Bait 'n' Beer

There's a good post (followed up with a lively debate in the Comments section) over at Northshire Bookstore's Blog. You should read it for yourself here (http://www.northshire.com/blog/?p=4159).
 
In the post, Chris Morrow, who's one of the smartest and most forward-thinking independent booksellers I know, describes an instance where a visitor to the store, made a series of notes as she browsed and spent considerable time with one or more staff members asking questions and soliciting recommendations. In the process of doing so, she said she planned to download these titles from Amazon for her Kindle and left without making a purchase at the store. Reactions from staff and from commenters at the blog ranged from moral outrage and insult to "whaddayagonnado" shrugs, and Chris winds up his post asking some serious questions about the place for physical bookstores in a digital age.
 
Obviously, there are no easy answers and it's still unclear to me whether a Google Editions arrangement, nicely described by Joe Wikert here (http://jwikert.typepad.com/the_average_joe/2010/07/the-rapidly-shifting-ebook-retailer-landscape.html) will provide any meaningful help in addressing Chris's issues (setting aside the fact that Google Editions remains phantom-like...it's been coming "next month" for many months now).
 
There is one suggestion I'd offer Chris and his team, though, and that's not to get discouraged or take umbrage at those who come to the store to "mooch" ideas and recommendations, as frustrating as it may seem at the moment. It's a sign that what you're doing is valued. I'd offer the analogy of digital piracy, which is much discussed in the publishing community these days and which, in my judgment, has been written about most intelligently in a number of posts by Brian O'Leary at Magellan Magellan Partners' blog (www.magellanmediapartners.com/).
 
There's a negative reason and there's a positive reason for my suggestion. On the negative side, pushing back or trying to control "pirates" in either the digital or physical space tends to be expensive and non-productive. DRM on digital products is often said not to hinder pirates while merely annoying real, paying customers. I doubt, without having been privy to the conversations at Northshire, whether the event described above was a lost sale; more likely, it was never going to be a sale.
 
On the positive side,  there's enough evidence in the digital arena to persuade me, as Cory Doctorow (or was it Tim O'Reilly--or either of them?) famously said, that piracy is better than obscurity. The moocher obviously thinks she gets good advice and recommendations from Northshire. Maybe she tells her friends who tell their friends. Maybe they don't all want digital books and at least some of them, who might otherwise never have thought of darkening Northshire's door, actually come in and make a purchase or three. Think of it as 'sampling' rather than 'mooching' and it becomes a whole lot more palatable.
 
I'm not minimizing the challenges facing indie bookstores and while I've been critical of (some of) them at times for being in denial rather than forward-leaning in their business approach, the good ones, like Northshire, are enormous resources for their local communities and for the common culture. I'm just not sure that browser/moochers are a problem to get too exercised about.
 
Be the place EVERYONE comes to get information and advice and you'll sell your share (and more) of whatever you're selling.