Bookstores Evolution

Bookstores have always been providing services.

Traditionally a bookseller:

_ selects titles for its clients;
_ counsel its clients on new books, pointing them out and making reviews;
_ tracks and gets books that are difficult to find;
_ be a bridge between authors, readers, distributors and editors;
_ ...

Listing those services, and thinking about bookstores as they were in the XX century, we may think that they were a sort of culture authority. The relationship between booksellers and clients was vertical, the bookseller was a reference point.

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There are then case studies referring to bookstores providing extraordinary services but that is about individual booksellers rather than about tradition:

_ being a cultural centre;
_ being an editor;
_ hosting events;
_ organizing courses and meetings;
_...

Listing those services, and considering the pioneers of new kinds of bookstores, we may say that bookstores gradually became culture promoters. The bookseller were still reference point, but the distance between bookseller and clients grew shorter: where clients used to go to booksellers, now booksellers started to go towards clients too.

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There are trends describing that some services are worth to be integrated in a bookstore business model, reason why they are becoming more and more common:

_ organizing courses, workshops, concerts, shows...;
_ hosting art exhibitions;
_ hosting people for a cup of coffee or a relaxing break;
_ ...

Again we may try to describe bookstores as they seem to be nowadays: cultural and social hosts. Today the bookseller is seldomly an authoritative reference point: the relationship between clients and booksellers is now horizontal. Clients expect booksellers to offer them a reason why to go to them: promotion sometimes looks like a cultural crusade.

It is interesting to notice the success of those bookstores welcoming culture as a horizontal social exchange, and where "books" is a product, hosting and exchange are services.