The Seeker Academy Bookblog

To Compete With Amazon.com,

Imitate And Improve On Its Reviewing Platform

I’m an indie publisher, a PMA member, and author of The Seeker Academy, a just-published literary novel that explores the holistic/ mind-body-spirit movement. I’ve also been an Internet media specialist for two decades: consulting in 2006 to Yahoo, and in 2007 to the nonprofit Americans For Libraries Council (ALC). My ALC work concerns how public libraries can best use the Internet, viewed as an emerging publishing medium. As an advocate for local empowerment, I find it natural to switch my concern from the 9,000 public library systems to the 1,800 independent bookstores.

I sense that many indie booksellers do not look closely at the Internet. One told me recently to take the Amazon reviews I’d brought to show him off his counter. He seemed to think he fully knew his business.

In fact, though, this bookseller’s business is being shaken, and uncertainties abound. For one thing—the subject of this letter—the reviewing infrastructure that sits upstream from retail on the book business value chain is coming apart. Two Internet-driven shocks are causing this to happen:

The print periodical business model is being upended. Much of the ad revenue it depends on is moving to the Internet—a more effective medium for most niche market advertising… for reaching fly-fishing enthusiasts, etc. Fewer print ads means fewer newspaper and magazine pages, thus fewer reviews. The book editor role is being reduced or consolidated.

The Internet’s emergence as a social space challenges the book editor’s cultural authority. A city with two daily papers and a weekly paper has at most three book editors and a few dozen freelance reviewers. Yet it also has many thousands of readers. With collective opinions about every topic, used to reading reviews and responding only rarely with letters to the book editor: these readers now can choose to also write reviews and to engage in more open-ended online conversations.

These shifts redefine the bookstore business. Customers, who until now consumed reviews, can have more of a say; they can join the taste makers. Amazon.com has begun to figure this out; ABA has not.

A book’s Amazon page displays editorial and customer reviews. If the customer reviewing platform can be abused—if an author’s cousins can write reviews—it is transparent enough to be reasonably credible. One can read and compare reviews, see reader comments on a review, and look at a reviewer’s other reviews. Once a number of reviews are posted, they give taken together a sense of what the book is like.

The ABA in its Web presences provides, on the other hand, a closed system, weak features, and a poor showing of its value. It has no customer reviewing platform. It only points to Booksense Picks, a tallying of the favorite books of member stores. Browsers see signed blurbs—not reviews—and lack a way to discuss a book or a blurb with other readers. ABA booksellers, rather than invite engagement, rest on what they must see as their positions of influence.

This attitude is shortsighted, as it sees neither Amazon’s game nor the chance ABA has to compete. The game is about online social networks, joining published works to conversations. These networks make print culture-exclusive bookstores (and libraries) relatively less valuable.

In fact, though, this network model points to an advantage ABA can have over vendors like Amazon, and to how ABA-member bookstores can extend their local reach. If the Amazon reviewing platform lets one gauge a book by browsing it, by comparing reviews and evaluating reviewers, and by tapping into reader discussions, it remains ungrounded: it offers no physical connection. It lacks the warm local presence and the communal air of, say, a Main Street Books.

Building An ABA Reviewing Platform

Booksense Picks samples at a miniscule rate the staff-written reviews displayed in most indie bookstores. Yet in the space-is-cheap frontier of online social networks, value resides in volume, not samples. Among 1800 ABA members, how many current and recent reviews have been written, on average, by staff—50 per store, or 90,000? And, was there a value to the staff reviews that carried beyond the local store, and offered prizes, how many might be written in the next year—again, 50 per store, or 90,000 more? And finally, could customers write reviews that would display across the network and be eligible for prizes, how many might they write in the next year—once more, 50 per store, or 90,000?

In this scenario, using what may be low estimates, we see gathered 270,000 reviews. Add the discussions that can augment reviews and you see the potential of an ABA-managed community-reviewing network. Then let it build over time. Readers would know that each review and discussion linked to a bookstore that, like our Main Street Books, is a local anchor. Each store would add its local accountability to the network. And each could use the network as a promotional tool: deepening its local ties by letting its staff do more than sell and by letting its customers be more than just consumers.

The ABA, by imitating the Amazon reviewing platform and by adding its based-in-the-local credibility, can build an online-and-physical social network more purposeful than those of its corporate competitors.