Do you remember what it was like to hold a book in your hands, to get absorbed into a story as you lazily sit in an overstuffed chair in a dim room with just a reading light guiding your eyes? Or perhaps you recall the smell of old books as you sit in the library frantically cramming for that midterm or final exam. Will your children or your grandchildren have that experience?
One would hope so, it is intoxicating as well as enlightening. The tactile sensation of holding a book that is 40, 50 or even 100 years old is almost beyond description.
The survival of the small bookstore hangs in the balance as larger and larger corporations think they know best and continue to industrialize all aspects of life. When they turn your favorite small bakery into the mega factory, adding nonfood chemicals to your beloved bread, or attempting to convince you that being totally sanitized from the world is somehow a desirable thing.
One man is standing up to fight a giant corporation and wants to help maintain some semblance of sanity in an otherwise insane world, even if it is just his little corner of the world. His battle is for his little bookstore. This man has made CNNs David vs. Goliath section. Jeff Mayersohn a man young enough to know better and old enough to remember is positioning his little bookstore, the Harvard Bookstore, to survive in a world of online buying.
Jeff is totally tech savvy but he fully understands and loves the old fashioned printed book. He purchased this world renowned bookstore in 2008. As a member of the high-tech community he knew he could use the newer technologies to help his bookstore survive. He found a huge printing press that is capable of printing entire books from a list of millions of options and accomplish that in just a few minutes. This allowed him to maximize his stock without having to create a warehouse to display it all.
Harvard Book Store’s Espresso Book Machine
Locally he uses bike messengers to deliver his new hotcakes and can produce books and deliver them faster than Amazon can. His sales increased by an astounding 10 percent over the past year. Quite an accomplishment considering that small bookstores are becoming fossilized remnants of the not so distant past. This energetic entrepreneur has even impressed Forbes.
edited by tw
