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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!
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
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
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. I love brick and mortor stores and I for one am not ready to see them go.
Last time I went into a B&N store I was looking for something to read on an intercontiental flight, I found something but a quick check on amazon.com(not even bothering to look for anything that may even be cheaper) they had about a 50% markup and thats not even including the sales tax(shipping from Amazon was free). Now I understand having to pay a couple of bucks more for the convenience of walking out of the store with the book, but 50% is just insane. Their online store isn't much better, 95+% of the time they are considerably more expensive than amazon. They aren't dying solely because of factors outside of their control, they are dying because they feel entitled to margins that the more successful players in the industry have known to be unreasonable for a long while.
Monstar L
Sorry but I stopped buying books at B&N for one reason... Obscene prices. 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.
Or how about the photography books ranging from $49.99 to $129.99 for an Ansel Adams coffee table book... Exact same books on Amazon.com for less than 1/4 the price.
I'm sorry. But I buy almost nothing from them.... Except their clearance books, those are honest pricing. Everything else I buy elsewhere.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
And, with this shift, we will see the resurgence of the mom and pop bookstore that sells new and used books in a loving environment which was previously squeezed out by the mega chains. And I'm fine with that.
Sadly, we'll also see the resurgence of those bookstores with five cats wandering around the store making the place smell like stale cat urine. I'm less fine with that...
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.
I remember seeing B&N devote a rather substantial amount of space to toys, games, etc. around a year or so ago, figured the writing was on the wall.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The one thing that I will surely miss is being able to leaf through a book before i decide to put down my hard earned cash for it.
This is one thing that keeps me coming back to B&N when purchasing a book. Yes, there are time when I leaf through a book in the store, only then to note the title and then buy it cheaper through Amazon. But there are also times that I will use Amazon's reviews to narrow down my choices, then head out to B&N to leaf through the books before making my final decision, then purchasing it there on the spot.
I end up doing the latter for more expensive books. I'd rather spend the extra money knowing that I'm going to like the book, then send my money to amazon to purchase a book that I may find horrendous.
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've always sworn that I'd never become the old fart who's confused in the world of modern technology, ...
It is neither you nor 'modern technology', it is the majority which is confused, e.g. believing to be able to 'multitask' with the help of friendly gadgetry while at the same time unable to read (and comprehend) simple texts (see post above) or to add one-digit nuimbers (as mentioned in some other post yesterday).
CC.
TaijiQuan (Huang, 5 loosenings)
Here's the closed internet search I could turn up in about ten minute for it:
Cite
Borders. Borders Group (NYSE:BGP) lost the online and brick-and-mortar bookstore war years ago to Barnes & Noble (NYSE:BKS) and Amazon.com (NYSE:BGP). The company’s stock is down to $1.20 from a 52-week high of $4.48 and its market value is less than $80 million. For the quarter ending in October, the company’s loss from continuing operations was $39.0 million,or $0.65 per share, compared to a loss of $39.0 million, or $0.64 per share, a year ago. Revenue was $595.5 million, down $86.6 million, or 12.7%. Border’s large Waldenbooks division has all but disappeared. That part of Border’s operations is down to 361 stores. With its debt net of cash at $375 million, a competitor like Barnes & Noble could buy $2 billion in annual revenue for a fraction of sales and cut general and administrative costs to improve margins. Borders has been dead for over two years, but no one has been able to dispose of the body.
FYI: green machine = Barnes and Nobel... Red = Borders... I realized not everyone may color associate like I do.
When I go to B&N it's full of people lounging in chairs/on the floor, reading books.
While I understand that initially B&N's browser-friendly policy made it very popular, there's a difference between reading 3-4 pages of a book to see if it is a worthwhile purchase, and reading it from cover to cover - which is what a lot of people are very obviously doing. This means that 1) the person won't purchase the book - why should they? and 2) I would be purchasing a "used" book. While being read doesn't fade the letters, there's a difference between new and used in terms of wrinkled pages, smudges, etc. If I'm paying for new, I want new.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
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.
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.
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.
This isn't a loss in my world. B&N in my area had 7 aisles of "christian inspiration" where "religious studies" should have been, "judaica" consisted of 12 books (of which 4 were holocaust history) "current events" (read sarah palin and rush books) where "political science" should have been, half the store devoted to the bargain section, two rows of way way overpriced journals, the most mainstream programming books that appeal to entry-level, and annoying cashiers reminding me how much i could have saved if i had their loyalty card. My god, I don't remember the last time they were even useful for me. Amazon, otoh, has received maybe 60% of my book purchases in the past 2 years. What can I say besides they have what I'm looking for?
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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.
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.
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
This is not a sign that B&N is in trouble. This is about a fight between Leonard Riggio (the founder of B&N and holder of the largest number of shares) and another investor. Mr. Riggio is facing challenges to his control of the company from another investor who actually wants to buy a bunch of B&N stores for his own company (and is trying to buy enough shares to force the issue). I think it is likely that he will be successful in taking B&N private.
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison
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.