Dynamic bookstores?

02/15/2007

Dave and I have learned a lot since we started the Pragmatic Bookshelf. Daily we come to face to face with the reality that physical bookstores, trucks full of books, and books crossing international borders form a completely different reality in the physical world than in cyberspace.

In the comfortable confines of the ‘net, you don’t have to worry about maintaining an inventory of PDF files—-enough for all customers. Crossing geopolitical borders is largely transparent, and finding things is farily easy: there’s Google and Amazon, there are tags, and books can belong to mutiple categories.

But that last one creates quite a hitch in real book stores. Read Dave’s blog posting for his thoughts on the subject.

Can we drag the brick-and-morter world into the loose, dynamically reconfigurable world we’re used to in the software domain? I can tell you from first hand experience with the retail world that if we do, they’ll be kicking and screaming all the way.

But isn’t that how most innovation happens?