Bricks and Mortar Meets the Digital Dilemma

By Monica Georgieff  [appeared in QB Newsletter vol. 2, issue i]

Foyles bookstore has partnered with the online news resource The Bookseller in order to revolutionize the flagship Foyles store on Charing Cross Road in London by inviting customers and industry experts to put their two cents in on the design of the new space! By collecting ideas of how to modernize the new store according to standards of the way of book trade fluctuates, the project aims to successfully create ‘the bookshop of the future’. How do digital texts change the way book-selling manifests itself in a physical form? How do bookstores handle declining sales? How about accommodating events? The editor of The Bookseller Phillip Jones maintains that the bookshop isn’t dead (and rightly so!) but the changing environment and its effects need to be addressed to keep the business going. “What we are offering … is a truly unique opportunity, an open digital platform for creative but constructive play, a chance to create a bookshop where the experiential, cultural strengths of bricks and mortar meets the growing opportunities of digital,” project director and architect Alex Lifschultz explains. This initiative hits close to home with Quattro in regards to our own Q Space on College. Working off the necessity of publisher and author collaboration, the exchange of ideas to keep independent publishing afloat in the age of digital and corporate giants and the changing faces of ‘the bookseller itself’ – Q and Foyles aim to address the same real-world problems of the modern publishing industry.