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Bookstores are dying. Barnes and Noble’s pricing policy may help explain why

6 points by erehweb 5y ago

cafard 5y ago
There used to be four Barnes and Noble bookstore easy to reach from downtown Washington, all within a short walk of a Metro station: downtown on 12th about E NW; at Union Station; at Woodmont and Bethesda Avenues in Bethesda, Maryland; in Clarendon (a neighborhood of Arlington County, Virginia). Of them, Clarendon is left. I heard that the Bethesda store was profitable, but the landlord wouldn't renew. I think that it is now an Anthropologie.
mdrzn 5y ago
https://archive.md/UOGlc https://archive.md/UOGlc
aurizon 5y ago
The U of T library has been purging their collections of old archived journals - possibly onlining them as well. They also toss out 3-4 cubic meters of all sorts of books/ They put them in the University swap shop at 10 cents each in large cubic meter bins of wheels. about a dozen bins. New bins enter full and the book buyers burrow and more. and by the time the bins reach the end in about 2 weeks, the rest are pulped. The University gets donated books as well as their own aging collection. If a book is not used for XX years, I suspect they allow people at them and then pulp them. I looked at some fresh bins - nothing at all I wanted even if free. Covid has reduced access, I have not been there for over a year, but I hear it is open again - if I have a mind to browse...
- toomuchtodo 5y ago
  Is there any chance you could put the U of T folks in touch with the Internet Archive? They would likely accept artifacts of value for digitization. https://help.archive.org/hc/en-us/articles/360017876312-How-do-I-make-a-physical-donation-to-the-Internet-Archive- https://help.archive.org/hc/en-us/articles/360017876312-How-...
  - aurizon 5y ago
    I will mention the idea then next time I visit the swap shop - maybe in January 2022 and see if it gets any traction. One problem is one meter box will be 1000-1300 pounds, and the university will probably not want to ship cross border to the USA at University expense/ There are a numbre of people doing this now, some actually shear the binding off and send the book through a high speed double sided page scanner. Some also use OCR software to create a text file. There are some youtubes on it. I do not know how they correct typos or missed pages. A spell checker will catch a good proportion, I am sure there are a number of book scanner fail modes. The solution = hand correction = the problem,
icedchai 5y ago
I used to go to Barnes and Noble all the time, hang out in the cafe, read random books that caught my interest. Sometimes I even bought a few! I went a few times this summer, but basically covid ended that for me.
satya71 5y ago
Wonder if Barnes and Noble make more money from the affiliate commission than from selling the book? May be they're riding the coat-tails of Amazon's cheaper distribution and better negotiating power.

6 points by erehweb 5y ago

There used to be four Barnes and Noble bookstore easy to reach from downtown Washington, all within a short walk of a Metro station: downtown on 12th about E NW; at Union Station; at Woodmont and Bethesda Avenues in Bethesda, Maryland; in Clarendon (a neighborhood of Arlington County, Virginia). Of them, Clarendon is left. I heard that the Bethesda store was profitable, but the landlord wouldn't renew. I think that it is now an Anthropologie.

mdrzn 5y ago

https://archive.md/UOGlc https://archive.md/UOGlc

aurizon 5y ago

The U of T library has been purging their collections of old archived journals - possibly onlining them as well. They also toss out 3-4 cubic meters of all sorts of books/ They put them in the University swap shop at 10 cents each in large cubic meter bins of wheels. about a dozen bins. New bins enter full and the book buyers burrow and more. and by the time the bins reach the end in about 2 weeks, the rest are pulped. The University gets donated books as well as their own aging collection. If a book is not used for XX years, I suspect they allow people at them and then pulp them. I looked at some fresh bins - nothing at all I wanted even if free. Covid has reduced access, I have not been there for over a year, but I hear it is open again - if I have a mind to browse...

toomuchtodo 5y ago
Is there any chance you could put the U of T folks in touch with the Internet Archive? They would likely accept artifacts of value for digitization. https://help.archive.org/hc/en-us/articles/360017876312-How-do-I-make-a-physical-donation-to-the-Internet-Archive- https://help.archive.org/hc/en-us/articles/360017876312-How-...
- aurizon 5y ago
  I will mention the idea then next time I visit the swap shop - maybe in January 2022 and see if it gets any traction. One problem is one meter box will be 1000-1300 pounds, and the university will probably not want to ship cross border to the USA at University expense/ There are a numbre of people doing this now, some actually shear the binding off and send the book through a high speed double sided page scanner. Some also use OCR software to create a text file. There are some youtubes on it. I do not know how they correct typos or missed pages. A spell checker will catch a good proportion, I am sure there are a number of book scanner fail modes. The solution = hand correction = the problem,

icedchai 5y ago

I used to go to Barnes and Noble all the time, hang out in the cafe, read random books that caught my interest. Sometimes I even bought a few! I went a few times this summer, but basically covid ended that for me.

satya71 5y ago

Wonder if Barnes and Noble make more money from the affiliate commission than from selling the book? May be they're riding the coat-tails of Amazon's cheaper distribution and better negotiating power.