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Barnes and Noble Bookstore Chain Put In Play
suraj.sun sends in word that the country's largest bookstore chain, Barnes and Noble, will put itself up for sale. "The news surprised analysts and alarmed publishers, who have watched as the book business has increasingly shifted to online retailers and e-book sales, leaving both chains and independent sellers struggling. ... For years, Barnes & Noble has been battered by large shifts in the publishing industry and the retail environment. Book sales have moved toward big-box stores like Costco, Wal-Mart and Target, and away from mall-based stores like B. Dalton, which Barnes & Noble acquired in the late 1980s. 'There's been a long series of pressures,' said David Schick, managing director at Stifel Nicolaus in Baltimore. 'The market has not been kind to bookstores, and it's for new reasons like competition with Apple and Amazon, and it's for old reasons, like what we believe has been a decline in reading for the last 20 years. Americans have devoted less of what we call media time to books.'"
It is extremely hard for our kids to even have an opportunity to learn to love books! They are exposed to so many competing media at such an early age that books get relegated to schools as something they use. I teach and every year it gets harder and harder to get kids to read the simplest of texts. It is very sad as books offer a very personal relationship and intimate relationship with characters that no other medium can provide.
Piracy hasn't done a damn thing, it's just not en vogue for Americans to read. Because they're fat and stupid, you see.
I can say that because I'm an American.
-- Ethanol-fueled
Here's the link on how to crack the DRM on the ePubs that Barnes and Nobel delivers their eBooks in, if you buy one.
http://i-u2665-cabbages.blogspot.com/2009/12/circumventing-barnes-noble-drm-for-epub.html
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
sorry but $69.99 for a book on Python programming is robbery. When I can get the same book on Amazon.com for $29.95.
...which also is like robbery, considering that you can find most information on the internet.
If Pandora's box is destined to be opened, *I* want to be the one to open it.
There is a large free standing B&N up the street from me and a similarly large Borders not far down the road. The B&N has a Starbucks which probably draws a good number of people to the B&N on its own.
While book pricing isn't bad its not great. New releases usually can be found cheaper elsewhere and they lord over you the fact that you can buy into their membership with a low $25 fee to get books at better prices. This is where they lose me, I don't want to be badgered into being a member of their store, let alone pay for the privilege. Throw in the horrendous pricing in their DVD and CD section and suddenly I find myself comparing all prices or desiring to hit the net to see if I can find it cheaper. Membership "rewards" never come across as friendly, let alone one I have to pay for.
While I do laud them for having an atmosphere that encourages spending time there, reading, sipping coffee, and etc, they need to work on their pricing and ditch this pay for membership to get a discount routine. Just ditch the requirement to get a discount on books entirely.
I can understand why they badger you into memberships. I have a good friend who had her hours cut severely (like from 35+ to way less than 15 per week), causing her to lose her health benefits (badly needed at that) because of a failure to meet an insanely high requirement for new and renewal of memberships.
They badger you because their incomes and benefits hang on it.
I'm in the same boat as you, but I bought the nook with no intention of ever buying ebooks from B&N so I'm not really too upset about it. There are many places to get ebooks. Also, if you haven't tried Calibre to manage your library, you owe it to yourself to try it out.
In Soviet Russia jokes are formulaic and decidedly non-humorous.
The UK subsidiary went out of business in December last year - all the staff lost their jobs on Christmas Eve.
Sorry but you don't know this store, obviously. While there are a number of the coffee house crowd it normally does have a flow to the checkout line as well.
Dedicated Cthulhu Cultist since 4523 BC.
Those hard to find books are typically at the funky local book store you might find in the "arty" part of town, and while they're feeling it as much as B&N, they've responded the same way I think a lot of local record stores have, focusing on having those hard-to-find books as well as readings, events, etc.
I stopped buying from B&N and similar stores years ago when they started stocking a bajillion copies of the latest tell-all of the celeb du jour, and relegated everything else to a couple of rows each. So I buy all my tech books from Amazon (still miss Fat Brain...), get my "classics" from Project Gutenberg for the iPad, and will happily walk in and spend an hour browsing and chatting with the local bookstore owner, and I never walk out without buying something; not as a "pity" sale, but because I found something genuinely interesting that would have been too obscure even for B&N.
There's certainly a strong argument for Amazon having an adverse effect on mom & pop stores, but i'm not sure the used book market is that argument. Half the time i get used stuff from Amazon the purchase is actually routed to some small and presumably independent bookstore that i've never heard of before. Maybe you can't physically enter your local used book store because of dust and mold issues, but it's possible that they're selling a fair number of used books via Amazon.
This Space Intentionally Left Blank
It's very possible that old LIFE book came from a mom-n-pop store that also sells online. I know a woman who has a small bookstore in upstate New York and she keeps the actual storefront open to give her a place to go (she's pushing 80), as a place for book readings, but also as warehouse; she sells most of her stuff via Amazon, with apparently one or two really rare things going on ebay.
If anything, it was a brilliant move on Amazon's part to adopt this model; now lots of mom-n-pops can stay open and be more of a social place (if only for the cats) and still have give people the opportunity to browse.
I think that there will be book stores around even in the future, but they need to be more specialized.
They need to be more specialized, sure, but that makes their market much smaller. It's easy to stock specialized books when you've got the security of offering Harry Potter and Twilight et al. to keep the money coming in between the rare consumer of niche books. But once Amazon and Walmart start selling the popular stuff at your wholesale cost, it changes things. It's much harder to sell specialized books when you can't subsidize the lower turnover with mass-market books. So yeah, the book stores that remain in the future will be more specialized. But you won't find many of them outside of major cities where there are enough consumers of their chosen specialty to make it financially viable.
This is already the case with electronics. You can get low-end camera gear anywhere, even at drug stores now, but if you want anything beyond the basics you have to go online or to a city big enough to support one real camera store. Used to be a mom & pop camera store in every town more than 50,000, but now that they can't compete with Walmart for point and shoots, there's not enough high end business to keep them open.
True. I love when I'm flying and the Flight Attendant announces to stow all electronic devices, and turn anything "with an off switch" off.
I watch all the people with e-book readers and laptops groan while I pull out my paperback. Uninterrupted reading pleasure during the trip.
This space for rent. All reasonable inquiries will be entertained at proprietors discretion.
The one in Highland Park, IL closed last month. I got some good clearance deals.