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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.
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
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 don't care if it's Jesus's suggested retail price. If it's less than half the cost somewhere else, it's moronic.
Are you trying to say that stores are required to sell at MSRP? They aren't.
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."
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.
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.
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.
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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.