Thinking. Recording. Writing. Reading. Publishing. Distributing. Selling. Archiving. Reusing….
These are just 9 of the processes we had in mind when beginning AWB.
How do books happen? What’s their lifecycle? What do they mean to a place like Wigtown, the book town, which has based its regeneration around books?
What’s the future for the book?
And where should AWigtownBook fit in to the picture?
Well, like any business, we just made a start and tried to build an inventory and a customer base. That involved the usual local contacts, some house and barn clearances, making friends with recyclers and charity shops and setting up accounts with book wholesalers and remainder sellers. We now have an online inventory of 2000 books and a much larger collection of books waiting to find a home, which we’re looking for premises to house in or around Wigtown.
We want to supply booksellers and readers directly and we want to make sure what we do is as sustainable and economical as possible. With 16 other booksellers in the town, we’ve spent a lot of time talking and listening. One thing we realised very early on is that visitors and local people alike would prefer to buy books as locally possible.
So, working with the Kendraio Foundation, we have built an application for local book buying clubs to share inventories and place orders, either with each other or, as a collective to suppliers, avoiding all sorts of purchases and shipping costs. The app is currently up and running and we can demonstrate for anyone interested. Just get in touch…
What we want to achieve is the knowledge, for everyone here in Dumfries and Galloway, that they have explored every opportunity to buy a competitive product locally, before they go to international platforms. That means having the power of an Amazon or EBay but with a bias to local inventories. So that’s what we’ve built.
Standing in a bookshop earlier this year, I overheard a customer ask for two books – quite valuable books- I had heard of. The bookshop owner simply replied: “Nope, sorry, we don’t have anything like that”. What a missed opportunity I thought. The books were probably worth over a thousand pounds. I wondered at that moment: “How would it be for all 16 sellers in the town if that booksellers could do a quick search to see whether the books existed in the town elsewhere? Wouldn’t another seller happily give her 10% if she brought them a sale worth over a thousand pounds? And wouldn’t it be good for the book selling offer as a whole?
So, we built it. The aim of AWB is to enable no sale to be lost and for everyone locally to be able to source the books they love – ‘local first’!
We want to create a sort of local distribution hub for books. What is really exciting is that this model could be used for nearly all other products as well. So, we’re talking to developers about extending it. But our hearts remain in books. We want to focus on serving local readers and bookshops and continuing to knit together the evolving story of Scotland’s national book town…