Fewer items, higher circulation? Can we learn from Borders?

Under the leadership of Customer Service Manager Eve Wittenmyer and Assistant Manager Melissa Little PVLD has been working to more effectively "merchandise" our collection by displaying more books face-out and displaying more books on the ends of the shelves.  We started with the new book area, and are doing our best to apply these techniques elsewhere in the library in the face of space and shelving design limitations.  Customers seem to love the face out display, but we haven't had it in use long enough to get real data about whether it is resulting in increased circulation.

That's why I was interested to read this article from the Wall Street Journal about Borders Bookstores' experience with face out displays.  Sales went up 9% when books were displayed with their covers, not spines, facing out!

As we are experiencing, face-out display means more shelf space consumed per book, and Borders is anticipating that it will need to reduce the number of titles carried in its stores by up to 10% to accomodate the new approach.

This overturns a longstanding orthodoxy in the bookstore business that faced with competition from Amazon.com and its ilk the bricks and mortar stores need to carry more and deeper inventories.

However, as John Deighton of the Journal of Consumer Research notes "We can be overwhelmed or thrust into indecisiveness by the presence of a large number of temptations," Mr. Deighton adds. "People don't want choice, they want what they want. And what they want is sometimes constructed for them in the store by the attractiveness of what's on offer."

Interestingly, "Borders says customers visiting its prototype store said their impression was that more books were available." [emphasis mine]

Borders also intends to couple its merchandising strategy with a new online service that will give customers fairly ready access to titles that are not in store inventory.

Commenting on the Borders strategy Seth Godin  makes the point that Borders is adopting the second of two potentially valid strategies:

1.  "Order taking" where you try to stock everything so that the answer to "Do you have....?" is YES, or

2.  Marketing and selling so that instead of trying to answer as many permutations of the "Do you have...?" question as possible you instead do the asking and the question is "Do you want...?" (and as Mr. Deighton notes in the quote above, sometimes wants are created by what people see when they walk through the door.)

As Seth notes, "Bookstores that follow this strategy need to be pickier about what they carry, organized differently (alphabetical order again!) and staffed differently as well. Don't put all the cookbooks in a little corner. Instead, put books for me (whether they are cookbooks or computer books) together and make me delighted I found you."

If the Borders strategy works there are some interesting implications for libraries -

• Maybe we can get higher circulation, and better customer satisfaction, with fewer items displayed more creatively and attractively....surely a good thing in the face of perennial budget pressures.
• We may need different types of shelving and furniture - more display cubes, tilted shelves, etc.  Bookstores make good use of temporary displays, cardboard fold-outs, etc.  Can we?
• Our Dewey Decimal and alphabetical shelving schemes are counter to the idea of,as Seth Godin so eloquently puts it, putting books for me together -

  "Do you want this cool new cookbook about Spain? It's right next to that amazing new novel about food in Spain..."
  
  Dewey may not just be too limiting for the digital world, it may be to limiting for the physical world as well.

Interesting stuff...and an indication that Eve and Melissa are leading us in a worthwhile direction.

Comments

[Linda]

These are great ideas, but...you cannot convince me that Dewey doesn't work. Even in bookstores, I've never seen cookbooks shelved with novels, unless on a display. And libraries can make displays too - that has nothing to do with Dewey.

Other than that, I agree with you. I'm a supporter of many displays and face-out books. Book covers always sell me on books and I know I'm not alone!

[Jeff]

Face out bookshelving works. It increases circulation. We have a new books display that we changed to face-out and the circulation jumped 15% from the same time last year. It was funny because the previous shelving had 200 book capacity each for fiction and non-fiction. I reduced that by more than half, but the books don't stay on there long enough to be a problem.

Also, libraries DO put cookbooks and computers together for displays. It just depends on the theme. :)

[MelissaW]

Face out definitely makes it easier to browse for new titles by an author of interest and it can help a new author be "seen." After all, book jackets are meant to grab our interest. On the other hand, I did feel like the Pen Center library has fewer new books the last few times I was in. I thought it was due to recent heavy use, but perhaps it is part of the change in display philosophies.

As a librarian, I can see how increased circulation is a "good thing." As a user, I am troubled by cutting how many titles are in the new book display, though - more books to look at means more opportunity to discover a new author. It's a tough balance, I suppose.

If we want to discuss the idiosyncratic nature of library organization, though, let's talk about format. Is shelving videos, CDs and books in different places really the best thing for our users (and why fiction paperbacks and hardbacks in different places...)?

[Katherine Gould]

Melissa - your observation that there are fewer new books at Peninsula Center is accurate, but its not due to a change in purchasing philosohpy. We're buying as many new books as ever (although we may need to start cutting back due to budget pressures). The scarcity of new books on the shelves is due in large part to the fact that we took a hiatus on ordering and receiving for several weeks as we went live with our new integrated library system. Now we have a backlog of items to get out onto the shelf! In addition, with the change to face-out shelving the new books do seem to be circulating more so there is less available on the shelf. You should see "fuller" shelves" soon though!

[Marcia Brandt]

Read-aloud guru Jim Trelease has been advocating the cover-display of books for a long time in the education world. I heard his "rain gutter" idea over ten years ago and adapted it in our K-3 library. http://www.trelease-on-reading.com/rah-ch7-pg3.html#raingutters.

Before we give up on Dewey, however, I would like to state that I can never find anything in Barnes and Noble. I always have to ask. Do we REALLY have the staff for that in libraries? Great displays might attract me and send me home with an impulse find, but when I come to the library on a quest I want to be able to find what I'm looking for without help.