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Is It Time to Say Goodbye to Barnes & Noble?
- techdog 15y agoRead "How the Internet is Changing Economics." http://asserttrue.blogspot.com/2012/01/how-internet-is-changing-economics.html http://asserttrue.blogspot.com/2012/01/how-internet-is-chang...
- Tichy 15y agoI wonder: the equivalent to the small corner bookshop has not yet emerged on the internet, or has it? I had expected to see more web sites offering a choice selection of books through the Amazon affiliate program (or something similar). But I rarely ever stumble across them. Perhaps because there are no corners on the internet.
- technoslut 15y ago>I wonder: the equivalent to the small corner bookshop has not yet emerged on the internet, or has it? I had expected to see more web sites offering a choice selection of books through the Amazon affiliate program (or something similar). It really doesn't matter anymore. Both Amazon and Apple are destroying this idea because they own the hardware and the software. What disturbes me is that no one has come up with a proper solution similar to public libraries.
- Tichy 15y agoTechnically, anybody could produce an ebook reader. I suppose the publishers brought their demise onto themselves by giving exclusive rights to sell books to Amazon, Apple and Barnes & Nobles. Maybe they'll come around in time and open the market to everybody. Then there could be competition on ebook readers. I'd love to switch to ebooks completely, but I still can't stomach the fact that I don't own the ebooks I "buy", and that I can not just read whatever I want on my reader (at least not without a lot of hassle). Or even switch readers at will - these days buying an app or an ebook is essentially just cementing the vendor lock in, which is of course intentional.
- bsimpson 15y agoThere's always http://www.powells.com/ http://www.powells.com/
- _delirium 15y agoImo, those kinds of sites are squeezed between Amazon itself, higher-profile book-recommendation services like the NY Times book reviews, and spammy but well-SEO'd landing pages that link to a bunch of Amazon books in an area, but provide little value-add ("top 25 books on [subject]" type lists, which are just automatically culled from the top-25 bestselling books in an Amazon keyword search). Especially with the existence of that last category, it's tough going for someone who's genuinely curating book selections, perhaps even reading the books and providing good advice about them, when a lot of their competitors in the space are just algorithmically throwing together lists of books based on keywords. To a quick glance (the kind you normally get from search-engine visitors), it's hard to differentiate yourself from them. It might be possible to more slowly build up a fanbase of regular readers, though. Some book blogs have done that, which is not exactly the same format you're talking about, but has some similarities.
- AndrewDucker 15y agoWhy would a customer buy from one of them rather than direct from Amazon?
- Tichy 15y agoI wouldn't mind so much if they buy from Amazon, as I said, they could offer affiliate links. I am more interested in the curation that a small bookshop provides.
- jseliger 15y agoThose equivalents sort-of exist, but part of the challenge is finding them and finding someone with tastes reasonable similar to your own; I write a book blog called The Story's Story at http://jseliger.com http://jseliger.com that somewhat fills his niche, and there's a pretty big book blog called The Millions that's worth reading: http://www.themillions.com http://www.themillions.com , plus a bunch of smaller book bloggers. But the big ones from the 2002 – 2006 era have mostly closed up shop or stopped posting as often as they did; there's no money in "offering a choice selection of books through the Amazon affiliate program," and hobbies without funding tend to flame out over time as interests wane or the hobby starts to feel more like work.
- Tichy 15y agoThanks for the pointers, looking forward to browsing. As for money in the affiliate program, I have a small web site where I tested it, and I realized it sucks: if somebody buys a book through my link, I get perhaps 1 to 3€ (Europe here). But only a tiny fraction of visitors clicks, and a tiny fraction of those buys anything. Meanwhile, every click on an Adsense ad gets me 10 to 50 cents... Adsense wins easily. The only times it seems to be effective is if people click on your Affiliate link and then go on to buy expensive stuff like iPods or TVs. A friend of mine told me he was making money for years because of a a comment on some discussion board recommending some cheap cable (forgot the details). People who bought the cable also bought other more expensive tech stuff... In any case he said the discussion board people have caught on and now insert their own links.
- Tichy 15y agoAny chance you could mirror your RSS feed on Twitter? (There are tools for that, too). I would follow, I just don't use an RSS reader atm.
- jseliger 15y agoFunny you should ask—I just started doing so about a week ago, for precisely this reason: https://twitter.com/#!/seligerj https://twitter.com/#!/seligerj .
- pearle 15y agoI'm really going to miss bookstores if they disappear, even the big chains like Barnes & Noble.
- ams6110 15y agoI don't know... there is still a B&N store here and if I judge them by their selection of tech books, they are pretty poor. Worse than the now-gone Borders, which was worse than the local indy store they forced out of business back in the 1990s. Can't say I'd miss them if they closed. The people who work there seem to have followed the same trend as the books.
- Lewisham 15y agoCan you expand on why? I keep seeing people say that they'll miss bookstores, but I can't imagine what they'll miss. Bookstores are very inefficient. Ordering books they don't have is a pain. You literally have to judge a book by its cover, or at least the 5 minutes you spend perusing it. Finding books in the shelves is difficult. A lot of people seem to think that Amazon is winning on price alone, but it's because they're offering a better product. So I don't know why people keep saying they'll miss bookstores. The atmosphere? Isn't that replicated by coffee shops?
- Apocryphon 15y agoYou can sit in them and read through books for hours if you choose to. And it's much quieter than coffee shops.
- chc 15y agoYou find it easier to read a book based on what's available to you in a physical bookstore (the entire book) versus what's available on Amazon (a small sample if you're lucky and a bunch of reviews from people of unknown tastes)? That seems a bit odd to me.
- Lewisham 15y agoI'm not sat there reading the book; I'll look at the table of contents, skim bits that I think might be useful, and then have to make a judgement call. With Amazon, I get the TOC, I get reviews that tell me whether the book is any good or not (which is better than a gut reaction, for me at least), and if I really want to delve into what's in the book, Google Books usually does a good job of showing me some relevant pages. I don't have time to read an entire book, nor peruse for 20 minutes. I think the people who are like that are the ones who want bookstores to stay, but those people are a very small minority.
- SteveJS 15y agoDoes anyone know how much of this industry crisis is based on a reliance of selling higher priced (and presumably higher margin) hard cover books?
- ams6110 15y agoHard to imagine anything with a higher margin than digital. The marginal cost of selling an e-book is effectively zero.
- rmason 15y agoWe lost the Barnes and Noble in East Lansing about a month ago. The town now lacks a true bookstore despite a population of 50,000 students. I received a BN gift card for Christmas which I used online. Now I am receiving 2-3 emails a week from BN trying to interest me in buying other books. Unlike the ones from Amazon what they're offering me is almost laughably irrelevant. I used the same credit card with which I have bought hundreds of books from BN and either they can't match it to the email I gave them to get a hint of my interests or they don't care. So unless I receive another gift card they're not going to receive any future business from me.
- Aloisius 15y agoBarnes and Noble really does have a one untapped resource over Amazon that I really wish they'd exploit. They have a lot of people who love to read working for them and building recommendation lists for their stores. If they would simply get these same employees to review their books on bn.com and build recommendations, I could see that site doing a lot better. Of course that might hasten the demise of their brick and mortar stores or turn them into something like an Apple genius bar.
- Apocryphon 15y agoI have to wonder that if ebook prices continue to be inflated due to publisher meddling (which Apple is involved in, for whatever reason), will paper books continue to have an edge in terms of pricing for the next several years.
- nextparadigms 15y agoAn even more interesting question is if e-book prices will start dropping sharply once the paper book business is almost gone?
- Apocryphon 15y agoI'm almost certain we're decades away before paper books start declining that badly.
- Lewisham 15y agoThis is an oddly "poor publishing cartel!" story, which has echoes of our friends at the MPAA and the RIAA without the venom, but a good helping of the cynicism. Let's see if I have this straight: The long and short of the article is that everyone's scared of Amazon, because Amazon is actually selling what consumers want, and are leveraging their consumer power to cut out the publishers completely. This has the appearance of a big win for consumers and for writers, but the publishers worry that they can't "mold talent" any more, and have finally realized that the middleman loses when he forgets to provide what people want. It's a complete play-by-play of the Kill Hollywood models we've been talking about recently. NYT paints the publishers as a poor industry who are getting swirlies from the school bully, so they really hope that Barnes & Noble will save them. As always with the cartels, they want to hold on to the past and their print books (even when they that put the ridiculous, onerous DRM on their e-books and people are still buying them). What they won't do is acknowledge that Amazon has changed the game on them, and fight Amazon toe-to-toe: ie. actually merge with Barnes and Noble. They want a proxy battle, and if B&N eats it, then they don't lose anything. Personal prediction: without a merger with one or two publishing companies, B&N as we know it dies within 5 years. Renting that floor space and paying those employees is just too much overhead. The last play will be to shutter their big stores, and cut themselves right down to small boutique stores on highly foot-trafficked areas, that focus entirely on pushing Nooks and eBooks.
- Tichy 15y agoI don't care about the publishers, I just want my bookstore browsing experience somehow. I think that is why such stories are of interest, because a lot of people worry about losing that. I wonder what could replace it in the future :-/
- aespinoza 15y agoI agree. That is actually why I was so interested in the article. I love going to a physical bookstore, specially B&N. I really hope whatever replaces the experience is not fully digital.
- raymondh 15y agoRetail store fronts don't have any problems that cannot be solved by better margins. If the publishers valued the service offered by Barnes & Noble, the obvious solution is to grant lower prices to brick-and-mortar bookstores. According to the article, the whole industry benefits from and depends upon customers being able to physically browse shelves of real books. Perhaps the whole industry should start subsidizing physical bookstores.
- raymondh 15y agoWhy was this downvoted? Margins are a relevant topic when discussing the survival of a business, and a "tragedy of the commons" is relevant when discussing the failure of a segment of business upon which all the others depend.
- dangrossman 15y ago> Perhaps the whole industry should start subsidizing physical bookstores My understanding was that this is how the printed book industry works already. Book stores are filled with books they didn't pay for -- the publishers are the ones covering nearly the entire inventory cost of the store! Only once a book is sold does the store pay the publisher the wholesale rate for that copy, while unsold copies are returned to the publisher to be shipped to a different store or destroyed. What I've seen on publishers' websites are examples like a $12 wholesale cost for a $20 retail book. That's a 40% margin, on top of the publishers subsidizing the existence of the store by providing the inventory for free. The reason your comment is being downvoted is probably because they can't "start" subsidizing margins when they already are.
- shareme 15y agoSad to say I will miss them for the ideal place to pick up women for dating..
- mathattack 15y agoInteresting. The Yuri Milner thread suggests that the Walmart in China will be 100% online. Based on this article's market values of $88 billion for Amazon versus $719 million for Barnes and Noble, I'd say he's right.
- pacomerh 15y agoI'm assuming that getting rid of bookstores means getting rid of real books. I've tried digital books so many times, and I want to like them, it feels like a cool thing to organize all your stuff in one place, but I keep going back to real books, I would only use tablets to read if I had no other choice. For me, the digital pages get lost, I forget about them.
- daintynews 15y agoI also have ebooks. However, maybe it's because I grew up reading books, I can't imagine myself not reading a real one. There's this amazing feeling whenever I get a book, especially a used one.
- junto 15y agoBarnes & Noble have a website? In my opinion publishers both of old media such as books and modern media such as tv and films need to disappear. Then we can get a global distribution network going that no longer tells me "this content is not available in your area". This concept of nationalised distribution rights is of no benefit to me as a consumer.
- evoxed 15y agoThe very reason why even I'll miss big bookstores is because of their nonchalance towards what they're selling. You can stay in the store for hours, look at anything, bring a book to the cafe or any number of seats in the corner and read, etc. I give tons of business to small booksellers but when I'm not looking for specialty subjects I like the non-atmosphere. And when Borders was around, their coupons made Amazon the best back-up. Over the years, both Borders and B&N selection has gotten worse and worse, but B&N @ Union Square currently has the best architecture section in the city (Rizzoli could be argued first, but its selection is at times over-curated and certainly saves no pennies).