Sunset over the Bellingham Harbor, Wash.

First, the bookstore made the announcement through its newsletter, which a lot of bookstores have. But a good newsletter is way to maintain contact with customers. (“Good” being defined as more for the reader than for the sender, not too long, not boring, offline friendly. I don’t know whether Village Books’ newsletter fits my definition, so I’ll go on.)

The biggest and, to my mind, most useful change the bookstore has made is to install the Espresso Book Machine, which will give customers access to out-of-print books and allow them to self-publish in the store. It does not say how long it takes to set up and print the book.

You can set up and order the books through the Village Bookstore website, and then presumably pick it up and perhaps market it at the bookstore. That makes it a very strong competitor against Lulu.com, especially for books with local interest. The bookstore co-owner, Chuck Robinson, is especially interested in volumes on local history.

The other high-tech addition is the sale of Symtio cards in the store, which purchasers can use to download ebooks and audio books.

A novel chosen at random from the Symtio site runs $11.99 for ebook and $14.99 for audiobook. The Kindle version is $7.99 on Amazon (though the Symtio comes in several versions that don’t require the $300 Amazon reader). The same audiobook is $27.99 at Audible.com ($7.49 on a special promotion that requires a $7.49-per-month, three-month commitment).

These are complicated financial calculations beyond my ability to guess what will happen in the market, but the Symtio card seems like a gift item, which makes sense for a bookstore. A lot of my bookstore purchases are gifts. I don’t know how representative that is of the market as a whole.

I hope it works out for them. Even though I confessed yesterday that I don’t enjoy bookstores very much, I want to like them. Innovations like this make it easer.

Books are wonderful, and shopping for books is fun.

But the brick-and-mortar maze of volumes has “time sink” written all over it. I have spent hours in a bookstore with a paid gift card in hand and finally had to spend it on something, anything, just so that I wouldn’t have to go back.

I can’t find what I’m looking for. If they have it, it’s hidden, and if they don’t have it, they can order it for me, which I could have done from home in about 5 minutes without putting my shoes on.

The sensory assault of covers and titles and authors makes it hard to think of what I originally came for.

I do like the smell of printed paper, especially if it’s spiced with coffee from the in-house coffee shop. I like the bookish knickknacks — the tiny booklights, the classy journals, the ingenious little bookmarks. But my booklight that I bought years ago still works fine, and I can only fill so many journals.

When it comes to actually buying books, I prefer the online book sellers. Their database  knows my name no matter how seldom my budget opens for a book purchase. I can find just about anything, and the database knows that a lot of people who bought A also bought B, so I might like B also.

The database never judges my taste or makes assumptions about my politics. It keeps a list of books I might want to buy for as long as I might want to buy them. When people talk about the personal touch, they could be talking about the database.

What bookstores have that online sellers can’t:

1. Live human beings. Readers, authors, clerks. Make the most of them. More authors. Clerks that enjoy the customers. Make connections between readers. The coffee shops are good for this.
2. Make it easier and faster to find books. That might involve filing a book in two places — if it’s well-reviewed murder mystery with aliens, do I really have to not find it in SF and mystery before I find it on the Local Authors table?

Maybe what I want is a coffee shop with books, where the friendly clerk (who likes the customers and enjoys his or her job) takes your order for books and coffee and brings both to your table. it’s a wacky idea, but in the face of closing shops and declining sales, maybe wacky ideas will help shake things up.

Until that happens, if  you like to shop your laptop, check this out:

Fund Literacy, Care for the Environment, and get a Fair Price on the Books you Want.
Better World Books.com