A few weeks back I was invited to give a demonstration of visual problem solving at the Northern California Independent Booksellers Conference in Oakland, CA. Using The Back of the Napkin tools, I worked with many of the attendees to visually discover and describe ideas on how independent bookstores can thrive in the age of the online book store (read: Amazon).
We captured everything on a big blackboard, which I then cleaned up and rendered as a single image. Publishers Weekly magazine liked the image so much that they ran it last week as their "soapbox" editorial -- the first time anyone could remember in which PW's op-ed piece was a picture.
To see why comparing an independent bookstore to Amazon is like comparing apples to zebras, click here.
