{"id":920,"date":"2012-09-12T12:56:44","date_gmt":"2012-09-12T19:56:44","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/?p=920"},"modified":"2012-09-12T12:56:44","modified_gmt":"2012-09-12T19:56:44","slug":"notebook-on-cities-and-culture-s2e7-corporate-refuge-with-christin-evans-and-praveen-madan","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/?p=920","title":{"rendered":"Notebook on Cities and Culture S2E7: Corporate Refuge with Christin Evans and Praveen Madan"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignright size-full wp-image-921\" style=\"margin: 5px;\" title=\"C&amp;P\" src=\"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/09\/CP.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"285\" height=\"300\" \/>Colin Marshall sits down in a back room in San Francisco&#8217;s Haight-Ashbury with Christin Evans and Praveen Madan, owners and transformers of <a href=\"http:\/\/www.booksmith.com\/\">The Booksmith<\/a>, and now <a href=\"http:\/\/www.keplers.com\/\">Kepler&#8217;s<\/a> in Menlo Park. They discuss being deemed &#8220;corporate refugees&#8221; by their employees for their tech consulting past; creating a positive, aspirational experience that doesn&#8217;t make bookstores seem like broccoli; what they learned from spending date nights in other cities, having dinner and then visiting the local independent bookstores; the importance of offering serendipity, deeply knowledgeable service, and a multisensory browsing experience; how they&#8217;ve come to hold 200 events a year, including their popular bookswaps, born of customers&#8217; desire to meet people in places other than bars; what makes Haight-Ashbury something more than a neighborhood where a lot of fun stuff happened a long time ago, and how they made it a first priority to connect with the local community; the parallel non-profit functions of community bookstores, including public education; what makes bookstores businesses, but not <em>normal<\/em>\u00a0businesses; &#8220;matchmaking&#8221; books to readers such as Dwight, lover of Russian history; how they create an addiction to books, bearing in mind that half of America doesn&#8217;t read a book afer high school; what <a href=\"http:\/\/www.huffingtonpost.com\/praveen-madan\/the-new-york-times-gets-i_b_542990.html\">the controversy about Yann Martel&#8217;s <\/a><em><a href=\"http:\/\/www.huffingtonpost.com\/praveen-madan\/the-new-york-times-gets-i_b_542990.html\">Beatrice and Virgil<\/a><\/em>\u00a0illustrates about The Booksmith&#8217;s &#8220;high-touch&#8221; business model; the abstraction of life in corporate consulting, and the total lack of abstraction of life in bookselling; bookstores as social networks when you want to unplug from social networks; and the mind-expanding books that running The Booksmith has brought into both of their lives.<\/p>\n<p>Download the interview from\u00a0<em><a href=\"http:\/\/colinmarshall.libsyn.com\/webpage\/s2e7-corporate-refuge-with-christin-evans-and-praveen-madan\">Notebook on Cities and Culture<\/a><\/em><a href=\"http:\/\/colinmarshall.libsyn.com\/webpage\/s2e7-corporate-refuge-with-christin-evans-and-praveen-madan\">\u2019s feed<\/a>\u00a0or on\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/itunes.apple.com\/us\/podcast\/notebook-on-cities-culture\/id266539442\">iTunes<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Colin Marshall sits down in a back room in San Francisco&#8217;s Haight-Ashbury with Christin Evans and Praveen Madan, owners and transformers of The Booksmith, and now Kepler&#8217;s in Menlo Park. They discuss being deemed &#8220;corporate refugees&#8221; by their employees for their tech consulting past; creating a positive, aspirational experience that doesn&#8217;t make bookstores seem like [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[33],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-920","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-notebook-on-cities-and-culture"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/920","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=920"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/920\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":923,"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/920\/revisions\/923"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=920"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=920"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=920"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}