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What's sad about Barnes and Noble is that the book industry never saw the ebook and online buying coming. So they kept the price of books high, pressured by big

What's sad about Barnes and Noble is that the book industry never saw the ebook and online buying coming. So they kept the price of books high, pressured by big name authors who were use to the big royalty checks, and they can't move away. Imagine if B&N could compete on price with Amazon, and the booksellers had to take what the market is willing to pay.

Finnucane 9y ago
Never saw ebook book buying coming? What? In the '90s we were selling books for the Palm Pilot. I remember when a sample of the Rocket showed up at the office. We thought, hey, now maybe people will start buying ebooks! I also remember when Amazon first started selling books online, and they were getting their data from Books in Print. Despite the name, BIP lists a lot of books that are not in print. Some effort was required to get them to clean up their data. In those days, B&N was rapidly expanding their superstore system, and trying to drive out the independents by, you know, discounting. And we said, hey, once they've gotten rid of the competition, those discounts will go away. And they did.
- smacktoward 9y ago
  Not to mention that B&N went in big on ebooks. B&N's Nook platform was the only competitor comparable to Amazon's Kindle ecosystem. It didn't work out, of course, but that's something very different than missing the coming tide of ebooks altogether. > Imagine if B&N could compete on price with Amazon One of the points of the article is that they can't*, because Amazon has other lines of business and B&N does not. So Amazon can use the revenue from those other businesses to swallow losses on book sales in order to drive out competition.
  - chx 9y ago
    I am just a single data point but still I have a story to tell: I had a B&N Nook. Then I didn't and I still was buying Nook eBooks. You know why? Because DRM was a fig leaf. They had their DRM solution which was so easy to strip it's not even funny -- they encrypted your books with a key based on your name and credit card number (this might've originated with ereader.com). Then in 2015 March they changed algorithms and it was not so easy any more and I walked.
- ghaff 9y ago
  Yeah, it like how Kodak "never saw digital coming." Actually they had PhotoCD long before digital cameras were a widespread thing. You can recognize a shift to electrons and still not figure out a way to make a large chain B&M business work. Smaller scale, but one of the first larger bookstores around me to discount books on a consistent basis effectively helped drive a lot of the smaller bookstores that had been around forever out of business. Ten or twenty years later, they were complaining online when they were effectively driven out of business by Amazon.
  - Finnucane 9y ago
    But, rather infamously, a Kodak engineer cobbled together a rudimentary digital camera out of parts lying about in the lab, c. 1975, showed it to management, and they were like, who would want that.
    - ghaff 9y ago
      Oh, Kodak did plenty of things wrong. But the technology wasn't really there for a mass market digital camera for almost 25 years after that. And replacing a consumables business that was so big Kodak owned their own chemical company at one point was going to be difficult in any case. Fujifilm transitioned much better but they were much smaller and also had their own struggles.
chipotle_coyote 9y ago
pressured by big name authors who were use to the big royalty checks Um. Goodness. Traditionally, publishers set a wholesale price and a "suggested" cover price. Retailers set the retail price, what the customer is actually going to pay -- but the royalties paid to authors are based on the publisher's suggested cover price. If the book lists for $24.95 and the author's contract stipulates 17% royalties on hardcovers, it doesn't matter if you, the consumer, pays $24.95, $18.75 or 25¢ -- the author is going to get $4.24. Amazon, like Walmart, can afford to price physical books at or even below wholesale price, because they're making the money up in other ways. B&N and most other booksellers can't compete on price with Amazon because they can't do that. Amazon has long been weirdly close to the old joke of "we lose money on every sale, but we'll make it up in volume"; the vast majority of their profit comes from AWS. Also, B&N was actually selling books online before the consumer internet, via Prodigy. They were selling on the web by 1997, and the Nook ebook reader was introduced in 2009, only two years after the Kindle. Whatever their historic and current faults have been, being entirely ignorant of the electronic world isn't really one of them.

Finnucane 9y ago

Never saw ebook book buying coming? What? In the '90s we were selling books for the Palm Pilot. I remember when a sample of the Rocket showed up at the office. We thought, hey, now maybe people will start buying ebooks! I also remember when Amazon first started selling books online, and they were getting their data from Books in Print. Despite the name, BIP lists a lot of books that are not in print. Some effort was required to get them to clean up their data. In those days, B&N was rapidly expanding their superstore system, and trying to drive out the independents by, you know, discounting. And we said, hey, once they've gotten rid of the competition, those discounts will go away. And they did.

smacktoward 9y ago
Not to mention that B&N went in big on ebooks. B&N's Nook platform was the only competitor comparable to Amazon's Kindle ecosystem. It didn't work out, of course, but that's something very different than missing the coming tide of ebooks altogether. > Imagine if B&N could compete on price with Amazon One of the points of the article is that they can't*, because Amazon has other lines of business and B&N does not. So Amazon can use the revenue from those other businesses to swallow losses on book sales in order to drive out competition.
- chx 9y ago
  I am just a single data point but still I have a story to tell: I had a B&N Nook. Then I didn't and I still was buying Nook eBooks. You know why? Because DRM was a fig leaf. They had their DRM solution which was so easy to strip it's not even funny -- they encrypted your books with a key based on your name and credit card number (this might've originated with ereader.com). Then in 2015 March they changed algorithms and it was not so easy any more and I walked.
ghaff 9y ago
Yeah, it like how Kodak "never saw digital coming." Actually they had PhotoCD long before digital cameras were a widespread thing. You can recognize a shift to electrons and still not figure out a way to make a large chain B&M business work. Smaller scale, but one of the first larger bookstores around me to discount books on a consistent basis effectively helped drive a lot of the smaller bookstores that had been around forever out of business. Ten or twenty years later, they were complaining online when they were effectively driven out of business by Amazon.
- Finnucane 9y ago
  But, rather infamously, a Kodak engineer cobbled together a rudimentary digital camera out of parts lying about in the lab, c. 1975, showed it to management, and they were like, who would want that.
  - ghaff 9y ago
    Oh, Kodak did plenty of things wrong. But the technology wasn't really there for a mass market digital camera for almost 25 years after that. And replacing a consumables business that was so big Kodak owned their own chemical company at one point was going to be difficult in any case. Fujifilm transitioned much better but they were much smaller and also had their own struggles.

chipotle_coyote 9y ago

pressured by big name authors who were use to the big royalty checks Um. Goodness. Traditionally, publishers set a wholesale price and a "suggested" cover price. Retailers set the retail price, what the customer is actually going to pay -- but the royalties paid to authors are based on the publisher's suggested cover price. If the book lists for $24.95 and the author's contract stipulates 17% royalties on hardcovers, it doesn't matter if you, the consumer, pays $24.95, $18.75 or 25¢ -- the author is going to get $4.24. Amazon, like Walmart, can afford to price physical books at or even below wholesale price, because they're making the money up in other ways. B&N and most other booksellers can't compete on price with Amazon because they can't do that. Amazon has long been weirdly close to the old joke of "we lose money on every sale, but we'll make it up in volume"; the vast majority of their profit comes from AWS. Also, B&N was actually selling books online before the consumer internet, via Prodigy. They were selling on the web by 1997, and the Nook ebook reader was introduced in 2009, only two years after the Kindle. Whatever their historic and current faults have been, being entirely ignorant of the electronic world isn't really one of them.