Barnes and Noble Bookstore Chain Put In Play 414
suraj.sun sends in word that the country's largest bookstore chain, Barnes and Noble, will put itself up for sale. "The news surprised analysts and alarmed publishers, who have watched as the book business has increasingly shifted to online retailers and e-book sales, leaving both chains and independent sellers struggling. ... For years, Barnes & Noble has been battered by large shifts in the publishing industry and the retail environment. Book sales have moved toward big-box stores like Costco, Wal-Mart and Target, and away from mall-based stores like B. Dalton, which Barnes & Noble acquired in the late 1980s. 'There's been a long series of pressures,' said David Schick, managing director at Stifel Nicolaus in Baltimore. 'The market has not been kind to bookstores, and it's for new reasons like competition with Apple and Amazon, and it's for old reasons, like what we believe has been a decline in reading for the last 20 years. Americans have devoted less of what we call media time to books.'"
Let me tell you... (Score:5, Interesting)
I sure feel great about my Nook purchase this week.
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have you been inside a borders lately? They look like they have been barely scraping by for years...
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If you consider people coming in to drink coffee and read books and magazines in store without purchasing, they've been doing FANTASTIC!
Re:Let me tell you... (Score:4, Informative)
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really? They don't have big gaping holes in their floorplan from where all the DVDs and CDs used to be from their huge back collections?
All of the Borders in my area stripped most of their DVDs and CDs out a few years ago, and haven't replaced the floorspace with anything else.
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Re:Let me tell you... (Score:5, Interesting)
I've not been to a Borders in years, but I've never even got the point of the DVD/CD section in the local bookstores here (which in this area are typically B&N and Books-a-million). They rarely have stuff that other places like Best Buy don't, and the prices are ridiculous. Boxed sets that are $30 at a regular store will be $65 in Barnes and Noble. Sure, they'll sometimes run a sale, and they have those "membership" cards to give some discounts, but even after you factor in all that stuff you're still typically paying more.
Reality check to them: you're never going to get by selling the same thing everybody else does for double the price because it's in a trendy setting. Bookstores excel in one area: having the books that aren't necessarily the latest teen craze. I'm not exactly going to find a copy of Dandelion Wine down at Wal-mart, but I can at B&N.
Stock those hard to find books, and for goodness sakes sort them in same sane fashion(sorting by category can be confusing - sometimes science fiction novels end up in "Literature" instead of the "Science Fiction/Fantasy" section for example). Put in a terminal that allows customers to look up what books you have in stock and show what shelf it's located on.
And if they really wanted to pull in some extra customers - run a free e-book special for purchases in the brick and mortar store. I can imagine a lot more people buying there if Barnes and Noble had a code included with the books sold in their store that allowed you a free e-book copy of the work for your Nook - only for books purchased in the physical store (and naturally using that "no value until activated at the register" scheme so that people couldn't copy the codes out of the books).
Local bookstores (Score:3, Informative)
Those hard to find books are typically at the funky local book store you might find in the "arty" part of town, and while they're feeling it as much as B&N, they've responded the same way I think a lot of local record stores have, focusing on having those hard-to-find books as well as readings, events, etc.
I stopped buying from B&N and similar stores years ago when they started stocking a bajillion copies of the latest tell-all of the celeb du jour, and relegated everything else to a couple of rows
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On Site Publishing (Score:3, Interesting)
Another alternative is to print and bind books well as burn CDs on premises.
I go to a book store for two reasons, kill time while in a shopping center or because I need a book now, not two days from now.
Also:
* All manner of publications, even out of print, could be available with minimal wait time.
* Nothing would ever be out of stock.
* Theoretically, the books would cost less after equipment costs are amortized because of less shipping.
* Custom mix CDs would be a big hit, but the music industry would probab
Re:Let me tell you... (Score:4, Insightful)
They don't even have to give e-book copies away for free. Allow me to purchase both the physical book and the e-book for, say, an additional $1 or $2 over the physical book's cover price, and I will be happy as a clam. Not only would I buy a Nook (which I don't have now) but I would also do all of my shopping at B&N rather than at Amazon, even doing in-store orders rather than ordering online for items not currently in stock. Non-B&N brick-and-mortar stores could ally up together to offer downloads for a similar pricing structure for books purchased in stores. Heck, the publishing industry in general should get behind it. It makes sense. Why in the world would I buy an e-book for very nearly the same cost as a hard copy, without some kind of added perk?
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Sadly, the publishers, who set the price for the ebook, would either keel over as all the blood vessels in their head exploded or would nuke the store off the map in a fit of apoplectic rage. They want to pretend that e-books are worth just as much or more than a paper book, so attempting to roll a '2 fer 1' deal will never pass muster till they agree to open their eyes.
Look back on the past three years of news on things like Google Books and the Amazon vs Apple ebook wars, and tell me you think that'll be
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I agree, the publishing industry has been even slower than the music industry in adapting to the change brought about by the internet. They're traditionalists, but that's no longer an excuse. The internet has been a major part of our culture for at least 15 years, and what's killing there business is that they never embraced and adapted to what it can offer them.
No, basically, we have to wait for the old, slow dinosaurs to die off to make room for the new, fast mammals. It's just a pity. If they were willi
Re:Let me tell you... (Score:4, Insightful)
Reality check to them: you're never going to get by selling the same thing everybody else does for double the price because it's in a trendy setting.
Starbucks might disagree with you.
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Offline stores are good for only one thing: paging through a book before you buy.
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Re:Let me tell you... (Score:5, Informative)
Here's the link on how to crack the DRM on the ePubs that Barnes and Nobel delivers their eBooks in, if you buy one.
http://i-u2665-cabbages.blogspot.com/2009/12/circumventing-barnes-noble-drm-for-epub.html [blogspot.com]
You're not kidding. (Score:3, Interesting)
We're going to have to eschew DRM because there is no guaranteed survival for any content distributor.
The shift to ebooks will accelerate, whether anybody likes to read them or not.
The book and news publishing industry, a form of 1:N broad casting using paper as it's medium, is reaching the tipping point where the economic pressures on the content producers will make the old methods of production "not worth pursuing" because of the real devastation of the existing distribution channels by the internet.
Re:Let me tell you... (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Let me tell you... (Score:5, Interesting)
I sure feel great about my Nook purchase this week.
I bought a nook for Christmas this year. Part of my thought process was how useful will the device be if the parent company goes out of business.
The nook has wi-fi, so I don't need to rely on the 3G working. The nook has a user-replaceable battery. It reads open formats like PDF and ebup natively, so I don't need to rely on the B&N storefront to buy my books. The nook runs Android, and is relatively easy to jailbreak, so I don't have to rely on B&N for software updates.
So, I figure that the nook is still going to be a handy device even if B&N goes out of business.
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Wait, what? Jesus was born in September in Canada? Awesome!
Um duh... if you'd read the New Testament, you'd know that Jesus is a Canuck. Read Dekey 14:24 for the part where he turns the water into maple syrup, or there's Biffy 20:10 where he drives the money-lenders out of the Temple hockey rink, and then there's my personal favorite - Tuque 9:28 about where they served back bacon and beer at the last supper in Moose Jaw, eh?
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But tech companies don't fold like investment firms. Look at how failed businesses that produced hardware have been repurposed by a community. The old CueCat barcode scanner comes to mind. Heck, I could boot up a C64 or Amiga right now and find quite a few new-ish programs written for it. Or some no-name router made by a fly-by-night Chinese company that now runs dd-wrt and is quite useful. Old generation one/two Tivos being used as stand-alone recorders, some mated with ethernet cards.
Hardware is different
We live in a multimedia word (Score:5, Informative)
Re:We live in a multimedia word (Score:5, Insightful)
We have a PS3, an xbox 360 and a Wii, plus a PSP and an NDS. We have several hundred DVDs and blu-ray titles, plus on demand FiOS, several computers around the house and netflix. Our two kids spend more time in books than on all those combined. Don't blame the options available, blame the parents.
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Yeah, but they'll probably derive more enjoyment from the cardboard box the block of wood comes in.
Re:We live in a multimedia word (Score:5, Insightful)
If your parents read to you, more chance you'll grow up liking books & reading.
Re:We live in a multimedia word (Score:5, Insightful)
Also getting them books they enjoy. Something I see far too much, particularly from schools, is this emphasis on "classics." They want kids to read "good" literature and thus try to cram stuff they don't like at them. This very much leads to a books = boring kind of mentality. Let kids read what they want to read, even if you don't consider it to have literary value. I'm not saying don't offer them classic books, but if they don't want them leave it alone.
For that matter, maybe what they are reading now will be classic some day. More than a couple of the "great" books we were made to read in school really weren't in my opinion. Wuthering Heights is basically a trash romance novel, it just happens to be an OLD trash romance novel and one that people latched on to as being "classic" for that reason.
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Expecting someone to learn to love reading by starting at the classics, is like expecting someone to learn to love mathematics by starting at the Riemann zeta hypothesis.
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Yeah, that's the problem a lot of classics have - Wuthering Heights was the first trash romance novel, and it defined the genre that we now think of as "trash romance novels".
I'm not saying you should force kids to read things they don't want to - hell, I didn't start reading novels until I found the Belgariad in middle school, and that t
Re:We live in a multimedia word (Score:4, Interesting)
It's not a matter of being "cliche" or "done before" or anything like that, it is a matter of being good or bad in my book. A novel can be the millionth of its type, but if it is a good novel then great.
My objection are the "classics" that suck. They are not good stories. It just seems to be because they are old, who wrote them, and a bit of luck that they get labeled as some kind of great literature, where a modern novel will be passed over simply because it is new.
When I was in high school, there was no sci fi at all on any of the reading lists unless you want to count 1984, which isn't really sci fi. This is not because there were no great sci fi novels, this was only back in the mid 90s, but because all the crusty academics that put together these lists can't consider anything made after their birth to be good to read.
My objection to Wuthering Heights is that it is a crap romance story, not that it is a romance story. It is extremely poorly done. I don't care if it was the first trash romance novel, that doesn't make it any better.
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For that matter, maybe what they are reading now will be classic some day.
A good read from cracked.com, 6 Great novels that were hated in their time [cracked.com]
Re:We live in a multimedia word (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:We live in a multimedia word (Score:5, Insightful)
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Oh I don't think we'll condition people preferring the first thing they try out of our nature any time soon.
A sad day (Score:3, Insightful)
I know that i will certainly miss the ability to wander through a bookstore and pick up authors or titles I might not have otherwise. I love brick and mortor stores and I for one am not ready to see them go.
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I know that i will certainly miss the ability to wander through a bookstore and pick up authors or titles I might not have otherwise.
If by that you mean the limited selection that happens to be on the shelves. I love brick and mortar book stores, but the B&Ns in driving distance are horrible. If the book is not part of some reading club book of the month, or by an author that was featured on one of those lists, or it is not a major seller, they do not have it. The staff is always happy to order it for me and have it shipped directly to my house, but they can't look up a price on it to let me know how much that will cost. I know books
Maybe if they charged sane prices (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Maybe if they charged sane prices (Score:5, Insightful)
Well, I think more accurately what happens is what you're describing is factors outside of their control.
I don't think they need those margins because they feel 'entitled' to them, so much as Amazon has been able to rely on its sheet size to work on smaller margins. B&N is now simply being squeezed out so badly, they they can't compete.
For them to sell at the same price as Amazon, they'd likely have to do it at an even greater loss -- which will squeeze them dry even faster.
Amazon has truly been able to exploit Economies of scale [wikipedia.org], and B&N has not. With fewer people buying books overall, and Amazon being able to sell a much larger volume at a lower price, B&N has been squeezed from both ends.
This isn't about entitlement.
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If Borders in the UK were anything to go by, "entitled to margins" isn't really the problem. There's every possibility the structure of the entire business is such that they essentially have to charge that much or they'll be making a whacking loss.
An example: Virtually every book these days has a barcode, right? The barcode identifies the book, you can either use an existing database or build your own as you acquire stock. You can then scan your stock as it comes in and again at the checkout as it sells
Re:Maybe if they charged sane prices (Score:4, Insightful)
If Borders in the UK were anything to go by, "entitled to margins" isn't really the problem. There's every possibility the structure of the entire business is such that they essentially have to charge that much or they'll be making a whacking loss.
Borders used their own specific barcode labels. Which means every book had to have a separate barcode label which they'd have to pay someone £X/hr to apply, [...]
That's exactly what GP's "entitled to margins" means.
If you are a sane manager, unless you think you are "entitled" to huge margins, you would be changing your business practices so your costs stay within your margin (which should be in line with your competitors')
By keeping their business structured in the way to requires more margin that their competitors, and keeping the high margin on the prices, they are thinking they are "entitled" to such margins, and are in fact slowly killing the company.
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You claim B&N charges 50% because they feel "entitled" but realistically Amazon
Re:Maybe if they charged sane prices (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Maybe if they charged sane prices (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Maybe if they charged sane prices (Score:4, Insightful)
A little digging [bookfinder.com] suggests that a book selling at its list price will give the retailer approximately 45% profit.
Assuming the previous is correct, your local Barnes and Noble has to stretch that money to cover all those incidental costs of running a physical, specialist store – rent, local taxes, utilities, sales taxes, staffing costs, benefits, insurance, stocking cost, inventory and so on. Their prices are a real kick in the pocketbook but I don’t think they’re exactly swimming in profits either. Indeed, a quick look at their wikinvest page [wikinvest.com] reveals that
. My econ’ tends to be on the weak side, and correct me if I’m wrong, but that means they’re making a profit of approximately 1c on every dollar sold (couldn't find the figure for Amazon but it looks like Apple has an operating margin of 29.1% and Microsoft has 39%).
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You're already making a penny on every dollar sold. How can you hope to fix that impression? It's not like you can cut prices. You could cut costs by making stores less nice, but the simple fact of the matter is that most people who still go to bookstores (like me) go for the experience. I like that everything in Barnes and Noble looks nice. There's a reason I'll drive farther to go to B&N over Books-a-Million or Borders. So while they could cut cost by becoming "Wal-books", they'd probably lose a
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You can find those places in the States too, but the key word in your post is "London". Could you find a nice cross section of adorable little specialist book shops in (*picks random little British town*) Kirkby on Bain? Or even (*picks random decent sized British town*) Hull, or York? You probably could find a subset of such things in say (*picks random fairly large city*) Birmingham or Manchester, but I doubt it's as good as London. It's the same here. New York is simply full of nice specialist book s
It's the price of books has became obscene... (Score:3, Insightful)
Sorry but I stopped buying books at B&N for one reason... Obscene prices. sorry but $69.99 for a book on Python programming is robbery. When I can get the same book on Amazon.com for $29.95.
Or how about the photography books ranging from $49.99 to $129.99 for an Ansel Adams coffee table book... Exact same books on Amazon.com for less than 1/4 the price.
I'm sorry. But I buy almost nothing from them.... Except their clearance books, those are honest pricing. Everything else I buy elsewhere.
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I don't care if it's Jesus's suggested retail price. If it's less than half the cost somewhere else, it's moronic.
Are you trying to say that stores are required to sell at MSRP? They aren't.
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No, they're not required to sell at the suggested price - but they are required to sell at a price that covers their costs and allows them to make a reasonable profit.
Chances are their costs are simply higher than those of Amazon, and they're not able to make the same volumes to pull in the money they need based on higher volume and lower margins.
None of which means you should pay more and buy from them of course; it just means that it's not moronic, it's simply a business model that's failing in the face o
You miss the SUGGESTED part (Score:2)
MSRP is just what the manufacturer says someone might like to charge. In some industries, it is a guideline, but in most cases it is deliberately inflated to make stores look good. Pro audio gear loves this. You'll see MSRPs that are double, sometimes more, what you actually pay. It isn't because the store is taking a loss or whatever, it is because the manufacturer has a stupidly high MSRP on purpose to let the stores pretend to give people a great deal.
Book MSRPs are additionally stupid because you'll not
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Book stores actually buy their inventory up front, if my days in a book store aren't too hazy from the passage of time. So, a store with an inventory has a fairly big cost invested in the actual books. Someone like Amazon can buy them as they need them and exploit supply chain savings.
No, i
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Well then, whose fault is it? After all, it's only a "suggested" retail price.
It's up to the bookstore to to get an appropriate contract with the manufacturer/distributor and ensure they're still capable of profitability. They should be working on selling as much product as possible, not raising the cost due to lack of volume.
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I'm sorry, but only idiots charge MSRP for anything in this day and age.
MSRP? You're kidding, right? (Score:2)
MSRP is *suggested*. It's pretty much always inflated. It's a meaningless joke and an often-cruel one, too, in nearly every industry.
These days, charging MSRP for anything is almost always a way to drive away customers.
So, yes, I blame bookstores if they're stupid enough to charge MSRP.
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Yeah, I have to agree with you. The retail prices for new books in general are too high for me. I would love to buy more from Barnes and Nobles because I do like the store, but I just can't bring myself to pay the prices. It seems like my wife is always asking me to go to the used book chain Half Price Books (we have been to two different Half Price Books stores already the past seven days), but she almost never wants to go to B&N because of the prices. My miserliness usually wins out over my enthus
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sorry but $69.99 for a book on Python programming is robbery. When I can get the same book on Amazon.com for $29.95.
...which also is like robbery, considering that you can find most information on the internet.
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Bleh, Amazon is the Wal-Mart of bookstores. Some of there low price comes from not having stores, but a lot of it comes from their size allowing them to push around publishers and authors. Cheap and convenient as it is, I have basically given up buying books, or anything else from them. Which reminds me, I should delete my wishlist over there...
Mom and Pop (Score:5, Funny)
Sadly, we'll also see the resurgence of those bookstores with five cats wandering around the store making the place smell like stale cat urine. I'm less fine with that...
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They're amazingly efficient for used stuff- for his birthday my son wanted an old LIFE book, now out of print. I found a used copy on Amazon, in perfect condition, in about 5 minutes. $8 + shipping. There's no way I could do that with used book stores in the area- I can't even enter half
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Funny enough... (Score:5, Informative)
It's very possible that old LIFE book came from a mom-n-pop store that also sells online. I know a woman who has a small bookstore in upstate New York and she keeps the actual storefront open to give her a place to go (she's pushing 80), as a place for book readings, but also as warehouse; she sells most of her stuff via Amazon, with apparently one or two really rare things going on ebay.
If anything, it was a brilliant move on Amazon's part to adopt this model; now lots of mom-n-pops can stay open and be more of a social place (if only for the cats) and still have give people the opportunity to browse.
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Sad Day for Print (Score:4, Interesting)
Saw this coming (Score:4, Insightful)
I remember seeing B&N devote a rather substantial amount of space to toys, games, etc. around a year or so ago, figured the writing was on the wall.
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No, I'm referring to the expanded section for board games (they actually started selling popular Euro board games, very cool of them) and the GREATLY expanded kids area. Plus they seem to have added a bunch of other random shit I've never seen them selling before, like $90 Lego sets. This is all based on my local store, but still. They definitely have branched out from books substantially, and when a business starts moving away from their core that much, things aren't looking good.
Pricing hurts. membership requirements too (Score:4, Interesting)
There is a large free standing B&N up the street from me and a similarly large Borders not far down the road. The B&N has a Starbucks which probably draws a good number of people to the B&N on its own.
While book pricing isn't bad its not great. New releases usually can be found cheaper elsewhere and they lord over you the fact that you can buy into their membership with a low $25 fee to get books at better prices. This is where they lose me, I don't want to be badgered into being a member of their store, let alone pay for the privilege. Throw in the horrendous pricing in their DVD and CD section and suddenly I find myself comparing all prices or desiring to hit the net to see if I can find it cheaper. Membership "rewards" never come across as friendly, let alone one I have to pay for.
While I do laud them for having an atmosphere that encourages spending time there, reading, sipping coffee, and etc, they need to work on their pricing and ditch this pay for membership to get a discount routine. Just ditch the requirement to get a discount on books entirely.
Badgering membership crap (Score:2, Informative)
There is a large free standing B&N up the street from me and a similarly large Borders not far down the road. The B&N has a Starbucks which probably draws a good number of people to the B&N on its own.
While book pricing isn't bad its not great. New releases usually can be found cheaper elsewhere and they lord over you the fact that you can buy into their membership with a low $25 fee to get books at better prices. This is where they lose me, I don't want to be badgered into being a member of their store, let alone pay for the privilege. Throw in the horrendous pricing in their DVD and CD section and suddenly I find myself comparing all prices or desiring to hit the net to see if I can find it cheaper. Membership "rewards" never come across as friendly, let alone one I have to pay for.
While I do laud them for having an atmosphere that encourages spending time there, reading, sipping coffee, and etc, they need to work on their pricing and ditch this pay for membership to get a discount routine. Just ditch the requirement to get a discount on books entirely.
I can understand why they badger you into memberships. I have a good friend who had her hours cut severely (like from 35+ to way less than 15 per week), causing her to lose her health benefits (badly needed at that) because of a failure to meet an insanely high requirement for new and renewal of memberships.
They badger you because their incomes and benefits hang on it.
Re:Pricing hurts. membership requirements too (Score:4, Interesting)
My wife is a lead at our local B&N, so let me see if I can enlighten you a bit...
Paying $25 for a B&N membership does make a lot of sense for some people. It's a 10% discount on everything bought there (including the coffee and ON TOP of the 30-40% discount on things like new hardcovers), so if you spend $251.00 in a year at B&N, you've made money back. Now most people WON'T spend $250.00 a year there, but there are people who regularly spend over $250.00 a MONTH in there, and not taking the card would be insane. My wife has been flabbergasted by customers who are making a $500.00 purchase and won't take the card (essentially getting paid $25 to take it) because "You don't have to pay for Borders' card!" Last I checked, Borders' card is a "Rewards Card" type deal that eventually gives you a gift certificate after so many dollars worth of purchases as opposed to a flat discount, so I can understand why you don't have to pay for it... Removing the $25 fee, though, would be functionally equivalent to reducing their income by 10%, which doesn't seem to be a smart move for a chain trying to stay in business...
Secondly, the CD and DVD section isn't there to sell you the latest popular movies/albums (though they happily eat up the obscene profits from people buying them there). Why would you buy Avatar from them for $30 when it's available at Best Buy for $22 (Or the Wal-Mart double disc pack for $20)? What they do provide is an insanely large back-catalog of old/obscure films and audio. The kid at Best Buy looked at me cross-eyed when I asked him to order me "Hard Boiled" ("Order? You mean like online? And what's 'Hard Boiled'?"), while B&N offered for me to have it shipped to my house or brought in for in-store-pickup. Want that ten disc set of great violen concerts at Carnegie Hall? Good luck finding that Best Buy or Sam Goody, but you'd better believe B&N can get it for you. Looking for indie albums with very small releases? They can get it shipped to you from the store where that artists plays. Yes, plays, as in B&N music sections go out of their way to stock local artists and bring them in for signings and performances.
So I completely understand why B&N's membership service and Music section are not for you, but believe me when I say that there ARE people who enjoy them very much.
What a pity (Score:3, Interesting)
The last physical media to fall? (Score:4, Interesting)
About 12 years ago Napster made downloading music easy. We had easy ways to take that downloaded music and integrate it with our existing habits via CD burners. Legal alternatives soon followed. Eventually record shops closed their doors. Not due to piracy but to due to uselessness. Now we have devices like MP3 players and iPods that let us enjoy our downloaded music in a more efficient manner than the old burn-to-CD method.
Thanks to codecs like Divx, movies became downloadable in a semi-reasonable amount of time. Later technologies like Hulu made streaming possible. Rentals stores are taking a beating and stores specializing in selling movies and TV shows have all but disappeared. Originally like CDs, you had to burn your movies to DVDs to watch them on a TV but thanks to HDTV and to set-top boxes, there are more efficient ways to enjoy downloaded TV and movies.
With books there was always a rub: There was no simple way to integrate them with out existing habits. You could print something but it would likely be on single-sided 8.5"x11" paper. You could read it off the screen but that's a lot less comfortable and convenient. With books, we had to wait for the more efficient device in order for electronic distribution to become feasible. I imagine we'll see a very rapid shift now that such devices exist and are becoming affordable. It'll be like the near-overnight industrialization that happens in nations these days compared to the slow, drawn-out process it was when Britain industrialized.
Barnes and Noble is in trouble and they know it. It's a good time to sell.
Re:The last physical media to fall? (Score:4, Interesting)
There's also print-on-demand. Drop your Kindle in the tub and you're out, what, $175? Drop a paperback in, and you're out $6. Same with whacking insects, trips to the beach, leaving the thing lying in your chair while you move the laundry to the dryer in the laundromat....
Books are too expensive for casual reading (Score:4, Interesting)
The bookstores wanted a lot of repeat business, so they pushed frequent buyer cards and book clubs (like Columbia House records in the '80s). Because they gave a "discount" price to frequent buyers, the publishers were free to jack up the price to keep margins high. When a casual buyer came in to get a book, it was priced at $16-20, which is just on the edge of an impulse buy. This was to push you into signing up for the frequent buyer club (which as others point out, wasn't free at B&N), even though you had no intention of using the card enough to make it pay. You may have bought that $20 book, but you weren't likely to go back either.
As for WalMart and Target, well, they found a niche and filled it. Now the casual buyer has a place to get a book once in a while. The high end book addict will eventually head to e-books. Or maybe sooner than later. I basically haven't bought a book for years, but suddenly I have the Amazon Kindle app on my new phone, which I used to get 3 books on the first day without even giving it a second thought... that's slippery economics. The quality of the screen is just fine for reading, too (Samsung Galaxy-S). The hardcore reader will give up the "paper experience" when they realize they no longer have to trudge down to the store, stand in line, and all the other stuff to get books. And if Amazon keeps beating up the publishers on price for all books, not just the popular ones, we should see a resurgence of reading.
And I don't buy the story that people don't read. They may not read novels, but given that the guest on The Daily Show is an author, and the first step in running for president of the US is to publish a book of some sort, there are readers out there.
Leafing Through a Book (Score:3, Insightful)
This is one thing that keeps me coming back to B&N when purchasing a book. Yes, there are time when I leaf through a book in the store, only then to note the title and then buy it cheaper through Amazon. But there are also times that I will use Amazon's reviews to narrow down my choices, then head out to B&N to leaf through the books before making my final decision, then purchasing it there on the spot.
I end up doing the latter for more expensive books. I'd rather spend the extra money knowing that I'm going to like the book, then send my money to amazon to purchase a book that I may find horrendous.
Book stores of the future will be more like (Score:3, Interesting)
a coffee shop (not Starbucks) where people can sit and browse online catalogues, google books, but mostly talk with other knowledgeable people about books. The communication face-to-face will be much faster (and more civil) than the online discussion forums that Amazon tries to run under each books page.
People will be able to buy their ebooks there, but the place will also have one of those print-on-demand machines, for people who want to print off a hand held copy of a book. Either one bought from the store, or one they've prepared themselves via PDF on a memory stick.
There won't be any physical books in the book stores of the future.
the kindles and ipads of tomorrow (Score:2)
will kill traditional paper books for good and I won't miss them. Over the past 15 years or so, I have been reading very few books (maybe 1 book every 3-4 years). Since I got my iPad recently, I have already read 5. The convinience is simply killer. I am sure I can't be the only one.
Love books, but totally gone e-Book (Score:2, Interesting)
I thought Borders was dying... (Score:3)
Here's the closed internet search I could turn up in about ten minute for it:
Cite [247wallst.com]
Borders. Borders Group (NYSE:BGP) lost the online and brick-and-mortar bookstore war years ago to Barnes & Noble (NYSE:BKS) and Amazon.com (NYSE:BGP). The company’s stock is down to $1.20 from a 52-week high of $4.48 and its market value is less than $80 million. For the quarter ending in October, the company’s loss from continuing operations was $39.0 million,or $0.65 per share, compared to a loss of $39.0 million, or $0.64 per share, a year ago. Revenue was $595.5 million, down $86.6 million, or 12.7%. Border’s large Waldenbooks division has all but disappeared. That part of Border’s operations is down to 361 stores. With its debt net of cash at $375 million, a competitor like Barnes & Noble could buy $2 billion in annual revenue for a fraction of sales and cut general and administrative costs to improve margins. Borders has been dead for over two years, but no one has been able to dispose of the body.
FYI: green machine = Barnes and Nobel... Red = Borders... I realized not everyone may color associate like I do.
Something that doesn't help (Score:4, Insightful)
When I go to B&N it's full of people lounging in chairs/on the floor, reading books.
While I understand that initially B&N's browser-friendly policy made it very popular, there's a difference between reading 3-4 pages of a book to see if it is a worthwhile purchase, and reading it from cover to cover - which is what a lot of people are very obviously doing. This means that 1) the person won't purchase the book - why should they? and 2) I would be purchasing a "used" book. While being read doesn't fade the letters, there's a difference between new and used in terms of wrinkled pages, smudges, etc. If I'm paying for new, I want new.
NEWSFLASH! Its the 21st Century. (Score:4, Interesting)
So I hit the nearest town looking for a specific book ("Dragonflies of Surrey" - yes the town was in Surrey) last weekend, heck I would have settled for ANYTHING decent on the subject matter I was looking for. 3 book stores (2 large chains, 1 small specialist store) and not a single book on dragonflies let alone the specific title I was looking for. And I hadnt really expected there to be to be honest.
Now if publishers had actually grasped new technology by the horns and allowed bookstores to print (and bind) **on demand** titles, browse through their back-catalogue (which is several hundreds of times larger than any store could be reasonable anticipated to stock) etc. etc. then maybe we would be seeing a thriving book industry as book stores competed on the quality of their product (paper, binding, ink quality....smell) and facilities (user friendly search, cafe to sit down and browse in) rather than the almost absolute reliance that we now have on the internet to find any rare or unusual titles.
The book store industry isnt dying, the publishers are slowly killing it.
No loss to me (Score:3)
B&N is not in trouble (Score:3)
Re: (Score:2, Informative)
Piracy hasn't done a damn thing, it's just not en vogue for Americans to read. Because they're fat and stupid, you see.
I can say that because I'm an American.
-- Ethanol-fueled
Re: (Score:2, Troll)
But honestly, if it wasn't for IsoHunt, would you have really spent the $150 or just done without? You acquired them because they were free and easy. If you *had* to pay, odds are you would have either gotten fewer or none at all.
Re:I still enjoy reading a good physcal book(store (Score:5, Interesting)
I've always sworn that I'd never become the old fart who's confused in the world of modern technology, but I really miss being able to walk into a record store and flip through the endless racks of LPs or CDs. I suppose I'm going to miss book stores too, when that day comes not too long from now.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
I think that there will be book stores around even in the future, but they need to be more specialized.
There is a difference between a book and an e-reader. If the book breaks it's still mostly readable, and it requires no power to be read.
Considering the amount of crappy channels on TV these days I'm amazed that not more people are reading books, but they are probably surfing the web instead.
Re:I still enjoy reading a good physcal book(store (Score:4, Informative)
I think that there will be book stores around even in the future, but they need to be more specialized.
They need to be more specialized, sure, but that makes their market much smaller. It's easy to stock specialized books when you've got the security of offering Harry Potter and Twilight et al. to keep the money coming in between the rare consumer of niche books. But once Amazon and Walmart start selling the popular stuff at your wholesale cost, it changes things. It's much harder to sell specialized books when you can't subsidize the lower turnover with mass-market books. So yeah, the book stores that remain in the future will be more specialized. But you won't find many of them outside of major cities where there are enough consumers of their chosen specialty to make it financially viable.
This is already the case with electronics. You can get low-end camera gear anywhere, even at drug stores now, but if you want anything beyond the basics you have to go online or to a city big enough to support one real camera store. Used to be a mom & pop camera store in every town more than 50,000, but now that they can't compete with Walmart for point and shoots, there's not enough high end business to keep them open.
Re:I still enjoy reading a good physcal book(store (Score:4, Informative)
True. I love when I'm flying and the Flight Attendant announces to stow all electronic devices, and turn anything "with an off switch" off.
I watch all the people with e-book readers and laptops groan while I pull out my paperback. Uninterrupted reading pleasure during the trip.
Nonsense (Score:4, Interesting)
Speaking as someone who owns a literary agency (a big one with lots of famous authors), I'm going to have to call you on that one.
It's not the authors. It's never been the authors. It's the publishers, and it has always been the publishers.
Re: (Score:2, Interesting)
Re: (Score:2)
If anyone at B&N had even the vaguest inkling of a clue, the "little guy" (Amazon) would have never even existed in the first place.
Mods on crack (Score:2)
Parent was modded "Funny"?
WTF?
It's incredibly insightful is what it is. Personally, I'm not much of a book-browser. I've always found books to be too expensive for impulse buying. But the thing that I'm really going to miss about bookstores is the magazine rack. Magazines pretty much *must* be browsed because they rotate out every month.
I actually subscribed to Photo District News last week because the bookstore where I used to drop by and pick up a copy 2 or 3 times a year has recently closed. Now I'l
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
It is neither you nor 'modern technology', it is the majority which is confused, e.g. believing to be able to 'multitask' with the help of friendly gadgetry while at the same time unable to read (and comprehend) simple texts (see post above) or to add one-digit nuimbers (as mentioned in some other post yesterday).
CC.