

Is It Time to Say Goodbye to Barnes & Noble? - mitchie_luna
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/29/business/barnes-noble-taking-on-amazon-in-the-fight-of-its-life.html?pagewanted=1&ref=technology

======
Lewisham
This 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
I 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
I 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.

------
Aloisius
Barnes 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.

------
rmason
We 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.

------
Tichy
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). But I rarely ever stumble across them. Perhaps because there are no
corners on the internet.

~~~
jseliger
Those 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> that somewhat fills his
niche, and there's a pretty big book blog called The Millions that's worth
reading: <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
Any 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
Funny you should ask—I _just_ started doing so about a week ago, for precisely
this reason: <https://twitter.com/#!/seligerj> .

------
pearle
I'm really going to miss bookstores if they disappear, even the big chains
like Barnes & Noble.

~~~
Lewisham
Can 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?

~~~
pacomerh
It's actually hard to explain, the whole experience of going to the bookstore
is valuable to me, looking at any page and feeling the book in my hands before
buying it, having other books that don't really matter next to the ones I'm
looking for is very interesting, it's a discovery thing.

~~~
JumpCrisscross
Would you be willing to pay a few hundred dollars a month for that privilege?
Their model is sustainable if they charge a heavy premium for the physical
bookstore experience.

------
techdog
Read "How the Internet is Changing Economics."
[http://asserttrue.blogspot.com/2012/01/how-internet-is-
chang...](http://asserttrue.blogspot.com/2012/01/how-internet-is-changing-
economics.html)

------
evoxed
The 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).

------
Apocryphon
I 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
An even more interesting question is if e-book prices will start dropping
sharply once the paper book business is almost gone?

~~~
Apocryphon
I'm almost certain we're decades away before paper books start declining that
badly.

------
pacomerh
I'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
I 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.

------
mathattack
Interesting. 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.

------
SteveJS
Does 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
Hard to imagine anything with a higher margin than digital. The marginal cost
of selling an e-book is effectively zero.

------
junto
Barnes & 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.

------
shareme
Sad to say I will miss them for the ideal place to pick up women for dating..

------
raymondh
Retail 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.

~~~
dangrossman
> 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.

