Portland's Indie Booksellers Foray Into E-Book Sales

St. Johns Booksellers displays QR codes for featured books, giving customers quick access to additional information and the ability to purchase e-books.

When it comes to e-books, the owners of small, independent book stores in Portland tend to have complicated feelings.

On one hand, e-books are fancy and fun.

On another hand, they might be pulling people away from neighborhood book stores.

On one hand, they encourage reading. On another, they discourage readers from paying full prices. And so it goes.

Portland booksellers are finding middle ground with the technological forces shaping their industry by selling e-books on their own websites, helping customers learn to use e-readers and, more than anything, responding deftly to all types of customer needs.

“Do This or Open a Blacksmith Shop”

St. Johns Booksellers and Broadway Books, along with Annie Bloom’s Books, have recently begun selling Google Books on their own websites using a framework from the Tarrytown, N.Y.-based American Booksellers Association (ABA).

“Basically, we decided we would either do this, or we would open up a blacksmith’s shop,” says Sally McPherson, a co-owner of Broadway Books in Sullivan's Gulch. “You kind of have to stay current with what your industry is doing.” 

After operating as a storefront for nearly 20 years, McPherson and co-owner Roberta Dyer expanded with an online book store and e-books in early July.

“It wasn’t as much a profit-motivated decision. It was a service motivated decision,” McPherson says. “We wanted our customers to be able to buy books at our store in whatever format they want them in.” 

Nena Rawdah, owner of St. Johns Booksellers, made a similar move in February. Her storefront had been open since 2005.

“It wasn't a hard call. If customers are asking for it, obviously we want to give it to them,” Rawdah says.

Getting Technical

While local giant Powell’s Books ventured into Google Books sales in December 2010 and was selling books online long before that, the time and technological know-how required for such systems can be taxing on smaller booksellers—that is, unless there’s support from a larger organization such as the ABA.

“For a small book store to be able to do all that stuff by themselves is almost impossible,” McPherson says. 

Using ABA’s system, McPherson and Rawdah can process credit card orders and upload ready-made book cover images, descriptions, reviews and bestseller lists to their websites. McPherson said she still spends time on website maintenance, but she’s publishing far more content than before.

Marketing Power

McPherson and Rawdah’s new book-selling websites are slick, but it turns out that their primary use is not for e-book sales.

St. Johns Booksellers has brought in about 100 orders online since February, with only 11 of those sales coming from e-books. Broadway Books’ two months of online activity is strong, but McPherson said the vast majority of sales are still for physical books. 

“The website has not affected sales significantly at all,” Rawdah says. “It is essentially a marketing expense—something without which we are not taken seriously nowadays.”

Even when readers aren’t buying directly from her shop, Rawdah finds that her online presence as an e-book seller allows her to build customer relationships.

“There are people who are eager for the e-readers [and] find them helpful, but want the personal and curatorial relationship they have with me as their neighborhood bookseller,” she says.

Pushing Against the Big Box

More than a lack of e-book sales, small bookstores’ finances are more affected by the recession, competition from mega-vendors, and a change in consumer attitudes about the value of written information.

“The biggest problem is still deep discounts at the big boxes and Amazon,” Rawdah says.

Joe Biel, founder and production manager of Microcosm Publishing and zine store in Buckman, takes issue with the fact that e-readers are so deeply connected to large publishing and distributing companies that don’t always cut fair deals for authors.

“[With] the book losing its physical form, it seems to simultaneously be devalued,” Biel says.

Meanwhile, in his research on the social and political issues surrounding e-books, Biel has found that bootlegging is already a common practice among e-book readers.

“The most surprising thing I found was how freely people talked about the fact that they would download illegally,” Biel says. “And that seemed to be an accepted cultural norm, the same way that people would download video games or computer programs or movies.” 

The reverse challenge, of course, is when large companies limit the devices on which an e-book can be read. Kindle e-books are only sold on Amazon.com and can only be read with the Kindle app.

“The thing I don’t like about Amazon and the Kindle is it feels very much like a bully to me,” McPherson says. “It’s like, ‘We play the game by my rules or I take my ball and go home. And it doesn’t matter if my rules are correct or not.’”

In a similar spirit, Biel’s staff held a Kindle trade-in campaign in January. The idea started as a joke, Biel said, but, during the campaign, two people exchanged their Kindles for their value in Microcosm books and zines. He continues to get inquiries about the effort, even seven months after the campaign’s end.

Making Friends?

Though they come from one of the largest companies in the world, Google Books can be read on just about any e-reader except the Kindle, and they can be sold through independent booksellers. That makes a world of difference to McPherson and Rawdah.

“It’s a great system. And it’s not bullying. It’s very ecumenical,” McPherson says. 

“As more people become interested, and choose to buy e-readers, I hope they will consider the platforms that allow them to choose where they buy their books and what kind of businesses they want to support,” Rawdah says.