Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Barnes and Noble Bookstore Chain Put In Play

Posted by kdawson on from the more-clicks-less-bricks dept.

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.'"

18 of 414 comments (clear)

  1. Let me tell you... by brouski · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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!
    1. Re:Let me tell you... by chill · · Score: 4, Informative

      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.
    2. Re:Let me tell you... by jockeys · · Score: 4, Informative

      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.
    3. Re:Let me tell you... by Ephemeriis · · Score: 5, Interesting

      I sure feel great about my Nook purchase this week.

      I bought a nook for Christmas this year. Part of my thought process was how useful will the device be if the parent company goes out of business.

      The nook has wi-fi, so I don't need to rely on the 3G working. The nook has a user-replaceable battery. It reads open formats like PDF and ebup natively, so I don't need to rely on the B&N storefront to buy my books. The nook runs Android, and is relatively easy to jailbreak, so I don't have to rely on B&N for software updates.

      So, I figure that the nook is still going to be a handy device even if B&N goes out of business.

      --
      "Work is the curse of the drinking classes." -Oscar Wilde
    4. Re:Let me tell you... by MBGMorden · · Score: 5, Interesting

      I've not been to a Borders in years, but I've never even got the point of the DVD/CD section in the local bookstores here (which in this area are typically B&N and Books-a-million). They rarely have stuff that other places like Best Buy don't, and the prices are ridiculous. Boxed sets that are $30 at a regular store will be $65 in Barnes and Noble. Sure, they'll sometimes run a sale, and they have those "membership" cards to give some discounts, but even after you factor in all that stuff you're still typically paying more.

      Reality check to them: you're never going to get by selling the same thing everybody else does for double the price because it's in a trendy setting. Bookstores excel in one area: having the books that aren't necessarily the latest teen craze. I'm not exactly going to find a copy of Dandelion Wine down at Wal-mart, but I can at B&N.

      Stock those hard to find books, and for goodness sakes sort them in same sane fashion(sorting by category can be confusing - sometimes science fiction novels end up in "Literature" instead of the "Science Fiction/Fantasy" section for example). Put in a terminal that allows customers to look up what books you have in stock and show what shelf it's located on.

      And if they really wanted to pull in some extra customers - run a free e-book special for purchases in the brick and mortar store. I can imagine a lot more people buying there if Barnes and Noble had a code included with the books sold in their store that allowed you a free e-book copy of the work for your Nook - only for books purchased in the physical store (and naturally using that "no value until activated at the register" scheme so that people couldn't copy the codes out of the books).

      --
      "People who think they know everything are very annoying to those of us who do."-Mark Twain
  2. We live in a multimedia word by ClaraBow · · Score: 4, Informative

    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.

    1. Re:We live in a multimedia word by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

      We have a PS3, an xbox 360 and a Wii, plus a PSP and an NDS. We have several hundred DVDs and blu-ray titles, plus on demand FiOS, several computers around the house and netflix. Our two kids spend more time in books than on all those combined. Don't blame the options available, blame the parents.

    2. Re:We live in a multimedia word by DrSkwid · · Score: 5, Insightful

      If your parents read to you, more chance you'll grow up liking books & reading.

      --
      There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
    3. Re:We live in a multimedia word by Sycraft-fu · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Also getting them books they enjoy. Something I see far too much, particularly from schools, is this emphasis on "classics." They want kids to read "good" literature and thus try to cram stuff they don't like at them. This very much leads to a books = boring kind of mentality. Let kids read what they want to read, even if you don't consider it to have literary value. I'm not saying don't offer them classic books, but if they don't want them leave it alone.

      For that matter, maybe what they are reading now will be classic some day. More than a couple of the "great" books we were made to read in school really weren't in my opinion. Wuthering Heights is basically a trash romance novel, it just happens to be an OLD trash romance novel and one that people latched on to as being "classic" for that reason.

    4. Re:We live in a multimedia word by Kpau · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Agreed. But you're watching the intellectual death spiral that is the result of two generations of parental fail in a large percentage of the population (at least in the US). Side note: its very interesting to sit in the kids section of Barnes&Noble and do a little anthropological observation. Watch which families head for the shitty books that squeak and squawk and are mostly pictures. Listen to kids far too old hate on "chapter books". Watch them simply screw with the displays and misbehave ... Now compare this versus the families that sit and read together quietly and put books back that they aren't going to buy. There's about an 80/20 split... hard to sell books to an Idiocracy. This percentage has substantively changed in the last 25 years or so. Yeah, there are pockets of goodness but it rather reminds me of a sociological version of entering a dark age.

  3. Re:I still enjoy reading a good physcal book(store by Black+Parrot · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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
  4. Maybe if they charged sane prices by antifoidulus · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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
    1. Re:Maybe if they charged sane prices by gstoddart · · Score: 4, Insightful

      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.

      Well, I think more accurately what happens is what you're describing is factors outside of their control.

      I don't think they need those margins because they feel 'entitled' to them, so much as Amazon has been able to rely on its sheet size to work on smaller margins. B&N is now simply being squeezed out so badly, they they can't compete.

      For them to sell at the same price as Amazon, they'd likely have to do it at an even greater loss -- which will squeeze them dry even faster.

      Amazon has truly been able to exploit Economies of scale, and B&N has not. With fewer people buying books overall, and Amazon being able to sell a much larger volume at a lower price, B&N has been squeezed from both ends.

      This isn't about entitlement.

      --
      Lost at C:>. Found at C.
    2. Re:Maybe if they charged sane prices by bertoelcon · · Score: 4, Insightful

      That would explain why the Half-Price Books around here are doing great. They are usually the same price as Amazon with a brick and mortar store.

      --
      Anything can be found funny, from a certain point of view.
  5. Mom and Pop by whisper_jeff · · Score: 5, Funny

    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...

  6. An interesting take on why they're failing by MikeRT · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

  7. Sad Day for Print by radicalpi · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.

  8. Funny enough... by wandazulu · · Score: 4, Informative

    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.