4 ms·

Is it only me that finds it deeply ironic that the company credited with closing a gazillion independent booksellers and round-the-corner bookshops, is currentl

Is it only me that finds it deeply ironic that the company credited with closing a gazillion independent booksellers and round-the-corner bookshops, is currently at the receiving end of exactly the same market forces that it espoused during their demise? Perhaps the real question is not how to save Barnes and Noble, but rather why anyone wants to save them at all. I find it hard to see them cast as Meg Ryan opposite Amazonian Tom Hanks in the re-re-make of You've Got Mail. B&N were once fans of market forces, and the public's insatiable hunger for lower prices at any cost. Unfortunately, their discovering that economies Of scale are only on your side until someone else comes along who does it better. B&N are fundamentally Unsaveable. They contain neither the charm of the shop around the corner, nor the value of Amazon. I for one will shed no tears at the demise of this corporate monster.

reustle 13y ago
> Perhaps the real question is not how to save Barnes and Noble, but rather why anyone wants to save them at all. I really enjoy stopping by once in a while and checking out what computer books are on the shelf. Sure, I can "see" them on Amazon, but with minimal effort I can flip through the pages and read bits and pieces. I am obviously guilty of going home and buying it on Amazon, because the markup is just too much to ignore. I'll miss them, but I agree that they're unsaveable in their current form.
- 001sky 13y ago
  BN is a great showroom. But agree, their assets are mainly the real estate. The inventory is just a commodity, and a depreciating one at that. On the other side of the Eq, B+N have had major impacts on the publishing side. The vaccuum that would be created there--in terms of losing the 800# gorilla on the buy side for trad. publishers-- is interesting to think about.
cgag 13y ago
B&N was the shop around in the various suburbs I grew up in.
acabal 13y ago
I agree with the sentiment, but since BN has crushed independent booksellers the problem now is that if BN closes, lots of more isolated places like suburbs and exurbs will have no good place to browse and buy books. I'm currently staying in a suburb of a major American city and BN is quite literally the only place to buy physical books for a 50 mile radius, if not more. It's kind of a crappy situation, but it's one that we've put ourselves in. I'm not confident that we'd see a renaissance of indie booksellers should BN close. Personally I think that with Nook, BN for various reasons bungled what could easily have been a very successful product. They might still have been able to turn it around by pressuring publishers to sell ebooks for cheaper, removing DRM, and focusing on a true ereading experience and owning a niche instead of competing with full-blown tablets. Since they've thrown in the towel with Nook, their only hope seems to be dropping prices to give people a reason to walk in instead of going to Amazon, or to make money on ancillary physical experiences, like drinking coffee while browsing. But they already made a possibly fatal mistake in that strategy by renting out space to Starbucks instead of doing their own coffee thing. BN closing would be a pretty big blow to books in general, regardless of Amazon's sales. While I can't pity the corporation for being affected by market forces, nor can I pity it considering what it's done to indie sellers, neither do I want to see books completely disappearing from the average American's sight.
- derefr 13y ago
  > I'm not confident that we'd see a renaissance of indie booksellers should BN close. Why not? Here's a pretty standard progression: 1. there used to be a bakery a few blocks away--medium-scale, medium-convenience. Six or seven of them in your district. 2. Then a supermarket came. It was just a bit further away than the nearest bakery, but it included a bakery and a bunch of other things. The bakeries went out of business. One supermarket per district was all you needed. 3. But supermarkets aren't something you pop into for an "experience"--you don't visit one on a date. So, someone trimmed down the bakery idea to the most consumer-focused essentials, giving people only what they wanted and none of what they needed (the supermarket covers what they need, after all), and launched... a cupcake shop. Maybe just one to start. But then, suddenly, they're on every street corner. I could see the "cupcake shop" equivalent to a bookstore: not a big pile of unsorted old tomes, but rather an exquisite presentation for a small, heavily-curated collection of books. A showroom for books, if you will. The clerk would have read everything on sale, and be able to talk at length about all of them. You'd be matched to a book in the same way an Apple Store employee guides you to a piece of consumer electronics. Etc.
rdouble 13y ago
Did B&N really kill off a lot of bookstores? In my experience, there weren't any other bookstores in the areas where B&N opened up.
dredmorbius 13y ago
Perhaps it's not that the McBookstores (and K-Marts and WalMarts and Bust Buys and Circuit Cities) were the problem but symptoms of a larger problem. Back in May, Marc Andreesen and Peter Thiel were hosted by The Economist in a panel on whether or not technology offers us a way out. While I'm generally not predisposed to agree with Thiel (my view, substantiated by much recent research, is that Libertarianism is grossly flawed), he hit time and time again on points that I've been becoming aware of in recent months: - That energy use and economic growth are very high correlated. And we're facing an impending shortage of cheap liquid fuels, and eventually of others (as well as environmental concerns over their continued use in any regard). - That virtually every post-WWII recession was preceded by an oil price spike (the 2nd early 1980 recession seems to be the principle exception). - That technology is underperforming and is delivering diminishing returns. - That older technologies: indoor plumbing, cars, phones, trains -- were vastly more profound in their societal impacts. - That government involvement is a mixed bag. Sometimes it detracts, but often it delivers (rural electrification & phones, highway system, Internet). - That the tech industry's scale is much smaller than is commonly believed. As Thiel puts it: it wouldn't be able to bail out the US government or even a state, it might be able to bail out San Francisco. - That we're developing a growing high-tech rust belt, companies such as Cisco, Intel, Oracle, IBM, and Microsoft. Possibly even Apple. - That post-Google, there really hasn't been a major new player in the tech field (and no, Facebook doesn't count). - That if you look at the Forbes list of wealthiest people, there are a handful in tech, but most are in highly price-inelastic sectors which do well when the economy is in decline. - The only recent growth sectors of the economy (1990-2013) have been financial services and tech. And the financial sector looks to be hurting. I'll toss in a phrase of Andreeson's here: software is eating everything. What finance and tech have in common is that both have been hollowing out other fields. Perhaps this has been providing for greater efficiencies in some cases, but it's also been resulting in weaker structures overall. None of this changes the situation for B&N, but it does suggest that the company is less the author and more the player of its fate.

reustle 13y ago

> Perhaps the real question is not how to save Barnes and Noble, but rather why anyone wants to save them at all. I really enjoy stopping by once in a while and checking out what computer books are on the shelf. Sure, I can "see" them on Amazon, but with minimal effort I can flip through the pages and read bits and pieces. I am obviously guilty of going home and buying it on Amazon, because the markup is just too much to ignore. I'll miss them, but I agree that they're unsaveable in their current form.

001sky 13y ago
BN is a great showroom. But agree, their assets are mainly the real estate. The inventory is just a commodity, and a depreciating one at that. On the other side of the Eq, B+N have had major impacts on the publishing side. The vaccuum that would be created there--in terms of losing the 800# gorilla on the buy side for trad. publishers-- is interesting to think about.

cgag 13y ago

B&N was the shop around in the various suburbs I grew up in.

acabal 13y ago

I agree with the sentiment, but since BN has crushed independent booksellers the problem now is that if BN closes, lots of more isolated places like suburbs and exurbs will have no good place to browse and buy books. I'm currently staying in a suburb of a major American city and BN is quite literally the only place to buy physical books for a 50 mile radius, if not more. It's kind of a crappy situation, but it's one that we've put ourselves in. I'm not confident that we'd see a renaissance of indie booksellers should BN close. Personally I think that with Nook, BN for various reasons bungled what could easily have been a very successful product. They might still have been able to turn it around by pressuring publishers to sell ebooks for cheaper, removing DRM, and focusing on a true ereading experience and owning a niche instead of competing with full-blown tablets. Since they've thrown in the towel with Nook, their only hope seems to be dropping prices to give people a reason to walk in instead of going to Amazon, or to make money on ancillary physical experiences, like drinking coffee while browsing. But they already made a possibly fatal mistake in that strategy by renting out space to Starbucks instead of doing their own coffee thing. BN closing would be a pretty big blow to books in general, regardless of Amazon's sales. While I can't pity the corporation for being affected by market forces, nor can I pity it considering what it's done to indie sellers, neither do I want to see books completely disappearing from the average American's sight.

derefr 13y ago
> I'm not confident that we'd see a renaissance of indie booksellers should BN close. Why not? Here's a pretty standard progression: 1. there used to be a bakery a few blocks away--medium-scale, medium-convenience. Six or seven of them in your district. 2. Then a supermarket came. It was just a bit further away than the nearest bakery, but it included a bakery and a bunch of other things. The bakeries went out of business. One supermarket per district was all you needed. 3. But supermarkets aren't something you pop into for an "experience"--you don't visit one on a date. So, someone trimmed down the bakery idea to the most consumer-focused essentials, giving people only what they wanted and none of what they needed (the supermarket covers what they need, after all), and launched... a cupcake shop. Maybe just one to start. But then, suddenly, they're on every street corner. I could see the "cupcake shop" equivalent to a bookstore: not a big pile of unsorted old tomes, but rather an exquisite presentation for a small, heavily-curated collection of books. A showroom for books, if you will. The clerk would have read everything on sale, and be able to talk at length about all of them. You'd be matched to a book in the same way an Apple Store employee guides you to a piece of consumer electronics. Etc.

rdouble 13y ago

Did B&N really kill off a lot of bookstores? In my experience, there weren't any other bookstores in the areas where B&N opened up.

dredmorbius 13y ago

Perhaps it's not that the McBookstores (and K-Marts and WalMarts and Bust Buys and Circuit Cities) were the problem but symptoms of a larger problem. Back in May, Marc Andreesen and Peter Thiel were hosted by The Economist in a panel on whether or not technology offers us a way out. While I'm generally not predisposed to agree with Thiel (my view, substantiated by much recent research, is that Libertarianism is grossly flawed), he hit time and time again on points that I've been becoming aware of in recent months: - That energy use and economic growth are very high correlated. And we're facing an impending shortage of cheap liquid fuels, and eventually of others (as well as environmental concerns over their continued use in any regard). - That virtually every post-WWII recession was preceded by an oil price spike (the 2nd early 1980 recession seems to be the principle exception). - That technology is underperforming and is delivering diminishing returns. - That older technologies: indoor plumbing, cars, phones, trains -- were vastly more profound in their societal impacts. - That government involvement is a mixed bag. Sometimes it detracts, but often it delivers (rural electrification & phones, highway system, Internet). - That the tech industry's scale is much smaller than is commonly believed. As Thiel puts it: it wouldn't be able to bail out the US government or even a state, it might be able to bail out San Francisco. - That we're developing a growing high-tech rust belt, companies such as Cisco, Intel, Oracle, IBM, and Microsoft. Possibly even Apple. - That post-Google, there really hasn't been a major new player in the tech field (and no, Facebook doesn't count). - That if you look at the Forbes list of wealthiest people, there are a handful in tech, but most are in highly price-inelastic sectors which do well when the economy is in decline. - The only recent growth sectors of the economy (1990-2013) have been financial services and tech. And the financial sector looks to be hurting. I'll toss in a phrase of Andreeson's here: software is eating everything. What finance and tech have in common is that both have been hollowing out other fields. Perhaps this has been providing for greater efficiencies in some cases, but it's also been resulting in weaker structures overall. None of this changes the situation for B&N, but it does suggest that the company is less the author and more the player of its fate.