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Nook Failure, Lack of Foot Traffic Could Spell Doom For Barnes & Noble
tripleevenfall sends in a story at Yahoo Finance forecasting the end of Barnes & Noble. Quoting:
"The last nationwide book retailer may be writing its final chapter. Barnes & Noble's latest quarterly results show a 7.4% drop in revenues and a $122 million loss for the fourth-quarter of its fiscal year. B&N's disastrous focus on making Nook e-Readers is weighing heavily on the chain's operations. A 17% drop in Nook revenues and stunning $475 million loss for the device division in 2013 are hobbling the company's ability to keep its stores afloat. B&N appears to be cannibalizing itself with branded tablets and cross-platform e-reader applications, which render the stores increasingly irrelevant."
On my way to the Starbucks in the back
I just got done with a garage sale and almost none of my (cheaply priced!) books sold, lots fewer than when I had a garage sale about five years ago.
I'd suppose more people who actually read are transitioning to e-readers. This might also account in general for why there are fewer visitors to B&N stores.
Hail Eris, full of mischief...
E pluribus sanguinem
Microsoft just invested $1 billion into B&N.
How much longer are the shareholders going to let monkey boy run things? A lot longer I hope ;)
Mod me down, my New Earth Global Warmingist friends!
'Amazon' and 'antitrust'.
Give it time. They're so overwhelmingly dominant in online retail, that people will be calling them the Standard Oil of the 21st century, if they aren't already.
The summary seems to attack B&N for trying to adapt to changing times rather than sticking their head in the sand. Even if it was ultimately futile, I don't think it was boneheaded.
Remember when the folks at B&N were hailed as visionary geniuses compared to the doofuses at Borders because B&N had an eReader?
Even on Slashdot, not enough people seem to be concerned about Amazon getting a monopoly on e-books.
[Sir Garlon] is the marvellest knight that is now living, for he destroyeth many good knights, for he goeth invisible.
turn it into a pr0n focused device and rebrand it as "the nookie"
how many pairs of boxer shorts should you own?
The last time I walked into one of their stores it seemed more like a toy store. Most of it was toys, puzzles, and games. It wasn't what I was expecting at all.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
(Reston VA), In part due to contract dispute with the mall owner. But they could have moved into a nice Borders store location about 5 miles away in Sterling VA. Instead, they pointed me to their store in Tyson's Corner, which costs me $5 in tolls and puts me in the middle of a traffic mess. I felt sorry for the Reston store employees and the managers who did a good job with our local store, handing one my B&N Readers Card. I said, "Send this to Corporate. Tell them to look up how much I've spent -in this store- over the last 15 years. Tell them that 95% of that business is going to Amazon, because I will not drive to Tysons and B&N offers me no alternative."
I really miss browsing in a paper bookstore, Amazon does not offer the same experience (their suggestions aren't as useful for me as they think they are...) The loss of B&N will be significant for consumers, I think. But I'm mostly through the 5 stages of mourning for them.
B&N has been somewhat schizophrenic about eBooks from the beginning, trying desperately to keep up with Amazon on one hand and yet not cannibalize their precious treeware stores. As a result, they've managed to fail at both goals.
Worse yet, they managed to buy, and then ignore, everything Fictionwise could have taught them about marketing eBooks and doing it right. I was a loyal (and VERY happy) Fictionwise customer for a decade. FW did three things that were absolutely priceless in marketing eBooks to me.
1. FW let you request email notifications when a new book by a particular author you were interested in was available. Naturally, as soon as I got such a notification...
B&N is still doing the old "These are the books WE want to sell you." routine with "push" emails and "new now" notices for books I couldn't care less about.
2. FW (and Books on Board) had a shopping cart for eBooks. Fictionwise had both "buy all of these at once" and "download them all in a ZIP file." My record buy was something like 25 books in one day when one of my favorite authors had all of his stuff released (finally) to eBook format. Fewer obstacles to purchase == more purchases. You'd think an experienced retailer would figure that out.
B&N: "Click once for each book" crud that both Amazon and B&N impose on readers. The day Paulo Coelho's books were put on sale at $1/each, I had to click "buy" and "confirm" eleven times, and when it came time to balance my credit card account... (cue loud curses)
3. If you went to an author's page at FW (e.g. Poul Anderson), you got a "show me only books by this author I don't own" and "buy everything that's showing" buttons. See my note about "fewer obstacles" above.
B&N: MISSING IN ACTION
4. FW frequently offered the ability to buy eBooks at listed price and get an equal amount in store credit. Result: I frequently took advantage of the offer, got best-sellers at full list, and then used the credits to buy more eBooks. From my standpoint, I got the best-sellers for free, and then used the credits to "buy out" other authors I wanted everything they did.
B&N: MISSING IN ACTION
It is a shame that B&N bought the major ebook retailer who knew how to do it right and then ignored everything they had done in order to cripple their eBook store as a doomed effort to force people to walk into their bricks-and-mortar.
Think of it as evolution in action.
Bookstores are dead, and I include in that Amazon's book business. I used to shop regularly at Walden's, B. Dalton's, and all them, pop in once every 2 or 3 weeks. Now I hardly ever visit. These days, I'd rather participate in a discussion such as these on Slashdot, than passively read a book.
When I do want to read a book, I much prefer to get it through a public library, rather than participate any further in this overly commercialized private bookstore and publishing business. Our public libraries should go digital, and I see the private bookstore as one of the obstacles to that. The digital public library would save us a great deal of money and give us far, far more access to published works than we now enjoy, but these scumbags in the private book sales industry have done all they could to delay and derail it. That being the case, the death of the private bookstore is reason to celebrate.
Intellectual Property is a monopolistic, selfish, and defective concept. It is "tyranny over the mind of man"
It's not so much that reading habits are shifting from paper to digital as it is the limited tablet computer market. Apple iPad has a strong foothold in the tablet market. Few people want another tablet to carry around not to mention one that is focused on eReading and not much else.
Eternity: will that be smoking, or non-smoking? I Corinthians 6:9-10
There seems to be a preoccupation in the article description with the idea of having a national bookseller. I'm not sure we actually need one. Personally, I get pretty much all my books either online or from local used bookstores. Even online, I lean towards the used market unless the new copies are (after shipping on the used, since new is usually free shipping) about the same price or less.
There's a kind of irony to the fact that the book superstores are all losing the fight while the local used shops are pretty much always hubs of activity at the times I visit them. Have publishers retail-priced themselves out of the brick and mortar world, creating a culture where the new-book-buyers go online where volume makes discounting possible, and the used buyers comfortably go either way? It certainly seems that way.
Nook or no Nook, Barnes & Noble would have been fools to ignore the eBook concept. However, I think they may be making a mistake to pursue the devices any further. It's time to go the razor route. Give the handles away, make your money on the blades. The great thing is, once you've created the "handle", the cost of delivering it to tablets, phones, and computers you didn't have to market or sell is negligible.
In SOVIET RUSSIA... erm...NSA AMERICA, the Internet logs onto YOU!
Ditto. I find it particularly galling that Manassas still has a B&N but that the Reston area, with higher incomes & education, has none.
"Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past." -- George Orwell
That's the problem, I think. B&N stupidly is restricting itself to the US, when there's millions (heck, billions) of people outside of that one bloody country. Instead of buying a Nook, I got a Kobo Glo, and that's one sale lost for B&N. Amazon sells the Kindle in more countries and it's always selling like hotcakes, but they're very slow at it. There's a huge market outside of the US, but many American companies seem not to understand that.
No reads anymore. /. is no different.
tl;dr
Welcome to the Panopticon. Used to be a prison, now it's your home.
I switched from a Nook to a Kobo to support my local independent bookstore. The bookstore receives a cut of every book that I buy from Kobo.
You all know there's a used bookstore in your town. Go give them some business.
I grew up in Omaha. Downtown there was a used bookstore with more character than was probably healthy. It had more books then it knew what to to do with, a healthy set of extraneous stairs, an honor system for coffee, and a set of couches in front with a constant crowd. I think the regulars manned the register when the workers were busy.
But it didn't make too much money and they couldn't make rent. They tried selling records in the basement and some sort of art gallary on the upper levels, but that didn't pan out. So it closed up. And Omaha lost something important that day.
Now, apparently, a small town about 20 minutes gained something eventually, because the owner bought a building, moved his books there, and is still doing business. I'll have to find out if it has the same magic.
But anyway, just a reminder to support your local church of the literate.
all i get is an eagle shredding a book with a vulgar phrase. and the reason now one buys books is why should we pay 20 to thirty bucks for a physical copy when they charge way less than that for digital or for the same physical copy on amazon. my problem with barnes and nobel is if i have to buy a book for 45 from barnes and nobel and 27 on amazon since i already have to pay taxes on amazon purchases why not buy from amazon. you want people to buy your books instore? then price match amazon.
No, that's still a crappy design. I get that the thing is supposed to be collapsable, but things that can be folded up like that are supposed to be designed so that they fold up only when you want them too, such as by flipping a lever. When they're erected, they're supposed to stay that way, especially if they have people inside them! If a stroller is supposed to be for carting kids around, it shouldn't collapse as soon as a little upward force is placed on it; it should stay that way, even if you pick it up with the kid inside, until you activate some kind of release mechanism to make it fold up.
Ya think it might have been a joke? The poster decrying how nobody reads and the commenter giving a tl;dr? Maybe? Ya think?
Anyone care to speculate on what happens to all the e-books that B&N has sold if/when they go under? I know I don't "own" the books, rather I purchased some sort of licensing agreement which lets me view the books until ... when?
This is a huge and not often discussed down-side to e-books. Our first nook died a few weeks ago, I'll probably avoid purchasing another one for just this reason.