The Industry’s Future

Retail and Marketing: The Focus on Tagging and Presentation
According to Madans, a major factor in future book sales will be XML tagging, which will increase the chances for someone to stumble upon a book they are interested in while searching for something else. “You want people to find your book while they are looking for things [online],” he says. “By putting it in contextual tags, you are making it discoverable when people need it.” An example would be a Google search on 19th-century whaling, which ought to bring up “Moby Dick,” or the search for a work of fiction leading to the discovery of related nonfiction books. Any search on any subject can lead to book sales—this, Madans says, is the promise of intelligent tagging, and the means by which a bookstore-browsing sensibility can be brought to the online experience. It’s already starting to happen with books scanned into Google Book Search.

The development requires significant changes in the author-editor relationship, Madans says, as editors will be expected early in the process to identify how a work should be marketed across multiple formats. Editors also must develop the ability to judge which of a range of presentations are truly best for a given work.

“Not every piece of content is going to be right for what you can do,” he says. “There may be some books where it makes sense to chunk it up, others not. It’s the editor working with the author right at the beginning to think about how you want to do this—starting with XML and tagging the content properly based on what you think you are going to want to do with it, and what the market is.”

Not surprisingly, book retailers also aim to encourage spontaneous book discovery during in-store browsing experiences, as well as to emphasize what they can provide that the Internet cannot. One of the important lessons of the Borders “concept stores” (launched in early 2008) is the need to emphasize presentation, according to Borders Executive Vice President of Marketing Rob Gruen. “How we present has been a key takeaway from that,” he says. Innovations include “plexi-fixtures,” which allow the store to display books stacked face out, as well as multimedia layouts targeted to specific interest areas, such as travel and cooking. The designs have helped to encourage impulse and cross-media buying, while enriching the customer experience, Gruen says.

Equally important is customer service, including help at digital media kiosks that offer services such as custom publishing (through a partnership with LuLu), music downloading and photo-album creation. Cafés and numerous in-store events are designed to transform stores into local destination attractions.

“Customers spend an average of one hour in our stores,” Gruen says. “I’ve worked for other retailers where they spend an hour because they couldn’t find anything or had to wait in line. The hour that they spend in our stores is because they love to browse.”

The chain’s new Web site, Borders.com, attempts to offer a richer user experience than offered by former partner Amazon, with interactive features, such as the “Magic Shelf,” which seek to replicate an in-store customer experience.

The Borders concept stores—which Gruen stresses are meant to be a laboratory for ideas that can be applied at all locations—are just one example of the reinvention necessary in a tough retail market.

“My biggest worry is what will happen to retail,” Schroeder says, “because I think there is a tremendous need for bookstores. They are community centers in so many places, and, unfortunately, they are having a tough go.”