rujmah’s Dis-Collected Thoughts

Now, look - a good recruiter is worth their weight in gold; the best recruiters are worth 10 to 100 times that. I happen to deal with two of the best recruiters in the world ever and think they are wonderful. 

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After doing a bit of research into project management books I wanted to take a look at Scott Berkun's Making Things Happen. Like, you know, in the flesh. Hard copy. So I decided to take a look at three local bookstores online to see if they had a copy in stock.

I've not done this before and had no idea of the functionality available. I was pretty sure that you could browse for books, but I wasn't sure about the practicality of checking stock in store.

So here for your reading pleasure is my experience of checking if a book is in stock via the internet.

The three bookstores I tried were Borders, Blackwells and Waterstones (do all bookshops have to have an 's' at the end?) situated in Oxford, UK. All three websites had the book on their list. Only two seemed to give any indication as to which of their stores might have it.

By far my favorite was Blackwells (below). The feature I liked best was the Google Books version of the title was available - effectively allowing me to browse the title as I would have done if in store. There was an option to reserve in-store, but only seemed to show one location (Charing Cross Rd) with no apparent way of requesting a search or confirmation from any other store that the book was in stock. Shame, since, on all other points this was my favourite online experience of the three.

Borders was a little more disappointing since it is usually my bookstore of choice in the flesh.

There seemed to be no indication of how to check if a book was in stock in a store and the details for the title were a little sparse (I ended up calling the store). There did seem to be some useful features such as tags and suggestions of other titles. But, it failed to show me anything other than the front cover and a description of the books. Amazon provides this experience well enough and the books are cheaper.

Waterstones had a link next to the book title that searched on availability in stores. At first glance this seemed good as could see the Oxford store on the list. But the stock level indicator was a little confusing: OK, stock is low. But it's ambiguous. How recent are those figures? Will it be in stock when I get there. Also, I noticed some small print (why was it small?) that told me that the book might be a different price in-store. Why and why wasn't this information available to the online shopper.

To be fair these questions would have been answered pretty quickly with a call to the store. But I just raising the online argument. These are online services - the information should be online.

Conclusion

Only Waterstones and Blackwells seemed to have any correlation between their online catalogues and their in-store stock, but both were fuzzy on the details.

As well as the functional and user friendly layout, the Blackwells site seemed to emulate the bookstore experience a little more keenly than the rest. On the whole, the function of the site was the best designed.

There were many useful features on the sites, such as loyalty points, second-hand books and suggestions.

However, the old theatre adage seems to apply here: What counts is bums on seats. For a bookstore to put up an internet site surely the point its to attract books sales to your sites thus justifying and enhancing their existence.  Whilst it is good to give an online catalogue of your wares the ultimate deliverable of any business website must be to drive custom to the core business. The core business of bookstore is to get books bought in the store (there's a clue in the name). Otherwise they are merely trying to emulate what Amazon does better: Selling books online. Sure, complement the business - it would be nuts for these sites not to sell books online! - but don't forget what you are trying to ultimately do.

So, what did I do?
Well, I haven't decided. There is one important point here: I would like to keep bookstores in business so I like to buy my books in store whenever I can. The winner was going to get my business. But, the winner, Blackwells, doesn't have the book in stock in Oxford (according to their site). However, I was able to establish from going to their website that I wanted to buy the book. Sooooo... we'll see. Maybe I'll order it in a walk into the store especially. I'll let you know.

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