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.
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.
Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)
Sad Day for Print (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
What a pity (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:I still enjoy reading a good physcal book(store (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:We live in a multimedia word (Score:1, Interesting)
It is very sad as books offer a very personal relationship and intimate relationship with characters that no other medium can provide.
Wrong. How do books provide a more personal relationship than an electronic device like an iPad or even cellphone? Words are powerful whether they be on a computer screen or on paper. Sure, it's a different method of consumption but it's the same words.
The big debate here should be over the fact that iPad-type devices don't give you the same rights a physical book do so either the price should be drastically cheaper or those rights should be instituted.
Whatever it is, am on my 7th book on kindle ipad version and it DOES NOT feel the same way an old worn paperback does in finding the attachment to the characters.
Maybe another century of human conditioning with electronic books change this. But for now i still prefer my book case as a matter of preference.
-S
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.
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.
Re:I still enjoy reading a good physcal book(store (Score:2, Interesting)
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.
Re:Let me tell you... (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
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....
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.
Re:Let me tell you... (Score:3, Interesting)
Love books, but totally gone e-Book (Score:2, Interesting)
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).
Re:A sad day (Score:3, Interesting)
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 are not impulse buys for everyone, but it seems that these stores would rather store an entire shelf of Marilyn Monroe photo essays (the same one) than stock a few non-book-club titles.
It is almost insulting, to me, to have the staff at such a store suggest that I could buy the book online. If I wanted to do that, as many other posters have pointed out, there are places with better prices on both the books and shipping.
Re:Saw this coming (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
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.
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.
Re:Mom and Pop (Score:3, Interesting)
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 of them due to dust and mold issues.
Re:Let me tell you... (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Maybe if they charged sane prices (Score:3, Interesting)
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 as many customers as they gained, and they still couldn't hope to compete with Amazon head to head on prices. No matter how cheaply run the store, it'll still cost more to run than no store at all.
Re:Let me tell you... (Score:3, Interesting)
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 happening sometime this generation.
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.
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 probably have a major pantie wadding event at the thought of this.
Re:Let me tell you... (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Let me tell you... (Score:3, Interesting)
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 willing to work WITH us instead of against us, we'd all profit. For example... there should NEVER be such a thing as an "out of print" book anymore. Everything should at least be available via e-book. But try finding a less-popular book that's 20 or more years old... if it's not from a famous author, your only recourse is a used-book store. No money goes to the publisher, no money to the author... It's a lose/lose for everyone but the customer and the used book store owner.
Another thing they should do is allow people to go into a brick-and-mortar store with any copy of a book, "register" it, and then download an e-copy of the book for two or three dollars (with part of the profit going to the store, the rest going to the publisher and author). Even if that was a used book. That way, they can still profit off of books that were already published and re-sold via a used book store (or garage sale, or given away, etc). They'll never do it, though. They may as well be throwing away money, and their business will fail because of it.
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:3, Interesting)
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 than investments. It still exists after the fold and people are eager to keep using it. Considering the Nook is android based, I really don't expect it to become a useless brick, ever. Wifi + epub and pdf will be with us for a long time even if no one ever updates the ROM.
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.