Replied to a post by Aram Zucker-ScharffAram Zucker-Scharff (Indieweb.Social)
I've seen a bunch of people sharing this and repeating the conclusion: that the success is because the CEO loves books t/f you need passionate leaders and... while I think that's true, I don't think that's the conclusion to draw here. The winning strategy wasn't love, it was delegation and local, on the ground, knowledge. This win comes from a leader who acknowledges people in the stores know their communities and can see and react faster to sales trends in store... https://tedgioia.substack.com/p/what-can-we-learn-from-barnes-and
@Chronotope Also heavily at play here in their decentralization of control is regression toward the mean (Galton, 1886) by spreading out buying decisions over a more diverse group which is more likely to reflect the buying population than one or two corporate buyers whose individual bad decisions can destroy a company.
Read Your Local Bookstore Wants You to Know That It’s Struggling (nytimes.com)
Independent booksellers are desperate for customers to return, and not just for an online reading.
Bookmarked on: Oct 15, 2020 at 20:19


Avid Bookshop in Athens, Ga., sends personalized URLs to customers with a list of handpicked recommendations. 

Perhaps if they went the step further to set up domains for their customers, they could ostensibly use them not only as book blogs, but also to replace their social media habits?

An IndieWeb friendly platform run by your local bookseller might be out of their wheelhouse, but it could potentially help solve their proximal problem while also solving one of society’s problems all while helping to build community.
Annotated on October 16, 2020 at 12:51PM

Take Vroman’s Bookstore, a 126-year-old institution in Pasadena, Calif. It has more than 200 employees, 20,000 square feet of space and the rent to go along with it. In a normal year, it hosts anywhere from 300 to 400 events, bringing in authors for readings and signings, along with customers who buy books and maybe a glass of wine from the bar. But none of that is happening this year. 

Coincidentally I bought two books at Vroman’s yesterday and it looked reasonably busy for mid-day. (Maybe because of this article?)

It’s a bit disingenuous to mention wine at their bar as their wine bar was only finally open for a minute before the pandemic shut everything down.
Annotated on October 16, 2020 at 12:54PM

Like many other stores, Vroman’s is hosting online events to promote new books, which can attract attendees from all over the country but generally bring in almost no money. 

Maybe they need a book paywall for admission into those events? Buy a book to get the zoom code to get into the event?

David Dylan Thomas essentially did this for his recent book launch.
Annotated on October 16, 2020 at 12:55PM

In the best of times, the margins at a bookstore are paper thin — traditionally, a successful shop hopes to make 2 percent in profits — but operating during a pandemic is even more expensive. 

Yes—they said paper thin…
Annotated on October 16, 2020 at 12:57PM

Simultaneously saving journalism and social media

As I’m reading the notes from the New Affordability session at IndieWebCamp Austin I can’t help but to think back on my old IndieWeb business hosting idea which I’ve been meaning to flesh out more fully.

What if local newspapers/magazines or other traditional local publishers ran/operated/maintained IndieWeb platforms or hubs (similar to micro.blog, Multi-site WordPress installs, or Mastodon instances) to not only publish, aggregate, curate, and disseminate their local area news, but also provided that social media service for their customers?

Reasonable mass hosting can be done for about $2/month which could be bundled in with regular subscription prices of newspapers. This would solve some of the problems that people face with social media presences on services like Facebook and Twitter while simultaneously solving the problem of newspapers and journalistic enterprises owning and managing their own distribution. It would also give a tighter coupling between journalistic enterprises and the communities they serve.

The decentralization of the process here could also serve to prevent the much larger attack surfaces that global systems like Twitter and Facebook represent from being disinformation targets for hostile governments or hate groups. Tighter community involvement could be a side benefit for local discovery, aggregation, and interaction.

Many journalistic groups are already building and/or maintaining their own websites, why not go a half-step further. Additionally many large newspaper conglomerates have recently been building their own custom CMS platforms not only for their own work, but also to sell to other smaller news organizations that may not have the time or technical expertise to manage them.

 A similar idea is that of local government doing this sort of building/hosting and Greg McVerry and I have discussed this being done by local libraries. While this is a laudable idea, I think that the alignment of benefits between customers and newspapers as well as the potential competition put into place could be a bigger beneficial benefit to all sides.

Featured photo by AbsolutVision on Unsplash

Read Paywall blockers: how publishers should prepare for this changing technology by Mary-Katharine Phillips (Twipe)
With more than a quarter of all readers globally using ad blockers, the news media industry has had to come up with new ways to overcome this, whether it be technically or through new strategies. But as the industry makes the move towards reader revenue strategies, we’re seeing more readers employ...
Bookmarked Zebras Unite (Zebras Unite)

“Zebras” has become a shorthand for aspiring entrepreneurs, investors, media, and adjacent communities as the expression and signal of a forward-thinking, long-game economy and business culture where ambitious companies build the goods and services we need for the society we want.

Zebras Unite is a community of entrepreneurs, investors and allies dedicated to building companies that balance both profit and purpose. 

Join the community to learn from likeminded individuals, pool resources and best practices and collectively build a new model for inclusive and ethical entrepreneurship. 

Together we are creating an emergent, grassroots movement to create a pluralistic approach to business processes and development. Won't you join us join us? 

A great reframing of the start up culture with more honesty and a great deal more morality.

📑 We Have Never Been Social | Kathleen Fitzpatrick

Annotated We Have Never Been Social by Kathleen FitzpatrickKathleen Fitzpatrick (Kathleen Fitzpatrick)
That is to say: if the problem has not been the centralized, corporatized control of the individual voice, the individual’s data, but rather a deeper failure of sociality that precedes that control, then merely reclaiming ownership of our voices and our data isn’t enough. If the goal is creating more authentic, more productive forms of online sociality, we need to rethink our platforms, the ways they function, and our relationships to them from the ground up. It’s not just a matter of functionality, or privacy controls, or even of business models. It’s a matter of governance.  

👓 Create your own WordPress.com! | WP Ultimo

Read Create your own WordPress.com! – WP Ultimo (WP Ultimo)
With WP Ultimo you will be able to setup a Website as a Service platform, like WordPress.com or Wix.com, in a matter of minutes, not months!
This is just the sort of thing one could leverage to build a gen2+ IndieWeb platform… 

👓 Hey there, Pro Sites user! | WP Ultimo

Read Hey there, Pro Sites user! (WP Ultimo)
WP Ultimo is a WordPress multisite plugin that allows you to create a network of Premium Sites. Its value proposition is the same as Pro Sites: you can create different subscription tiers and have customers pay you a recurring fee to have a site hosted in your Multisite network. In fact, WP Ultimo was created after I needed a solution for a premium network I was building and found that Pro Sites didn’t quite work for the specific requirements of my project. Instead of trying to adapt Pro Sites, I decided to build my own solution from scratch. This was 2.5 years ago and that codebase is now WP Ultimo.

👓 This Is Gonna Be Emotional, We’re Setting over 90% of Our Premium Plugins Free! | WPMU DEV

Read This Is Gonna Be Emotional, We’re Setting over 90% of Our Premium Plugins Free! (WPMU DEV Blog)
WordPress is evolving, and so are we, even though it’s hard to see the kids leave home. It’s almost 12 years since Andrew and I launched WPMU DEV Premium as ‘a subscription-based service that offers advanced plugins for WordPress Multi-User’ and I reckon it’s fair to say that, well, it’s been quite the ride. And as of today, we’re taking another corner, guided by you, our members, and bringing all of our focus and efforts to the core services and functionality you care most about when it comes to running a great WordPress site, or two, or a few thousand.
This is awesome and sad at the same time. They’ve got an interesting reader hiding in here as well as the backbone of the edublogs platform. This latter could be used to create a platform for a WordPress-based IndieWeb platform.

👓 The “Free” Model | Geek&Poke

Read The "Free" Model by Oliver Widder (Geek&Poke)
A single cartoon panel of two pigs having a conversation with the caption 'Pigs talking about the 'Free' Model'. Pig 1: Isn't it great? We have to pay nothing for the barn. Pig 2: Yeah! And even the food is free.     See David Dalka's post "Dear Facebook, Please Return Our Social Networking Space".     Tweet
This is an awesome cartoon.

I’m reminded a bit of Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s concept of the Thanksgiving Turkey in The Black Swan.

👓 Spotify’s Podcast Aggregation Play | Stratechery by Ben Thompson

Read Spotify’s Podcast Aggregation Play by Ben Thompson (Stratechery)
Spotify is making a major move into podcasts, where it appears to have clear designs to be the sort of Aggregator it cannot be when it comes to music.
An interesting take on Spotify’s recent acquisitions. I’m worried what a more active aggregator play in the podcast space will look like, particularly with most of the players (by this I mean companies) in the audio game using players (by this I mean the actual JavaScript interfaces that play online audio) hiding the actual audio files.

👓 Reflecting on My Failure to Build a Billion-Dollar Company | Medium

Read Reflecting on My Failure to Build a Billion-Dollar Company by Sahil Lavingia (Medium)
I left my job as the second employee at Pinterest–before I vested any of my stock–to turn Gumroad into a billion-dollar company. And…
A great little essay. We need more entrepreneurs building things like this rather than chasing the dream of being a unicorn. We need more stories like this, because this is how the world really works, not the other way around.