Books as Experiences, not Things, by Marcus Greville

4:18 PM, 25 February 2016

by Marcus Greville

The landscape of retail has been changing significantly over the last seven or eight years, essentially since the global financial crisis of 2008. The art of consumption has been shifting away from material possession towards the experiential; meaning people are placing more value on what they have done and how they have done it rather than the shiny object that now lives third draw down in that old desk in the spare bedroom. Ironically it seems consumers are moving from the physical to the substantial.

In a piece in the The Atlantic, James Hamblin noted that “over the past decade, an abundance of psychology research has shown that experiences bring people more happiness than do possessions.” Apparently happiness is awesome. If experiences are the new shiny, then this begs the question: where do books and bookshops live on the spectrum of the experiential and the material?

Amazon goes physical
In November 2015, Amazon surprised the book world by opening a bricks and mortar store in Seattle, and there have been rumours, though unconfirmed, that they are planning on opening 3-400 more in the future. There has been lots of supposition around Amazon’s motivation for opening physical bookshops, one theory being that Amazon is going into direct competition with Barnes & Noble and Indie bookshops in an effort to further corner the market and crush their opposition, thus achieving complete book supremacy. A Machiavellian interpretation, one hard to put past Mr. Bezos, but it’s worth considering that a more fundamental reason might be a recognition that Amazon is trying to get ahead of the curve, recognizing that online purchasing of books, as a percentage of the market, has leveled out over the last couple of years, potentially leaving the majority of book sales out of their e-reach. 

Part of the reason for a leveling of online sales could well have to do with the way people want to experience their books – not just the reading of them (nodding at e-books vs. physical books) but the experience of purchasing them. This brings us back to the experiential versus the material change in consumer’s buying habits and where we in the book industry live in that exchange. 

Experiences as part of the self and how books fit in
According to a study by Thomas Gilovich and Travis J. Carter of Cornell University, people are buying experiences more than ever, choosing a holiday or a concert over material items “… because our experiences become our memories, they are more truly a part of the self than are possessions.” Simply put, those things that become a part of us bring us more pleasure in the long term. But the differentiation between the two isn’t a clear cut one, as Gilovich and Carter acknowledge, “… whereas some purchases are clearly material and others are clearly experiential, some purchases fall somewhere in between and depend, in large part, on how they are construed.” 

This is where books come into their strength. An important element of the satisfaction experiential purchases bring is realised in the social world; the ability to form an anecdote, have a conversation, to share an experience. All of which are deeply involved with subjective experience, something a book offers up almost as well as a trip to gumboot tossing in Taihape.

When people buy a phone or a car, there is a competitive component in the social sphere, a moment of comparative regret when someone else has a flashier example, or a cheaper deal, leading to a negative experience, thus a diminishing of their satisfaction, but as Gilovich and Cater note, “the pleasure one gets from an experience does not depend as much on comparing it to various alternatives…” while an experiential comparison can in fact elevate satisfaction. Books contain that subjective experiential magic, the ability to provoke rapturous agreement in the joy an idea brought, or a fascinating argument over divergent interpretations. 

Booksellers as experience brokers
Booksellers encounter this on a daily basis, between themselves and with customers, because they are not looking to sell a particular model or upgrade, they are seeking to match a person to an experience; and they want to talk about it, share in it; as much as a reader wants to with their friends or book club. Yet the true beauty of books is not just those pages and those words, but with the hunt, the search. Browsing shelves is an experience in of itself, one that some readers are quite jealous of; readers are often prepared to be directed to a section but have no interest in recommendations, they want to have found the perfect book, formed their own path, then they want to share it with others. 

Experience is a diverse desire that can be found in the hunt, in the reading, then the sharing; what bookshops and booksellers provide is not just the physical material for that, but the experiential context for it; we can be the process of experience. The Amazon Books bricks and mortar bookshop may be looking to extend into the experiential realm to profit from the tactile sphere, and it’s important to recognise that they have some truly impressive tools to do so, but if it is a move of (threatening) genius to bring their analytics and online resources to bear in the physical world, it is also important to understand that Amazon is now entering our world, and they’re doing it without our experience, without our belief. Booksellers have reserves of knowledge and a sense of identity that is hard to replicate – we have built an experiential world, an environment of anticipation and reflection that is truly impressive. 

Bookshops make people happy, if we do it right. But to say books are happiness is wrong, because while happiness is the goal it is not the point, happiness comes through meaning, and meaning is found through shared and individual experience. The pathway to meaning (in our case) is the bookshop, the shelves packed with the beautifully expressed ideas and experiences of others, waiting to be shared, waiting to be found. We, as book places, as third spaces, act as an amanuensis to that end; if we don’t, we’re failing.

Feature by Marcus Greville, bookseller