Mainstream retail meets the maker revolution.
So this is interesting news, Barnes & Noble are hosting a mini maker faire in every one of their 650 retail stores between Friday November 6th and Sunday November 8th 2015.
You can find out more from the announcement on their blog. The schedule is now available on the makerfaire.com site.
Maker Faires are family friendly show and tell events where Makers come to share what they have made and what they have learned. They take me back to the 1985 Alexandra Palace personal computer show where Clive Sinclair announced his C5 electric car.
The big Maker Faires in the Bay Area and New York drew 215,000 visitors last year and there were 119 mini Maker Faires last year. There is a mini Maker Faire in Seattle next week. But this is the first synchronized national event like this.
It will be interesting to see the maker movement meeting mainstream retail, if you are a maker spread the word and visit a local Barnes and Noble mini maker faire. You could even sign up as a presenter.
If you are interested in becoming a maker, take this opportunity to see what it is about at a local Barnes and Noble store.
Good fun and good business
This will be a fun event for the maker movement, but with magazine sales down and brick and mortar book sellers struggling to survive, this is serious business for Barnes & Noble.
Hosting in store events is an interesting strategy as it leverages their high street presence in a way that an online bookseller can’t replicate. And it gets people excited about a topic and open to buying books and kits from the store.
Personally I like the broad choice of books at Amazon.com and the instant gratification of downloading a book to my Kindle or an audio book to my Audible player. I am intrigued by the idea of a brick and mortar store offering something more social, but I wonder how that will translate to me spending more money at Barnes & Noble over the long term.
You cannot get a coffee or cake online (& Barnes & Noble has some delicious cakes and good lattes), or flick through a book to see what it has inside or how heavy it is. And kids get excited about reading in B&N, they have a great kids corner.
There is still no substitute for a good book store to wander through and it is instant gratification. Online is ok sometimes, but sometimes a store is better.