Crockatt & Powell - The Future is Apple-Juice...

We ran into these really friendly people at the Booksellers Association annual conference and they offered to do a report for us.

It is all about our position in the book trade over the next ten - fifteen years.

Here is the report:

Crockatt & Powell is a new independent bookshop that seeks to buck the trend and stay in business for more than five minutes. When we met them at the BA conference they appeared a charming bunch but were clearly in need of thought leadership and knowledge venturing. After much persuasion we agreed to charge them astronomical sums of money to learn what they might have stumbled across over a couple of pints down their local boozer.

In other words - we brought the outside in by enlightening the dual managers as to the strategic impact of the e-book and the immanent transformation of their market from a "real" to a "virtual" consistency, the likely result of which was a paradigm shift of epic proportions leading to the total emasculation and corporate restructure device manipulation/re-orientation the likes of which has never been known (perhaps as relational to the present discourse as the invention of the printing press by Caxton) and that knowledge economies being primariliy funds of data serviced "robotic consumer" consumption patterning devices rather than anything remotely resembling an "actual human being" the result of which could be seen as, for want of a better phrase - a bit of a "bummer".

Notwithstanding the immense impact of these changes on the book trade (hence to be known as the e-book download business) with careful knowledge venturing analysis and other innovative techniques we read about in the bestselling book Freakonomics by Steven Levitt we came up with the following future defense strategy, hereafter described in this text as the FDS, the main thrust of which was that since it was agreed to be beyond doubt that the book "as we know it" was dying (a Barthesian description could be rephrased as the Death of the Book) that Adam and Matthew would be better advised to spend their time selling apple-juice or perhaps, as the nature of markets is their tendency to become ever increasing pits of energy and chaos, even, one might say, so that when the unpredictable happens (as is inevitable!) the best course of action is to "change" historically...

IE If not apple-juice then maybe buns? Or custard tarts?

So there we go. The future's bright. The future's apple-juice!