sold out, and then it is two or three books, and sometimes I think that the book with high price and difficult to sell is only 1 book.

I did meet some readers who matched my initial imagination. For example, in the later stage, I set up a "feminist bookshelf" in the bookstore, which will attract some girls who pay attention to this aspect, and everyone will exchange reading experiences together.

Before I paid more attention to the Nobel Prize, I read a book called "Complexity", talked about the "complex system" of last year's Nobel Prize in Physics, and wrote a book review. A man passed by the bookstore and came in to ask if there was a book on "complex systems," and I quickly recommended it to her.

But the thought of closing the store still comes intermittently. For example, some people pick up a book and start bargaining, saying that if your price is the same as Dangdang and JD.com, I will buy it here. There are also some readers, he came in and said a lot of emotional words, as if he cared about the bookstore, and the last book was not bought... A lot of these moments, I will think, why should I open a bookstore? I just wanted to turn it off.

But that's the case now, and you can't complain that readers don't buy books in physical bookstores, because books are originally a standardized product, and the same book, you may be half price online, cheaper than the offline wholesale price, but in the physical store you may have to spend twice the price, which seems really unreasonable.

The decision to close the store is definitely related to the fact that the business cannot continue, but the situation of not being able to make ends meet is not a day or two. There are two other things that made me decide to close.

The expensive book prices in offline bookstores discourage many readers. /Figure pexels

One thing is that in the second half of last year, I was already in a very desperate stage, often without turnover for several days, and I also had to face the pressure of dunning from all sides. One afternoon, there was still no book sold that day, I was about to close the door, a courier came to deliver my purchase of books, after delivery he said he wanted to buy books, asked me if there was any Korean War aspect, I said no. I recommended him several war-related books, and he finally slowly selected one of his own, "The Case of The Great Tang Dynasty.".

I felt particularly moved and directly burst into tears. Because I had always wanted to find a group of readers who were compatible with me, the target audience in my mind did not include this courier, and he became the only reader in the bookstore that day. So at that time, I suddenly felt that I was not too prejudiced and arrogant.

Another thing was that a friend who had never read a book suddenly came to me because she was chasing a star named "Amway" and asked if I had that book. Not long after that book came out, I was also reading Chen Nianxi's "Dust".

I used to think that it was hard for you to give a book to someone who didn't read "Amway". I read books in front of her for ten years and never recommended them successfully, and as a result, she was "Amway" by a video and couldn't wait to see it. After asking about the price of the bookstore, she said she would go online and then sent me screenshots of other online orders in their group and comments from readers who had read the book.

These two things made me think that everyone has the right to want to read books, but he may not have found that channel, or he may not have found the right book for him. A good book arrives at them in a way they have within reach and likes, and it attracts them more than shouting at them every day, "You have to read, it's beautiful to read, and it's very rewarding."

I open a bookstore not to let others know that reading is better than not reading, nor to show how many books I have read and how many things I understand, but to pass good books to you through me, for the sake of "the encounter between people and books."

The physical bookstore is a manifestation of the personality of every store owner

I'm actually rethinking the idea of opening a bookstore. In the beginning, I wanted to succeed in both senses, one commercially and the other as I envisioned it myself, as I would have done, a platform and space for people to read some good books, but the two never found a balance.

After the epidemic began, many people asked me if I could transfer to online, such as doing a micro-store, or communicating and recommending books on WeChat, and I sent them after the transfer. At that time, it suddenly felt as if online or physical is not so important, just like books are just a medium between knowledge and you, it can be an e-book, it can be a physical book, and the bookstore is just a medium between the book and the reader, it can be online or it can be an entity.

I moved the bookstore from Wudaokou to Huilongguan, and in order to reduce the cost of rent, I also developed some online business. Later, I even thought that in fact, it does not matter whether there is an online bookstore, because many people leave me messages on the public account, saying "After reading your recommendation, I went to read this book." He probably didn't buy it from me, but found a cheaper, more convenient way to buy it. But I don't think it matters, and what I want to do in the end is to really pass on some of the values, some knowledge, or whatever in the book to the reader.

So lately I've been doing co-reading, and I think it's going to be as I thought it would be, and I'm passing on some of my ideas about books, and other people may have some interest in a book because of my recommendations and dissemination, and then they'll read it too.

But some time ago, I was chatting with an editor of the new classic, and I said at the time that in fact, the physical bookstore follows a kind of human logic.

If you buy a book online, if it is a publishing house's own store, it is selling its own books; if you are in JD.com, Dangdang, it may be what books you have bought before, it will recommend you similar books, or a list, in short, some machine algorithms to determine things.

But the difference between private physical bookstores is that it is the display of the personality of each store owner, what books he chooses, how to place these books, and the space of that bookstore is the way he wants to present the spiritual world. So when you go to each different brick-and-mortar bookstore, you feel completely different. This is the biggest significance of physical bookstores.

When the store was about to close, a lot of people sent me their own cards and letters, and there were many large paragraphs of messages, which made me feel that from the goal I first envisioned, the bookstore was still successful, and I let many people recognize some very good books through the bookstore, opening up a world they didn't know before.

After closing the store, there are still more than 3,000 books left in the store, and I have now pulled them home. Even on the last day of the bookstore's operation, many people heard that the store was going to close and thought that there would be a discount, but I still insisted on selling at the original price. Because I really feel that every book is very valuable, and I have collected it from various sources.

November 21, 2021, Guangzhou. People read in a bookstore. / Figure Gao Fei

Although I chose to close the store in the end, I did not regret the decision to open a bookstore. If there are friends around who want to open a bookstore, I should still support it. Years ago, I applied for some companies, and recently there have been some replies. I intend to continue to work as an editor or as a publisher.

I think that these jobs are essentially the same as opening bookstores, doing the same thing as "recommending good books to everyone".