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I watched this happen over the last 20 years and its an important development. If you remember the 80s and 90s, you may remember lingering in bookstores becaus

I watched this happen over the last 20 years and its an important development. If you remember the 80s and 90s, you may remember lingering in bookstores because they were a focal point to daytime city life. Before online dating, you would meet women and men there, and that was the whole point. If you ask any man of a certain age from a city who the "bookstore girl," was, he will have a memory, if not a story for you. It was a big part of city culture. What Reismann (and her predecessor, Chapters) did initially was bring suburban big box stores into the city and wiped out a lot of the street life and culture, and with it, small publishers. In effect this polarized the market for fiction, where literary fiction today has been reduced to "content," and a lot of unctuous posturing funded by grant money. However, after hollowing the market out, Reismann branched out with Indigo and kind of re-planted, where her stores are once again places for people to linger. They are placed near movie theatres, so it was something to do while you waited. The formula that Indigo is getting right is, like us in software, it's about generating retail traffic. You need a funnel to drive conversions. To do that, you need to attract women, who draw men, and the frisson that keeps them coming back is what turns the engine over. Let's face it, Indigo isn't a Cabela's with books because that's not how you get that retail traffic engine to turn over. It's more like Anthropologie meets a craft shop. I don't like shopping at Indigo, but that's not the point. As a man I go there because I can get a new release or something relatively mainstream faster than amazon can deliver it, and crucially, I can get exposure to that element of social randomness and optionality that is completely absent and destroyed in cities now that everyone carries a slot machine in their pocket. The most interesting future from my view will be the one that gets people actually talking and connecting again the way we used to in bookstores and cafes.

barry-cotter 8y ago
> What Reismann (and her predecessor, Chapters) did initially was bring suburban big box stores into the city and wiped out a lot of the street life and culture, and with it, small publishers. In effect this polarized the market for fiction, where literary fiction today has been reduced to "content," and a lot of unctuous posturing funded by grant money. The MFA was born in 1940. Form before content is not a product of Borders. The same kinds of people read pretentious literature worldwide and the same kinds of people write it. It’s like avant-garde theatre, it’s the same everywhere. Literary fiction is no more because of Borders than fantasy or detective fiction is. People aren’t completely useless at realising that there are clusters in the kinds of books people like to read, even without computers. Those clusters are genres and literary fiction is one of them.
- motohagiography 8y ago
  The big box model killed small bookstores, then demanded that to access their new market, publishers print in sufficient volumes to stock all their huge stores, and then when they didn't sell all of the copies, the stores returned the unsold books to the publishers and that collapsed them. The big box store killed the more sparse and diverse shops that sustained the market for niches like Nobel, Booker, and other prize winners. Litfic is mainly character driven over of plot driven, so to say it's all pretentious would be a bit much. The result was that Indigo came to resemble a kind of landfill of discarded ideas, where the good stuff got lost in the effort to find it.

barry-cotter 8y ago

> What Reismann (and her predecessor, Chapters) did initially was bring suburban big box stores into the city and wiped out a lot of the street life and culture, and with it, small publishers. In effect this polarized the market for fiction, where literary fiction today has been reduced to "content," and a lot of unctuous posturing funded by grant money. The MFA was born in 1940. Form before content is not a product of Borders. The same kinds of people read pretentious literature worldwide and the same kinds of people write it. It’s like avant-garde theatre, it’s the same everywhere. Literary fiction is no more because of Borders than fantasy or detective fiction is. People aren’t completely useless at realising that there are clusters in the kinds of books people like to read, even without computers. Those clusters are genres and literary fiction is one of them.

motohagiography 8y ago
The big box model killed small bookstores, then demanded that to access their new market, publishers print in sufficient volumes to stock all their huge stores, and then when they didn't sell all of the copies, the stores returned the unsold books to the publishers and that collapsed them. The big box store killed the more sparse and diverse shops that sustained the market for niches like Nobel, Booker, and other prize winners. Litfic is mainly character driven over of plot driven, so to say it's all pretentious would be a bit much. The result was that Indigo came to resemble a kind of landfill of discarded ideas, where the good stuff got lost in the effort to find it.