12 ms·

It seems like the key insight is that bookstores are no longer places to get books. If I want a specific book, I already know where to go: the internet. No phy

• jojobas 4y ago
  The bookstores also still have an edge in terms of getting you a book right now. I might want to revisit this in a year or two.
  • inthepipe 4y ago
    Maybe if you want the latest release of a popular author. In my experience, book inventories held by bookstores have decreased dramatically, which fits with the “carrying a curated selection” narrative. If I want anything released more than two years ago, the book store rarely has it, unless it’s a staple like 1984.
    • jakear 4y ago
      Depends on the store. I can have Amazon deliver me Egan by January 6 (9 days from now), or I can walk down to the local sci-fi store and pick one up off the shelf today. Of course, Barns and Noble don't even stock his books.
      • noduerme 4y ago
        Also, if your local bookstore doesn't have something in stock, they can order it for you, which helps support them.
      • pbhjpbhj 4y ago
        I'm not a prime member, but it's just before midnight Wednesday 28 December. If I order by 2am then Amazon UK says I can have Greg Egan's "Diaspora" (paperback) on Friday. None of the local bookshops open until after New Year (rural UK). I'm rarely that desperate but Amazon delivery beats petrol costs here and can take only a day longer (assuming goods are even on the shelf locally). I can get it from bookshop.org on Friday too, but it is £15.50, vs Amazon's £10.50.
        • reaperducer 4y ago
          Assuming the one you get from Amazon isn't a Chinese knockoff Google Translated into another language and back in an effort to dodge copyright claims. I can trust my local bookstores.
          • dismalpedigree 4y ago
            I concur. Books are one of the few things I am very particular about making sure I get the real thing. I don’t trust Amazon to do this.
            • inthepipe 4y ago
              Books just seem like such a bad thing to counterfeit. There is a super long tail of products, they weigh a lot and are expensive to ship, and aren’t expensive or high margin to begin with.
        • sofixa 4y ago
          > I can get it from bookshop.org on Friday too, but it is £15.50, vs Amazon's £10.50 France and a few other countries have the right idea here - the same book always costs the same, regardless if it's on Amazon, local bookstore, big chain store. There's a unique price set country-wide for the edition, and that's it, they have to compete on other things.
          • pm215 4y ago
            We used to have that in the UK (the "Net Book Agreement") for most of the 20th century, but it collapsed in the 1990s, I think under pressure from big chain bookshops like Dillons that wanted to be able to attract customers with discounts on books.
• xhevahir 4y ago
  I feel like Amazon used to be a good place for discovering new books and that they decided at some point it was more profitable to steer customers toward sponsored (if that's the word for it) items. Nowadays I look at Librarything for suggestions.
  • hattmall 4y ago
    Like pretty much every big tech company they have figured out that it's more profitable to give you what you don't want. If they give you what you want right away it's less time you spend looking at ads or potentially getting exposed to new things to buy. Google search results haven't become worse on accident. Amazon and eBay are the same way, poor search results create more conversions and more time engaged. It's the digital equivalent of grocery stores putting milk on the back wall.
    • toofy 4y ago
      i understand this is a drifting a bit, but to your grocery stores with milk on the back wall comment: we did a grocery store trip yesterday (full size grocery store) and i counted 7 different places they had salsa. different types of salsa at each location. four different locations (opposite corners of the store) for different types of cheese. it’s maddening the direction these companies are pulling us towards.
• johnchristopher 4y ago
  Last week I needed a copy of Atlas Obscura to gift to someone. I checked my local Barnes and Nobles website, they had a a copy on a shelf so I went and bought it. No way I would ever risk buying such books from Amazon. I am concerned about the condition it would arrive in, scams and delays. I bought a second book based on a librarian's recommendation. There was only 5 or 6 books of the kind I was interested in. It made choosing one easier. Amazon is tainted brand.
  • hgsgm 4y ago
    What is the risk when buying a book from Amazon? It might catch fire?
    • ChrisMarshallNY 4y ago
      There was a post here, a few weeks ago, by an author, complaining that Every. Single. Copy of his book on Amazon was a fake. Books are ridiculously easy to counterfeit, and can bring in quite a bit of cash. Amazon has made the conscious business decision to be a counterfeit souk. I guess they make lots of money from it, and I suspect they don’t really care about their retail brand anymore. From what I hear, it’s actually a loss leader.
      • birdymcbird 4y ago
        i thought amazon would dominate and conquer books market but they never got beyond just super basic concept of selling a book online. Finding interesting books is awful, everything is an ad. reading on kindle is ok. i have prime and once or twice a year read a free book on it. i assume the problem is complacency. I don’t think buying real solid books has really changed on Amazon at all in past 5 years. kindle digital reader is same as it was 5 years ago. i wonder how many people work in kindle and what they actually do.
        • lynx23 4y ago
          Well, Amazon used to be ahead. I vividly remember using their "Find me this out-of-print book" service once and being very positively surprised that it actually worked. Signed up for the out-of-print book, got a message about 3 months later, and BANG, there it was, in my mailbox. That was one of the moment when I thought "well, they are really doing a great job" That has changed since, especially since the website design has been fucked up with ads everywhere.
• hn_throwaway_99 4y ago
  A few years ago Austin opened up a new main public library. When it was being proposed I thought "why are we spending millions and millions on a library in the digital age?". Boy was I wrong, and I'll happily eat crow for how wrong I was. The new library building is beautiful, super inviting and some of my favorite architecture anywhere. I love going there to work or read. They also do a great job making the building welcoming and accessible to all, while at the same time preventing it from getting trashed by the homeless (looking at you SF public library) with a simple no sleeping/no lying down rule. Welcoming, inviting public spaces can do very well if people understand why they are desirable.
  • chasd00 4y ago
    Took my boys to ACL and had to drag my 10 year old out of that library to get to the music! It’s a terrific library and I’m not a huge fan of Austin.
  • acjohnson55 4y ago
    The library in Linden, NJ--a working class town--is beautiful. My town is much wealthier, but our library is nowhere near as nice. I definitely appreciate that a town that probably has more challenges has such a nice piece of public infrastructure.
  • antiterra 4y ago
    The stairs are pretty terrifying if you have a fear of heights.
    • texasbigdata 4y ago
      They make you feel like you’re thousands of miles away just from a few short floors. Personally, upvote. (Also afraid of heights a bit)
  • greggarious 4y ago
    Maybe yours is inviting, the one near me redid sections that used to be used by the homeless or unemployed and made them "teen spaces" and directed huge chunks of money at turning the space into a community center... in the vein of a JCC or low rent country club for the folks who went to the universities surrounding it. (I haven't been to the SF public library in a while, but the few times I went in as a Mozilla intern the staff were so rude I ended up buying books and selling them at a used bookstore when finished rather than be treated rudely by folks who were within a year or two of me, from the same department I graduated from. Maybe there's a reason people don't respect that space, and it's not just because they're mentally ill and/or down on their luck.)
• wrycoder 4y ago
  The latest version of "look inside" has become super stingy. The default is to show you the first twenty pages or so, then you have to use "Surprise Me", which feeds me one page at a time at some random location, most of the time in the first twenty pages I've already seen. In technical books, that's not enough to get a feel for the actual content. It used to be better, you could read several pages for each "Surprise Me". It's really off-putting. In a bookstore, I can stand there ten minutes and make sure the book is worthwhile. Technical books are expensive. Amazon treats me like a deadbeat, even though I buy lots of books from them.
  • MrVandemar 4y ago
    > The default is to show you the first twenty pages or so, For anything other than a novel, that's usually the least representative sample. That'll give you the copyright, table of contents (admittedly useful) and the Preface and the Introduction and a page with a couple of quotations on it. Not really great to judge the quality of writing / code samples or whatever you're interested in. I always used to use zlib for "flicking through" a book the way you would in a bookshop to see if it was worth buying it.
    • KptMarchewa 4y ago
      I really, really want to look at table of contents. That should always be available.
  • Mezzie 4y ago
    > It's really off-putting. In a bookstore, I can stand there ten minutes and make sure the book is worthwhile. Technical books are expensive. We have a local chain that sells well curated used books and it's brilliant. Picked up my copy of Godel, Escher, Bach because I saw it on the shelf and flipped through and was like 'Yes, please!'
  • tzs 4y ago
    > The latest version of "look inside" has become super stingy. The default is to show you the first twenty pages or so, then you have to use "Surprise Me" [...] Note that this is only for print editions. For Kindle editions it does not have "Surprise Me". For those "Look Inside" seems to just show you the same sample that you get if you ask it to send a sample to your Kindle. I've found this is often completely useless for music books and math books as the sample doesn't get far enough in to actually have any music or math notation, and it is terrible handling of such notation that often makes an otherwise good Kindle book unreadable. I once bought a Kindle edition of "Proofs from the Book" and it had been produced apparently using OCR which didn't know how to handle anything other than normal letters, digits, and common symbols. Things like integral signs, summation signs, and set relationship symbols showed up as whitespace. Another math book I bought had many of the equations as graphics. Reading on the Kindle app on a computer or tablet was fine. The images were scaled to a reasonable size and were quite readable. On an eInk Kindle however they were not scaled. They were tiny and required more magnification than my best magnifying glass had for me to read them comfortably. I had to tap them to get a menu that would let me show the image full screen. This made reading the book incredibly tedious both from the slowness of the Kindle and only being able to see one equation at a time this way.
• robswc 4y ago
  I still like to go in to get a book the same day if its available. I'm just impatient, lol
• greenie_beans 4y ago
  i always walk in to a bookstore with the plan to get one book and i'm lucky if i leave with less than 4
• MuffinFlavored 4y ago
  I don't understand how the same people who hang out around bookstores + make recommendations (which you classify as "good") aren't the same people on Goodreads writing reviews/making recommendations as users (which you recommend as bad?)
  • WastingMyTime89 4y ago
    Goodreads is extremely annoying to use. It’s annoying to write interesting reviews which don’t surface compared to uninteresting reviews anyway. It’s annoying to look for books with interesting reviews and searching for anything a bit specific is completely impossible. I don’t know anyone who seriously like reading and use it. The recommendations you would get inside a bookstore have nothing to do with this kind of experience. You are having an actual conversation about what you like and are looking for.
    • deaddodo 4y ago
      I tried using GoodReads and my problem was it was terrible for discovery, which is the only thing I cared about. Now it’s really just a tracker for books I read on Kindle.
      • bwb 4y ago
        Try shepherd.com, I had similar frustrations and trying to build something purely around discovery in cool and unique ways.
  • spfzero 4y ago
    The incentives for the reviewers are different. On-line reviewers (often) get caught up in review-counting and status-seeking. They want to be a "Top Reviewer". In a store the person has to go out of their way every time they recommend the same book. It's one-to-one vs. one-to-many. There's more of a chance they really do think highly of the book, maybe even years after reading it. That's valuable.
• frereubu 4y ago
  My local bookstore can generally match Amazon in terms of delivery times, including next-day, although I have to go and collect it (but they're local, so they're easy to get to). They know me now too, so I just drop them an email and they reply when it's arrived. I'm in the UK though, so I guess the smaller distances may help compared to larger countries.
• wrp 4y ago
  Bookstore buying has one benefit in that you can verify the condition of the book. I'm really sick of getting bruised books in the mail. So, with expensive hardbacks, I've shifted to ordering through a b&m so I can be sure of getting an undamaged book.
• deaddodo 4y ago
  This is exactly my thought process as I read the title. It was fairly obvious that Barnes & Noble pivoted their business model (starting about a decade and a half ago). It was already happening with the Borders bankruptcy; but that solidified and accelerated the change. Now BN’s business model is more aligned with general leisure (books, board games, gadgets, coffee, etc) than a “book store”.
• pwinnski 4y ago
  I'm puzzled where you see that "key insight" in the linked article. I came away with the feeling that the key insight was: if you want to sell books, you must love books. Did you use the present tense to describe the past, before James Daunt took over, perhaps? I could understand "the key insight was that bookstores were no longer places to get books," but the entire article seems to be about how B&N has become a place to get books, because the CEO loves books, and empowers local stores to also love books and therefore sell them well.
  • tylerchr 4y ago
    I think your comment actually highlights the key insight. For a long time, the fact that the bookstore was the _only_ place to “get books” occluded the fact that it was the _best_ place to explore and appreciate books. Amazon stripped away the veneer by showing that, actually, bookstores weren’t so ideal for “getting books” after all (book not carried, book not in stock, can’t find the right shelf, etc). Daunt is therefore succeeding by refocusing on “loving books,” as you put it, rather than on transacting books. You might “get books” at a bookstore, but that’s probably not why you went there in the first place.
    • dragonwriter 4y ago
      > Daunt is therefore succeeding by refocusing on “loving books,” as you put it, rather than on transacting books. New B&N is much more focused on transacting (whether its books or other merchandise) than at any time in its past history. That’s why it works: B&N in the past has focused more than the current B&N on speculative/aspirational attempts to build demand and novel businesses (whether its effectively selling prime space for publisher’s promotions as discussed in the article, or the attempt to build B&N’s own Nook business by large dedications of space, or B&N’s bizarre restaurant business), the current version is focused on stocking and moving what the local stores know they can move.
    • pwinnski 4y ago
      Maybe my reading of the article is colored by the fact that I have become a frequent shopper at B&N within the last two years, but no, I go to B&N to get books, and so do many others, as evidenced by the statement in the article that sales are rising. I don't know that I really disagree with anything you're saying about discovery and so on, but you keep describing it as a key insight of the article which doesn't seem to talk about it even a little bit. It sounds like your key insight, maybe, although the article seems to offer counter-evidence to your claim.
• melony 4y ago
  Up north, the Indigo bookstore chain did the exact opposite. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indigo_Books_and_Music https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indigo_Books_and_Music They are a case study in business school that selling tchotchkes and trinkets is more profitable than books. I disagree with GP's article. It is the same myth in tech that "engineers make better founders" and "companies ran by execs with engineering backgrounds are more successful". It is feel-good masturbation for professionals without objective data backing it. In this case they are running with "booklovers run better bookstores". Not necessarily generalizable to all booksellers. The pandemic has shown that cheap rates play an oversized role in picking winners and losers.
  • Doctor_Fegg 4y ago
    Nonetheless what TFA says is absolutely true about both his original stores, Daunt Books, and Waterstones here in the UK. Waterstones is immeasurably better under his stewardship than it was before. If he’s turned around the biggest bookshop chains in both the UK and the US, he must be doing something right.
  • criddell 4y ago
    It’s possible that there’s more than one successful business model though, right? I think the lesson may be that B&N wanted to be a successful bookstore and they achieved that by doing a better job serving book buyers mostly by giving individual stores more autonomy. That doesn’t mean another chain couldn’t succeed by turning into a books & trinkets store with a focus on high margin trinkets.
    • melony 4y ago
      Here's the link if you want more details https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/01/books/booksupdate/indigo-books-canadian-chain.html https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/01/books/booksupdate/indigo-...
      • BizarroLand 4y ago
        I can see where you're coming from, there are multiple angles. B&N is setting themselves up as a bookstore for book lovers, and Inigo is setting themselves up as a book store for culture lovers. Many paths to the same destination.
• groby_b 4y ago
  Bookstores never really were the place to get specific books. Yes, you could, but in essence you'd just place a remote order. Bookstores always were places to make discoveries, to learn, to have people recommend books for you. My first bookstore experiences go back to the late 70s, and the ones that stick in my mind as memorable? Two stores that had fiercely opinionated voracious readers as employees, who both knew books and their customers. (I could literally go there, as a kid, and ask "what book do I want to get my dad for Christmas", and they'd inevitably make fabulous recommendations that I wasn't old enough yet to figure out by myself) This extends beyond bookstores - all stores are ultimately in the business of caring about customers and being deeply knowledgable about what they sell. The rest is logistics.
  • ghaff 4y ago
    And, historically, those remote orders were sort of an exception process whereby your order would often not get sent to the bookstore until whenever they next got a delivery from whoever the publisher was.
    • groby_b 4y ago
      Huh. Now I wonder if that system is regionally different. My experience was back in Germany, and delivery times were (unless it was a rare book) pretty predictably about a week. Still miss that store :)
      • ghaff 4y ago
        I'm talking about the 1980s or so--so a long time ago. There were some big city bookstores that would have a special customer service desk but my recollection from rarely using was that it would take a while. In general, I remember special orders for books not in the store as not really being a customary thing generally. (And for out of print books being pretty much on you to look through individual stores.)
        • groby_b 4y ago
          80s as well. But then, I was but a wee lass, and maybe my choices were easily available, just not in store. Still, now I'm deeply interested in reading an account of how different book selling systems in the 80s worked. (Yes, I'm avoiding other tasks, why do you ask? ;)
• icedchai 4y ago
  Definitely. For a long while (pre-covid), bookstores where my favorite place to hang out, drink a coffee, and browse! There's still something wonderful about having a physical book in your hands.
• cbhl 4y ago
  I actually really enjoyed the Amazon Books stores when they first opened; they were full of books, and not customized recommendations to me but actually the top rated and top-selling books across US Amazon shoppers. But I feel like they succumbed to the same problem B&N did here, for different reasons -- they became full of kitchen gadgets and devices, because people were buying more things and less books on Amazon itself, and the stores started to mirror that.
• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
• boredhedgehog 4y ago
  > It's very hard to do good recommendations -- even for Amazon/Goodreads! -- without people who care about what they're recommending. But is that a property of the recommendations or of the circumstances under which they are received? It's possible that the quality of a recommendation generated by an AI based on psychological profiles is superior, so that if it was followed, the book would be enjoyed. But it's not being followed, because it appears too unlikely and the reader doesn't trust the AI. If that's true, the competitive advantage of the physical interaction would not actually be the recommendations themselves, but the atmosphere it creates which makes readers susceptible to listening to them.
  • somethingreen 4y ago
    That is not how AI works and that is not what it is designed to do. AI doesn't understand you, nor does it care to - it just puts you into a bucket and recommends a set of products people in that bucket are statistically more likely to buy and keep buying, regardless of their quality. It's only if you land in a bucket with people who only buy good stuff that you get recommended good stuff. If you even get clipped by an edge of one of the ginormous junk buckets - it's over - junk central for you. Now, some people, maybe most even, will try and do the same to you. But not all, and store owner can optimize for those who won't.
• Insanity 4y ago
  I mostly agree, but for me Goodreads has given some good suggestions over the years as well. But one thing especially is the “friend activity”. There are some friends that I have connected with whom have a similar reading preference to me. Discovering what they are reading / have read and rated has influenced my buying decisions quite often. When I lived near those friends, we would talk about the books as we had more contact, but since moving halfway across the world that does not happen as often. Goodreads is great for that (imo).
  • bwb 4y ago
    I am trying to make a pure book discovery site at Shepherd.com if you are interested. I'd love some feedback.
• tgv 4y ago
  > If I want a specific book, I already know where to go: the internet. That cannibalizes the bookstore you like to visit.
  • hamilton987 4y ago
    [dead]
  • iiv 4y ago
    The bookstore I like to visit doesn't sell the books I want to read.
    • tgv 4y ago
      They can do the old-fashioned thing: order them for you. It may cost a bit more, but it's like in-store delivery (which is fine, if you're not too remote). It's too little, too late for B&N for this, but it can help smaller bookshops. And you'll get to know the personnel or the owner a bit better when you do.
• jb1991 4y ago
  In my experience, more often than not, Amazon ships books with very poor protection, and they arrive a little bent or creased in places. They never used to do this, but now it’s terrible. For that reason, alone, I like to buy books at actual stores.
• karaterobot 4y ago
  > It seems like the key insight is that bookstores are no longer places to get books. FWIW, this was considered common sense when I was in library school 20 years ago: that is to say, it was presented to us as a fact rather than a question. I don't think this was a unique or novel insight by B&N, rather a question of execution in the transformation of an already large company and, I suppose, the financial discipline to survive the competition.
  • torstenvl 4y ago
    Agreed: it's not the concept alone, but the execution. BN, Borders, BAM!, and others all tried the same strategy. Borders is already out of business, and BAM! looks like it's on its way (it's no longer public so financials are difficult to know, but part time employees report that they get more or fewer hours based on how many gift cards they sell, which indicates cash flow problems). BN is the only one doing well, and it's my opinion that this is due to being a comfortable place to buy and read books. By contrast, book selection at BAM! is atrocious, and the cafes all seem cold, uninviting, and surrounded by gimmicks and toys.