heidi go seek

About the Store

The Concept Store is different in a couple of ways from a typical Borders store:

At the Borders concept store, new themed book islands are built around lifestyle genres, including travel, cooking and health. The digital centers, meantime, are geared to welcome people of all levels of tech know-how. Staffers will guide customers through the process of burning music to CDs, downloading songs to most digital music players (except iPods, which, for now, work only with Apple software) or books to a Sony digital reader. They'll even print the cover art and fold it into a CD cover for you.

The music stations were intriguing but I think I was most curious about the lifestyle centers.  This sort of integration of print and digital content seemed to be a good concept fit for libraries, I wanted to see first hand how it was presented at the new store.  And yes, I was also curious about the music downloading stations.  A short conversation on Twitter this morning made mention of DRM free music at the store, I needed to know for sure if it was indeed true.

DRM Free Music?

Well, yes and no.  Actually the fact that I walked out of the store with no digital content might be an indication that I wasn't too impressed with the digital services.  You can get DRM free music at the store if you burn your content to CD, but if you had hoped to download music straight to your mp3 player then you can count on those files being .wma files only.  I thought the service was a bit pricey too, 7 songs for $9.99 and 99-cents for each additional song.  I'm a Rhapsody user and don't have a lot of use for purchasing music, but I still do on occasion for albums I really want.  I did some comparison of price before I left with Linkin Park's Minutes to Midnight CD, which is one I've been considering purchasing recently.  To download the CD on Rhapsody would cost me $8.99, to burn to CD at the store or download to a device would cost me $12.99.  For that money I'd rather just get the pretty shrink-wrapped version.  I can burn my own CD and create my own comparable cover art at home for several dollars cheaper if I really wanted to.  If getting DRM free music means I have to burn to CD first, then that isn't all that convenient for me either.  Actually I would rather just have the digital file because once I rip the CD that object is now just taking up space somewhere.

Another disappointment was their catalog.  Being a Rhapsody user, I'm used to a pretty amazing catalog, I get almost anything I want pretty much on demand.  Border's digital services didn't tap much into the long tail at all, which is a shame.  There was a smaller CD section compared to the other stores, but I would think that if you're going to offer online content alongside your physical content, you would want your catalogs to complement each other, especially considering there was no significant cost difference between downloaded content vs. a pre-packaged CD.  As a plus, Alex actually commented that he liked the smaller music area, he mentioned that he wasn't a fan of walking through half the store to browse the music collection.  And I should also mention that Alex bought a CD while we were there, but he opted for the pretty packaged sort and wasn't all that interested in downloading it from the kiosk.

Considering audio books?  Keep your money and get them from the library instead.  Borders uses Overdrive for their audio book content.  If I wanted to mess around with DRM protected audio book content I would prefer to do it for free at my library instead of paying for it.  It's the same service.

Lifestyle Centers

It wasn't a completely disappointing trip though, there was quite a lot I liked about the store, and the lifestyle centers were certainly one of them.  They are sort of information hubs all located in the center of the store.  The areas are themed, there's one for travel, cooking, and wellness.  Each area had their printed material displayed quite well and each had a sort of computer kiosk where you could tap into more information.  At the travel kiosk you could even book a flight or find a hotel, the computer will also recommend books to take on your trip (of course).  The cooking area allowed you to search recipes and it suggested them out of the printed books available at the store.  Near the digital content area there was a section on genealogy, users could print a family history book on demand, although I didn't play around with the family history searching, the section did feature popular computer software for the purpose.  There was another kiosk for printing pictures from digital images, which also included the option to create bound photo books here too.

Going back to Michael's post on TTW, "But, what about libraries?"  I see amazing potential for this kind of model, especially in a public library.  How many times have you helped your patrons book a trip online and suggested complementary travel guides in your catalog?  What if our patrons could tap into the content of our recipe books to search for that one recipe they are really looking for?  What about genealogy, doesn't it make more sense for a library to have an information kiosk devoted to genealogy instead of a bookstore?  Any library that offers access to Ancestry knows that our patrons have to come to the library to use it anyway, shouldn't we be making that experience more user friendly for them?

Other Goodness

There were a few other things about the store I enjoyed.  One of them was the signage, actually Alex noticed it first.  Major categories were dropped from the ceiling and not located completely on the sides of the stacks.  It's amazing how this simple thing makes a huge difference for findability.  I actually can't remember if the other stores do this, but it makes sense to me to be able to see where each section is from scanning the store in one spot.

I liked the way everything flowed in the store too, there was definitely a difference here than there was in other Borders stores I've been in.  Everything seemed to fan out from the center rather than work its way from front to back.  I'm sure a lot of research on what people are looking for when they enter the store, where they go and where they're likely to go next was done in order to come to this layout.  I think it works, it's very open and I didn't feel overwhelmed or lost while I was there.

I did go in to the store expecting to purchase the book Everything is Miscellaneous, this one has been on my buy list for awhile, and like the other stores they didn't have it.  I actually don't know why I never noticed this before, but Borders electronic catalog directed me to the section where the book would be for similar items (and of course said that they can order it for me if I wanted it).  As a heavy library user myself, this may seem like an obvious thing, but then I realized that Dewey is such a mystery to so many patrons that we often overlook that fact that our patrons don't understand that our libraries are set up similarly.  Why don't our catalogs do more to direct patrons to the stacks instead of allowing them to leave empty handed?  Patrons don't understand Dewey but I never thought they had to in order to use the library.  We could do more to improve our signage and our labeling in our catalogs.

Many of us library people realize that the serendipity factor of libraries can be improved, maybe because we rely too much on Dewey.  Of course the motivation for a bookstore to place products of interest close together is increased sales.  It worked for me today.  Since two books that I did want to purchase weren't on the shelf I checked out their selection of Second Life books, I ended up with a new one that I haven't read yet, Designing Your Second Life, then a few books off I noticed the Lifehacker book, Lifehacker: 88 Tech Tricks to Turbocharge Your Day.  Of course in a library these two books would not have been located close to one another based on a Dewey Classification.  Second Life books are classified under games (which I have always thought a considerably weak decision), usually in the 700s while the Lifehacker book is in the 000s under computers.  I would've never had that serendipitous moment while browsing the stacks at my local library.

Other than the digital content services, I actually really enjoyed the new store.  I also think that libraries should be paying attention to what Borders and other stores are doing.  In a sense, they are our competition.  You would think that a library has the advantage over the bookstore because everything is free, but our patrons are looking for more than just free stuff.  They're looking for quality services and interactive experiences.  Shopping at a bookstore is easy because easy equals more profits for the store.  Using libraries are still hard and our patrons don't have time for hard, they are willing to spend money for easy than to get hard for free.