Ancaman atau opportunity yang pasti: Perubahan ?

Anda memiliki usaha keluarga sudah hampir 40 tahun. Ancaman dari toko raksasa pengecer, perniagaan modern, supply chain, e-business, internet, perubahan jaman membawa perubahan dari masyarakat dan selera hidup, gaya hidupnya, media media yang tersedia begitu beragam ragam.

Kelangsungan hidup usaha menjadi suram dan mencemaskan. Apa yang harus dilakukan? Mana lautan biru saya..
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Computer Hardware Software
Corner Bookstores Stare Down Google
Chris Kraeuter, 12.06.05, 6:00 AM ET

Green Apple Books is surrounded by an old world.

The 38-year-old bookstore fronts San Francisco's bustling Clement Street, along with a host of Russian bakeries, Burmese and dim sum restaurants, Irish bars and even a two-screen movie theater.

Parking is a headache, and fog is ever present, but Green Apple Books remains a major draw for the city's bookworms. Co-owner Pete Mulvihill says the final chapter in his bookstore's life should have been written long ago.

He points to the opening in the city of Borders (nyse: BGP - news - people ) and other discount chains, as well as the popularity and ease of shopping via the Internet's many vendors, as harbingers of the end for his 250,000-title store, which also has an online inventory of 60,000 titles.

"For all of those reasons, we should have gone out of business long ago," he says.

Now with Internet powerhouses Google (nasdaq: GOOG - news - people ), Yahoo! (nasdaq: YHOO - news - people ) and Microsoft (nasdaq: MSFT - news - people ), as well as Amazon.com (nasdaq: AMZN - news - people ), working to digitize books and make the contents searchable via the Web, another threat has emerged.

Mulvihill doesn't know entirely how to take the recent digitization efforts of the Internet giants, but his store, along with thousands of other independent bookstores, continues to fill a niche in today's digital world.

"There's still something wonderful about browsing in a book store compared with browsing online," he says. "There's a sense of possibility about walking into a store like ours."

The Internet companies expending the time and money to scan millions of pages proffer that their efforts will actually boost book sales by better organizing the books through complete searches of text, making texts available that people didn't know existed previously.

Not everyone agrees with the methods. An authors group has sued Google alleging copyright infringement and some publishers have balked on the same grounds.

Yahoo! and Microsoft, seeing an opportunity to get an edge on Google, linked up via a nonprofit organization that is scanning books for search online.

The major Internet companies have hinted at the promise of increased sales from their efforts, but book vendors aren't so sure.

"Generally, in retail, the customer will take the path of most convenience," says Dave Weich, director of marketing and development for Portland, Ore.-based Powell's, one of the nation's largest independent bookstores with 4 million titles, as well as one of the first to build out an online presence.

"You're making an assumption that someone will go from Google and then out of their way to our site or our store," says Weich. "It's so hard to say what will happen, but it's hard to imagine how a small bookstore will benefit from this."

Weich sees the recent efforts as another step by "very large publicly traded endeavors" to consolidate the power that comes from controlling access to massive amounts of content.

Chuck Richard, vice president and lead analyst with Outsell, a research and advisory firm focused on the information industry, says in this kind of search-driven environment, low-cost providers will win. "Search-driven online book purchases will push independent booksellers to specialize, to go deep in subject areas," he says, adding that, overall, all booksellers stand to gain more than they stand to lose by the digitization of content.

That remains to be seen. One specialized author expressed his disappointment about what has happened to his titles since they were listed through Google.

Ralph Gabrowski has written more than 70 books about computer-aided design. When Google announced its plans to digitize books late last year, he submitted several of his books, which were already in PDF (portable document format).

Seven months later, his books were finally posted, but in the two months since then, he's received just $2 in revenue from linked ads and none from sales through any of Google's efforts. He also has issues with the amount of his work made accessible through the searches.

"It's not a big deal, but in a small business like this I try all sorts of things," he says. "If it doesn't work, I just move on to something else."