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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.'"
I sure feel great about my Nook purchase this week.
Proud member of the American Non Sequitur Society. We might not make much sense, but boy do we love pizza!
I've always sworn that I'd never become the old fart who's confused in the world of modern technology, but I really miss being able to walk into a record store and flip through the endless racks of LPs or CDs. I suppose I'm going to miss book stores too, when that day comes not too long from now.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
Norman Spinrad has some interesting points about how the publishing and book sales businesses operate. They're like the music industry, only a lot worse in how they calculate the acceptable level of risk... even if an author has proved to be a fairly safe bet.
I love reading, unfortunately I don't make enough time for it. I consider myself a very technical and electronic-savvy person. However, I have no intention of purchasing eBooks anytime in the future. There is something about owning a paperback and curling up with it as you flip through the pages. eBooks lack this personal touch. Browsing an online catalog doesn't compare to rummaging through the stacks and perusing a bookstore's inventory. It scares me greatly that we may, within my lifetime reach the point where we see the closure of the last brick and mortar bookstore.
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.
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
I have a soft spot in my heart for B&N ever since I dug up an old volume II of a four volume set of some first hand accounts of the U.S. Civil War. They were out of print, and I couldn't find them in any new or used book store I searched at. A few weeks later B&N had them show up on their web-page. Somehow they had gotten some in stock. Now whenever I'm book shopping, I try to pick B&N over their competitors now. I have to admit though, it's a LOT easier to just go to amazon and click on things than go looking for a brick and mortar book store. Also, consistent with the summary, I do spend less time reading than I used to. This is something I've recognized and am trying to change. Of course, I have a lot more money than I did when I was younger, so I can afford to buy things like hardbacks of new titles rather than paperbacks in the bargain bin so I bet I spend more money on books than I ever did.
Gentlemen! You can't fight in here, this is the war room!
I think that there will be book stores around even in the future, but they need to be more specialized.
There is a difference between a book and an e-reader. If the book breaks it's still mostly readable, and it requires no power to be read.
Considering the amount of crappy channels on TV these days I'm amazed that not more people are reading books, but they are probably surfing the web instead.
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
It is very sad as books offer a very personal relationship and intimate relationship with characters that no other medium can provide.
Wrong. How do books provide a more personal relationship than an electronic device like an iPad or even cellphone? Words are powerful whether they be on a computer screen or on paper. Sure, it's a different method of consumption but it's the same words.
The big debate here should be over the fact that iPad-type devices don't give you the same rights a physical book do so either the price should be drastically cheaper or those rights should be instituted.
Whatever it is, am on my 7th book on kindle ipad version and it DOES NOT feel the same way an old worn paperback does in finding the attachment to the characters.
Maybe another century of human conditioning with electronic books change this. But for now i still prefer my book case as a matter of preference.
-S
About 12 years ago Napster made downloading music easy. We had easy ways to take that downloaded music and integrate it with our existing habits via CD burners. Legal alternatives soon followed. Eventually record shops closed their doors. Not due to piracy but to due to uselessness. Now we have devices like MP3 players and iPods that let us enjoy our downloaded music in a more efficient manner than the old burn-to-CD method.
Thanks to codecs like Divx, movies became downloadable in a semi-reasonable amount of time. Later technologies like Hulu made streaming possible. Rentals stores are taking a beating and stores specializing in selling movies and TV shows have all but disappeared. Originally like CDs, you had to burn your movies to DVDs to watch them on a TV but thanks to HDTV and to set-top boxes, there are more efficient ways to enjoy downloaded TV and movies.
With books there was always a rub: There was no simple way to integrate them with out existing habits. You could print something but it would likely be on single-sided 8.5"x11" paper. You could read it off the screen but that's a lot less comfortable and convenient. With books, we had to wait for the more efficient device in order for electronic distribution to become feasible. I imagine we'll see a very rapid shift now that such devices exist and are becoming affordable. It'll be like the near-overnight industrialization that happens in nations these days compared to the slow, drawn-out process it was when Britain industrialized.
Barnes and Noble is in trouble and they know it. It's a good time to sell.
The bookstores wanted a lot of repeat business, so they pushed frequent buyer cards and book clubs (like Columbia House records in the '80s). Because they gave a "discount" price to frequent buyers, the publishers were free to jack up the price to keep margins high. When a casual buyer came in to get a book, it was priced at $16-20, which is just on the edge of an impulse buy. This was to push you into signing up for the frequent buyer club (which as others point out, wasn't free at B&N), even though you had no intention of using the card enough to make it pay. You may have bought that $20 book, but you weren't likely to go back either.
As for WalMart and Target, well, they found a niche and filled it. Now the casual buyer has a place to get a book once in a while. The high end book addict will eventually head to e-books. Or maybe sooner than later. I basically haven't bought a book for years, but suddenly I have the Amazon Kindle app on my new phone, which I used to get 3 books on the first day without even giving it a second thought... that's slippery economics. The quality of the screen is just fine for reading, too (Samsung Galaxy-S). The hardcore reader will give up the "paper experience" when they realize they no longer have to trudge down to the store, stand in line, and all the other stuff to get books. And if Amazon keeps beating up the publishers on price for all books, not just the popular ones, we should see a resurgence of reading.
And I don't buy the story that people don't read. They may not read novels, but given that the guest on The Daily Show is an author, and the first step in running for president of the US is to publish a book of some sort, there are readers out there.
"Well, good luck finding a judge that doesn't run a bestiality site."
Another thing is that B&N is the class A example of the "Big Guy that Crushes the little guy". This is the company that the movie "You Got Mail" was based on. Why are we sad to see it go again?
I've given up on Slashdot's comment scores.
a coffee shop (not Starbucks) where people can sit and browse online catalogues, google books, but mostly talk with other knowledgeable people about books. The communication face-to-face will be much faster (and more civil) than the online discussion forums that Amazon tries to run under each books page.
People will be able to buy their ebooks there, but the place will also have one of those print-on-demand machines, for people who want to print off a hand held copy of a book. Either one bought from the store, or one they've prepared themselves via PDF on a memory stick.
There won't be any physical books in the book stores of the future.
I love books. I love reading. I'm also the first to admit that a lot of what I read is crap (Science Fiction and Fantasy) but the mileage varies. At last count, since acquiring my iPod touch (with the "Bookshelf" app), followed by and iPhone (with the "Kindle" app) and most recently the iPad (again with "Kindle" - I finally gave in for the larger format) I've read about 300 e-Books in the last 3 years. Yes, it felt a little weird for a while, particularly on the small screen devices, but that didn't take long to get past.Meanwhile the convenience is/was totally addictive! Now I can find pretty much anything I want, anytime I want it. I never get caught short with nothing to read (well, once in a U.S. Embassy that wouldn't allow *any* electronic devices, but that's a different story). The only time I *have* to have a physical book is taking off and landing on airplanes, and hopefully they'll wise up soon, but I don't have to pack a dozen books to take away for a fortnight. Don't get me wrong, I still love reading "real" books, and I still browse bookstores when I get the time - but after having bought (and subsequently given away) something like 2,000 paperbacks over the previous 15years, I mostly only buy hard cover editions of a few authors any more. I'll sometimes be buying the e-Version of stuff while I'm standing at the bookshelf.
I know that i will certainly miss the ability to wander through a bookstore and pick up authors or titles I might not have otherwise.
If by that you mean the limited selection that happens to be on the shelves. I love brick and mortar book stores, but the B&Ns in driving distance are horrible. If the book is not part of some reading club book of the month, or by an author that was featured on one of those lists, or it is not a major seller, they do not have it. The staff is always happy to order it for me and have it shipped directly to my house, but they can't look up a price on it to let me know how much that will cost. I know books are not impulse buys for everyone, but it seems that these stores would rather store an entire shelf of Marilyn Monroe photo essays (the same one) than stock a few non-book-club titles.
It is almost insulting, to me, to have the staff at such a store suggest that I could buy the book online. If I wanted to do that, as many other posters have pointed out, there are places with better prices on both the books and shipping.
No, I'm referring to the expanded section for board games (they actually started selling popular Euro board games, very cool of them) and the GREATLY expanded kids area. Plus they seem to have added a bunch of other random shit I've never seen them selling before, like $90 Lego sets. This is all based on my local store, but still. They definitely have branched out from books substantially, and when a business starts moving away from their core that much, things aren't looking good.
So I hit the nearest town looking for a specific book ("Dragonflies of Surrey" - yes the town was in Surrey) last weekend, heck I would have settled for ANYTHING decent on the subject matter I was looking for. 3 book stores (2 large chains, 1 small specialist store) and not a single book on dragonflies let alone the specific title I was looking for. And I hadnt really expected there to be to be honest.
Now if publishers had actually grasped new technology by the horns and allowed bookstores to print (and bind) **on demand** titles, browse through their back-catalogue (which is several hundreds of times larger than any store could be reasonable anticipated to stock) etc. etc. then maybe we would be seeing a thriving book industry as book stores competed on the quality of their product (paper, binding, ink quality....smell) and facilities (user friendly search, cafe to sit down and browse in) rather than the almost absolute reliance that we now have on the internet to find any rare or unusual titles.
The book store industry isnt dying, the publishers are slowly killing it.
They're amazingly efficient for used stuff- for his birthday my son wanted an old LIFE book, now out of print. I found a used copy on Amazon, in perfect condition, in about 5 minutes. $8 + shipping. There's no way I could do that with used book stores in the area- I can't even enter half of them due to dust and mold issues.
"Seven Deadly Sins? I thought it was a to-do list!"
You're already making a penny on every dollar sold. How can you hope to fix that impression? It's not like you can cut prices. You could cut costs by making stores less nice, but the simple fact of the matter is that most people who still go to bookstores (like me) go for the experience. I like that everything in Barnes and Noble looks nice. There's a reason I'll drive farther to go to B&N over Books-a-Million or Borders. So while they could cut cost by becoming "Wal-books", they'd probably lose as many customers as they gained, and they still couldn't hope to compete with Amazon head to head on prices. No matter how cheaply run the store, it'll still cost more to run than no store at all.
I don't need a million points of light, just two points of multi-mode fiber and a 10 Gig-E router.
It's not a matter of being "cliche" or "done before" or anything like that, it is a matter of being good or bad in my book. A novel can be the millionth of its type, but if it is a good novel then great.
My objection are the "classics" that suck. They are not good stories. It just seems to be because they are old, who wrote them, and a bit of luck that they get labeled as some kind of great literature, where a modern novel will be passed over simply because it is new.
When I was in high school, there was no sci fi at all on any of the reading lists unless you want to count 1984, which isn't really sci fi. This is not because there were no great sci fi novels, this was only back in the mid 90s, but because all the crusty academics that put together these lists can't consider anything made after their birth to be good to read.
My objection to Wuthering Heights is that it is a crap romance story, not that it is a romance story. It is extremely poorly done. I don't care if it was the first trash romance novel, that doesn't make it any better.
Another alternative is to print and bind books well as burn CDs on premises.
I go to a book store for two reasons, kill time while in a shopping center or because I need a book now, not two days from now.
Also:
* All manner of publications, even out of print, could be available with minimal wait time.
* Nothing would ever be out of stock.
* Theoretically, the books would cost less after equipment costs are amortized because of less shipping.
* Custom mix CDs would be a big hit, but the music industry would probably have a major pantie wadding event at the thought of this.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
We're going to have to eschew DRM because there is no guaranteed survival for any content distributor.
The shift to ebooks will accelerate, whether anybody likes to read them or not.
The book and news publishing industry, a form of 1:N broad casting using paper as it's medium, is reaching the tipping point where the economic pressures on the content producers will make the old methods of production "not worth pursuing" because of the real devastation of the existing distribution channels by the internet.
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Speaking as someone who owns a literary agency (a big one with lots of famous authors), I'm going to have to call you on that one.
It's not the authors. It's never been the authors. It's the publishers, and it has always been the publishers.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.