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Amazon Gets Blow-Back Over Plan To Sell Kindles At Small Bookshops
Rambo Tribble writes "No sooner had Amazon revealed their plan to offer independent book shops the Kindle for re-sale, along with a kick-back on e-book purchases, than the fur began to fly. It appears the shops view the plan as Amazon-assisted suicide. Given the apparent terms of the deal, it looks like they may have a point. Amazon may well have done themselves more harm than good with this ploy. One storeowner wrote, 'Hmmm, let's see. We sell Kindles for essentially no profit, the new Kindle customer is in our store where they can browse and discover books, the new Kindle customer can then check the price on Amazon and order the e-book. We make a little on their e-book purchases, but then lose them as a customer completely after two years. Doesn't sound like such a great partnership to me.'"
You might as well get what money you can while you can. Owning a book store does not sound like a thing that is going to last for long. Maybe if you ask nicely, you can get Amazon to put some of their delivery lockers in your store.
Big Warehouse Book stores kill the independent book stores. Amazon killed the Big Book stores. But the silver lining is that the death of the Big Warehouse Book stores gave new life to the independents. So now Amazon tries to kill the independents, but they are not morons.
The independents were saved by Amazon, but that doesn't mean they are stupid enough to let Amazon kill them next.
How is this any worse for the small bookstores than their customers buying a Kindle from some other retailer, or direct from amazon.com? They'd still be browsing in the store, checking online prices, buying the e-books, and eventually ceasing to be a customer. The bookstore would simply have deprived itself of an opportunity to be the one selling the Kindles and getting a cut of e-book revenues in the meantime.
Do these bookstores really think that refusing to sell the devices themselves will slow adoption?
"The state is that great fiction by which everyone tries to live at the expense of everyone else." - Bastiat
At peak, Blockbuster alone had 9,000 video rental stores. The last day to rent a video from Blockbuster is tomorrow. All the stores are closing. When will the last DVD/Blu-Ray disk be made?
Bookstores are following the trend of video stores, about ten years behind. Borders went bust two years ago. Barnes and Noble is the last big chain. Soon, no more chain bookstores. Then, no more bookstores. Then, no more printed books.
Meg Ryan falls in love with Jeff Bezos at the end.
BlockBuster just decided to close its remaining stores.
Heres a hint, your business model is already dead.
There will of course be some room for quite some time for novelty, nostalgia, and those who simply refuse to go digital... but that is a shrinking market.
Sorry.
P.S. i consider myself one of those who prefers paper - but im not dumb enough to think that my kindle which weighs nothing and has 40 giant volumes on it isnt fast becoming the FAR superior product overall (barring the Orwellian perishable drawbacks of E-readers).
I'm firmly in camp ebook. Let's disclose that up front.
Book stores should charge cover. The experience of browsing in a book store is much better than browsing Amazon's web site. The tablet kindle store is better but it still doesn't compare to browsing on a shelf, reading a page on a whim. So when it's time to find something new to read, I'll go spend an hour in Barnes & Noble and make a list of a dozen books. I'll probably buy a coffee while there, but otherwise B&N is making nothing off me.
That's not fair to them, but that is how their business is structured. I fear bookstores collapsing. I preferred Borders and was disappointed when it went under. Don't want that to happen to B&N. But what answer is there? There are only a handful of reference-type paper books I would buy. Might get a calendar once a year. Couple presents. But Amazon gets most of my book dollars. That's just sad reality.
So, I say, charge me cover. Heck, charge everybody cover. $2 to come in. If you buy a book, offer a $2 discount. The bookstore is suddenly less disadvantaged then previously. If you are a paper book buyer, you're not disadvantaged. If you really are a paper book buyer and are simply browsing, suddenly, you're the party suffering. But you're incidental to this- if bookstores are in trouble, you're going to lose them eventually. So you have the heavy burden of paying a couple dollars, or you can browse at a library instead.
The small bookstores TFA discusses aren't necessarily the same as B&N - but that's the problem. They have even less to offer. Stocking Kindles may not be the answer, but they're getting squeezed by both Amazon and B&N. They need to find a niche compatible with their clients to survive.
Implicit Evaluation with PHP
Amazon is offering an option. Don't like it? Don't play. However Amazon isn't going away, they aren't going to stop selling eBooks (or physical books). So plan accordingly. If you think not partnering with them is best do that, if you think it is best, do that. But don't assume you can cry and they'll go away. You WILL have to deal with their competition.
I read that first as "kidneys" and I'm thinking, "ya, they'd probably see some repercussions from that."
As for the actual, much less serious issue, I don't know about the bookstores' reservations. The people you're luring into the store are obviously interested in touching a Kindle before buying it and/or want it right now instead of tomorrow or next week on their doorstep. I'd think this overlaps with the population who'd see a physical book they wanted and also decide to buy it right now instead of ordering it online. They're probably also people who would buy certain books in e-reader format but not others.
Besides, if a corner bookstore sells a Kindle or not, customers will get them if they want 'em. This way, they got them in the door. Retailers of all types complain of customers "showrooming." Is it as bad as they say? I've bought something in a bricks and mortar store I thought I was just going to look at -- "it's an extra five bucks here, but I feel impulsive now!"
I am not a crackpot.
If bookstores want to stay in business, they need to level the playing field. Requiring sales taxes on internet purchases was a good start, but only a start. For example, Amazon isn't forced by the cities to overbuild its parking lots as brick & mortar bookstores are.
Bookstores also need to adopt Amazon's business model. Amazon has low storage costs (warehouses in rural areas) but has to ship individual packages to each customer, while bookstores have high storage costs but ship everything to the store by freight. Bookstores could downsize their physical presence, keep most of their inventory in inexpensive rural warehouses like Amazon, and offer free overnight or 2-day shipping to the store, no membership required.
So there's still room for innovation, if bookstores are willing to learn from the competition.
Any sufficiently unpopular but cohesive argument is indistinguishable from trolling.
What electronic device lasts more than 2 years? They have to buy new devices, if you've built the love of your customer over the past two years they'll come back, and you get their royalties for another 2....
Readers are smarter than that and book store owners should be too. I don't patronize book stores anymore. If I did however, I'd have an axe to grind with Amazon and wouldn't be an ebook person. If a book store owner doesn't want to profit from the sale of a Kindle, he simply doesn't sell them. Sorry, non-issue. To each his own.
Your industry is falling from under your feet. Buying paper makes just about as much sense an putting 2 quarters into a filth phlegm & piss covered phone in a cold plexiglass & metal booth. Take the fucking handout. TAKE THE HANDOUT.
The independent books that I know have a small edges going for them.
There is new market for “shopping / entertainment“. You go to the store to be entertained and you pay via a purchase. Kind of like renting office space at the coffee shop for the price of a cup of coffee. Most of these shops tend to be narrowly focused, have a deep catalog of hard to fine / out of print stuff (which is sold via Amazon), have lots of events (singings, clubs, etc.) and sell a lot of stuff other than books.
Oddly the one that I am thinking about was the Amazon Bookstore specializing in woman and lesbian literature. There was a bit of a tussle between them and Amazon.com over the name and the more or less won that fight.
This offer will directly undercut what remains of their business model. Someone might be a dumbass here, but it's not the shop owners.
Customers are increasingly looking for ebook editions. If the customer can't get what they're looking for, do you think they're just going to shrug and buy whatever the bookstore wants to stock instead? Nope. They'll shrug, go home and buy the Kindle off of Amazon's Web site and go ahead and buy the ebook editions like they were planning to. Either way, the bookstore's lost their business because the bookstore isn't selling what the customer wants to buy.
Bookstores are going to have to figure out a way around this, or go out of business. No third option. If I owned a bookstore I'd be seriously looking at how I could work with Amazon and the Kindle store. The big attraction of bookstores has always been that customers can look at the books before buying, but Amazon can do that through their Web site with previews. The other big attraction has been bookstores with knowledgeable staff who can help customers select books. That, though, means the bookstore can't hire college kids for minimum wage to run the register. It might take a complete shift, from "bookstore as a place to buy books" to "bookstore as a place to browse and discuss books". Kind of like a coffee shop with a better reading library. It may be that there isn't a way for bookstores to remain in business without ceasing to be bookstores. But bookstores are going to have to accept the fact that electronic delivery of books has irrevocably changed their business.
I'd note this may go for publishers too. It's hard to get into print unless you're already a successful published author. The only route is self-publishing through Kindle or the like. But if an author's successful enough through that route to attract a conventional publisher, what's going to happen when that author very reasonably asks what they need a publisher for at this point?
I used to spend days in the library, but lately all the information I want is easily accessible online, wikipedia or google. I haven't been to the library in years. What's it been now, 5 years? 7? I don't even remember. For all I know, it may have been demolished since then. I would guess that soon they all will be.
We make a little on their e-book purchases, but then lose them as a customer completely after two years.
The way things are going now, they're going to be out of business in two years anyway. Maybe they can hang out with the guy that had the hardware store before Home Depot came to town. Or the people with the health food store before Whole Foods. Or the stationary store before Office Max. Or the printer before Kinko's. Or the computer store before Dell.
Your alternative to Amazon assisted suicide is Amazon unassisted suicide.
I get the model where you go into BestBuy, look at the TV, listen to the stereo and then purchase online.
But what does browsing for the book on the shelves get you over searching Amazon.com? You still get the same 'about the author' and plot taglines on the back...
Maybe there's some nostalgia that people enjoy walking through the stacks and prefer to read via eReader. For those people, the bookstore will die anyhow because no purchase will ever be made via the bookstore.
These bookstores need differentiate themselves from eReader providers just like movie theaters differentiate themselves from watching at home and Netflix. Movie theaters provide a service you don't have at home (a 100ft screen and a huge wattage sound system, and stadium seating).
Bookstores need something as well, book clubs (how do you keep people from joining the club that purchased the book via amazon), social gatherings, something...
All of these businesses died because the physical location couldn't differentiate itself from the delivered direct to home version:
*Arcades
*Video Rental shops
*Computer stores (CompUSA etc..)
*Bookstores
Isn't this the plan where the store that sells the Kindle gets a cut of all purchases made thru said Kindle? So that kickback expires after two years. Sell them a new kindle and reset the kickback clock. There's always a new reader coming out with new features, more storage, better display, etc.
This reminds me of that thread a year or three back where it was pointed out that book publishers need to realize that they're in the business of selling content, not paper. Paper is a content delivery/storage/display method. Kindle is the new paper in this scenario.
Paper books had a pretty good run. Over 500 years by my math. Now the business model is changing. Bookstores can find a way to change with it or they can bleed money until they go bankrupt. Their stubbornness isn't going to change reality. If they want to keep selling paper, they need to shift their physical inventory to publications that can't easily make the transition to electronic distribution. Large format books with lots of pictures. Art, atlases, photos, etc. Take the leftover space and stock it with readers (only from companies that will give you a kickback) and accessories. Put in a coffee/tea counter, comfy chairs, fireplace, etc. Fast WiFi, charging stations for devices. Have "meet the author" nights and "get the most out of your reader" nights.
As someone who needs to read a lot for their job, I find the definition of a book does not necessarily imply a square block made out of slivers of paper. In fact, any of the things like that that I have obtained in recent memory suffer due to lack of portability - I don't have enough additional carrying capacity to keep a book geographically close to myself for times when I want to read it.
If only there was a way for book stores to sell digital versions of the text with the item.... just like they did 12 years ago when I last had to buy an assload of textbooks.
To be fair, I don't own a Kindle. Why would I? I have notebook computers and smart phones and tablets, projectors and text-to-speech applications. Hell, even graphic calculators. I mean, you would HAVE to be blind to actually consider crappy-ass Kindles a realistic threat to your business in the wake of the countless other alternatives to read electronically.
But what does browsing for the book on the shelves get you over searching Amazon.com? You still get the same 'about the author' and plot taglines on the back...
Well, for starters, most books aren't shrink-wrapped. I can pick it up, leaf through it, and start reading to see if it hooks me. Sure some of Amazon's books give a sample chapter maybe even a "Take me to a random page" function but it isn't the same as holding it in your hand.
Slow Down Cowboy! It's been 1 hour, 47 minutes since you last successfully posted a comment
But what does browsing for the book on the shelves get you over searching Amazon.com?
Well, um... you, uh, get the see the book???
Seriously. I buy almost all non-fiction books, and 2-3 minutes leafing through the book, looking up a few things in the index, and reading a couple specific passages on topics I'm looking for will immediately tell me: (1) does the book contain the information I need and care about? (2) does the author have a freakin' clue what he/she is talking about? (3) are these things valuable enough to justify the cost?
I can spend time skimming dozens of reviews on Amazon and still have no clue about the answers to those questions. Sure, for some books on Amazon I can get a limited preview or limited search capability, but that's generally not enough to really let me check what I need to.
I own a couple thousand physical books. I can only think of ONE physical book that I purchased in an actual store that I regret buying, and I was in a hurry and just picked up some Barnes & Noble special for $1.99 or something. On the other hand, I must have at least 20 or more books I purchased online that turned out to be much less useful than I imagined. I just can't tell adequately from online descriptions. And returning them is often too much of a pain to bother.
On a related note, there's also the seredipitous encounter with interesting books on a physical shelf. While Amazon may be good at telling me what other people tend to buy who buy the books I'm already searching for, it's very unlikely to tell me about the really cool books out there that people like me may not always know about. Library shelves, on the other hand, are great for containing those hidden treasures, sitting there right next to a book I know on a similar topic. Actual physical bookstores can be good about that as well, though only if they have the kind of specialized non-fiction I like to browse for (and very few do anymore).
I'm very likely to walk out of a physical bookstore with some book I found and thought to be really interesting, and I almost never regret those purchases. Online, I only tend to buy books I already have heard about and which already are supposed to be "good," because I often can't adequately evaluate them otherwise.
Used bookstores are even more critical, because they carry all sorts of out-of-print stuff that's even more difficult to sort through on Amazon (if it's there at all).
You still get the same 'about the author' and plot taglines on the back...
I don't give a crap about the author bio or what some random other people say about how this is the "coolest book ever." I suppose if that's the way you evaluate the books you want to buy, I guess there's no benefit to a physical bookstore. I, personally, prefer to actually examine the merchandise... like the people you mention who might actually like to look at the TV or listen to the stereo before purchasing.
My kingdom for mod points! Well said.
I can see it now: in a few years being a writer one will come across the question if one has acctually published something "for real" or just ... virtual.
real books are the new gucci bags and rolex watches?
Sorry, I'm just not going to buy ebooks until they fix the pricing. When the role playing game industry went to direct digital distribution, it was understood that the product was 50% off. Amazon, however, thinks that not only do I need to shell out a couple hundred dollars for a proprietary device that allows them to remote delete my purchased products, but that they also get to charge a premium for the product itself. No thank you.
If I buy a used book through Amazon, odds are that I can find it for under 1 dollar. I can frequently find it for 1 cent. But I have to pay $3.99 for S&H for *each* book. Maybe the brick & mortar stores should sell said books for $2-$3, so that the total purchase price is less than Amazon + S&H. 50% of something is better than 100% of nothing, and that's what B&M stores are looking at.
There's an old mantra about getting bodies in the store. It's not that simple. They need to pull wallets out. If people are going into B&M stores to window shop, then purchasing online via Amazon, then the B&M stores need to lower their prices to be competitive, or offer some other reason for people to spend money there. It has to be something that Amazon can't offer. Drinking coffee is not going to cut it.
You're going to lose the customer anyway because you're selling an obsolete item, something that joins expensive fountain pens, handmade suits, and buggy whips as items that once used to be commonplace but now are only used by elites with too much money.
But what does browsing for the book on the shelves get you over searching Amazon.com?
Well, um... you, uh, get the see the book???
Have you ever heard of "sample"? You know, that box just below the buying button on Amazon's page when you are browsing a book?
Yeah, you only get the first couple chapters, so you can see the index. But if you can't decide if you want the book even after seeing two chapters, then either the author is being extra sly, or you have a problem yourself.
PLUS, you can return a Kindle book. I don't know exactly what the rules are for returns, I have done it before after buying a book and then found out another cheaper edition (quite stupid for Amazon to have 2 electronic edition of the same book for different price).
You posted a whole page of rant about Kindle and never mentioned sample and returns at all, I got to wonder if you actually do own a Kindle or not.
Selection. Far superior to Amazon, even though the breadth is more narrow. Searching for similar stuff is much easier when you only have 100-200 books on a shelf in a section such as SciFi/Fantasy, Physics, or other topics. Popular stuff stays stocked, the less popular is rotated out for room to stock new stuff.
Amazon's suggestions are pretty lame really. Seeing the full cover in its own section is just...its almost alien to anyone familiar with books. Search is not that great either, and using filters to crawl through things is not as good as it could be. For a massive megastore online that started out offering books, I am usually fairly disappointed unless i know exactly what I am looking for.
This is what small bookstores have to offer. Selection. Knowledge. Personal touch. They need to figure out how to make that work for them instead of against. Right now they give it away for free, people come in and shop then buy it on Amazon cause its cheaper. They don't realize that as more and more do that it means the store will eventually go away.
They don't need protection, they need to innovate. They need to look at their strengths and figure out how to make those work for them. Work with publishing houses to get better discounts, better return deals. How to get money from the people coming into their stores. B&N has their cafe's. That's great for them but John's Bookshop down the street may not be able to do that on his own. so maybe he instead talks to Jane's Pastry Shop about an exchange program. She puts pastries in his shop for X price, with her advertising on it, he gets his cut of the sales and sends her new business. She puts adverts for his shop on her tables, with a small discount if they bring their receipt, and he kicks her back 5% of those sales. Local businesses need to realize they are part of a community and then make that work *for* them instead of treating themselves like a bunch of independent little states.
This is not the only way to fight back. But it is a great one. cross promoting works wonders, but its work. And just like the biggest players, the littlest ones don't want to put in the effort. They want to bitch and moan and pine for the good ol' days.
That's no way to run a business.
Yeah, what a fucking disappointment.
"We acknowledge that our customers will move completely to e-books once they get used to the idea and find out they can save money."
Hate to break it to you but that sounds incredibly niche, as opposed to selling books which is popular. Sorry buggy whip salespeople, dead trees are on the outs, which is good because we need more of them to live.
In this digital era even books are getting encrypted and changing to E-books. future kids will be holding digital equipment like these at their hand . so i feel its a good intention in the future development perspective.