browsing

As an ebook enthu­si­ast, I still do occa­sion­ally buy print. No com­ments from the peanut gallery. One of the main rea­sons why I love vis­it­ing Mur­der by the Book is because their most fab­u­lous staff is always ready and will­ing to answer my ques­tions and pro­vide me with rec­om­men­da­tions when needed. Espe­cially when I’m just brows­ing and have no clue what I want to read.

That ser­vice isn’t dupli­cated if I were to go to a brick and mor­tar book­store like B&N. It’s a chain where imper­sonal rela­tion­ships with the cus­tomer is expected. Any­way, I wouldn’t expect that level of ser­vice as men­tioned pre­vi­ously from a chain but really, since they have less foot traf­fic in their stores maybe they need to focus more on hand­selling books to their customers.

I asked two peo­ple about the idea of “hand­selling” books in chain book­stores and one of them wasn’t all that keen on the idea and didn’t want to be both­ered while brows­ing in book­stores. Me on the other hand, I think I am more recep­tive to rec­om­men­da­tions after I’ve been brows­ing for about 20 or 30 minutes.

It is that “hand­selling” that got me to read Nora Roberts J.D. Robb books. The book­seller just grabbed Naked In Death off the shelf (with the the orig­i­nal cover) and told me that she’d never enjoyed futur­is­tics before and that “this book was really good.” I bought it and even­tu­ally became a fan of the series.

Am I the only one who is recep­tive to this kind of hand­selling? With book­stores prof­its down, why don’t they try a more tra­di­tional approach to sell­ing books like, yes, hand­selling books to their customers!

I don’t know about you but some­times when I’m in a book­store, I have no idea of what I want and am recep­tive to try­ing new authors. Sure, we’re in a reces­sion and peo­ple are not so quick to part with their dis­cre­tionary funds but I don’t see where hand­selling oppor­tu­ni­ties can hurt.

Any­way, this is not a new idea re “hand­selling.” And again, I do real­ize that some peo­ple don’t want to be both­ered by sales peo­ple or have them hov­er­ing around them while they are brows­ing. I do think chain book­stores can be a bit more per­son­able and con­sci­en­tious of their cus­tomers who are just brows­ing and look­ing for some­thing good to read and can’t find it (and that would be me).

Photo Credit by Stephen Cum­mings