So why is Barnes and Nobles struggling? A couple of important points:
Their inventory and footprint IS HUGE. Large inventory with low turnover is a margin-killer in retail. And I doubt they make much money off the books in their shelves - real money is in the piled selection and special coffee table books and new features and what have you.
Wide inventory is their advantage over the smaller stores, but it comes at a huge cost and forces them to keep prices high. Remember, in retail, selection costs money consumers have to pay. Smaller stores can get away with a random selection and stacking books all over the place (the hunt is part of the experience). If someone can't find a copy of the Republic at B&N, they probably lost a customer.
I suspect they will switch over to a more curated model (like AmazonBooks) - basically only new and select books. Smaller store, less footprint, and less product to buy and eat costs on. And then they can compete on costs more.
> It's important to remember that independent bookstores are doing great!
The independent stores that you think are doing great are not what many fans of independent bookshops are thinking of by the words “independent bookstores”.
I fondly look back on certain 1990s independent bookshops that had enormous stock, and books were all they sold. But these days, many independent bookshops have trimmed their book inventories to a bare minimum of “new and select books” like you speak of. Small bookshops have felt the same pressures as the large chains, and in the place of actual books come things like vinyl records, Kikkerland products, and fancy teas. That might help them stay afloat financially, but for actual book lovers, it feels like the soul has been ripped out of the shop, like the proprietors are not bibliophiles themselves.
One of the reasons I don't like B&N is because I feel it's a store no longer dedicated to books. They have books, but it's also a gift store, a toy store, and a stationery store. From just my estimate, I feel about 40 percent of its floor-space is for non-book items.
Another book chain in Canada, Indigo Books, operates similarly.
I think the last bastions for book-lovers are used bookstores. Also, Powell's in Portland seems quite dedicated to selling books of all sorts.
Powell’s is more of a tourist destination. Buy a mug, tote bag, shirt and 3 hardbacks you’ll probably never even read. Plus they’ve made some pretty poor financial decisions. Had to scrap renovating and expanding into a nearby building. Lots of layoffs. If they didn’t own their building they’d be long gone.
For someone who grew up in the middle of nowhere Florida, being able to walk somewhere that had not just a book or 2 on any technical topic imaginable but 2 SHELVES full was amazing.
C'mon, that's too high a bar. I was there a few months ago (went twice in a week and spent some non-trivial time). While, Dussman has unparalleled selection of books (it's a 4-storied bookstore after all), they are also a gargantuan gift store (the 5th floor, and throughout the other floors). They have a dizzying array of expensive crap to lure consumers. I was there in November, and by Jove, was it teeming with shoppers.
That said, I still loved the incredible bookstore, and the co-located English store. Not to mention the huge vertical garden, with some 600 plant species. Definitely worth visiting, whether you're a bibliophile, or not.
Notably they don’t consider themselves a bookstore. Their claim is “kulturkaufhaus” which roughly translates to “culture shopping center.” They have a large section of DVDs, Music and other stuff. Their comic book section is pitifully small, though.
They also hollowed out the center of the store to create a Nook store-within-a-store, at least in most locations I know of.
A major independent store in Denver, Tattered Cover, dropped from being spread across 2 large floors down to 1 smaller floor, and I heard the once had 3 floors of the building they’re in. They seem to have focused on keeping the best books in stock though, subjectively speaking. But a decent part of that space is also coffee shop, periodicals, etc as well. I think they also lost any space for authors to come do readings.
There are far fewer shelves of books now. Of the books they do have, they are optimized for profit -- ranging from best sellers, new books by genre, and those few books from big authors that sell year over year.
Most of these books are now trade paperback instead of mass market paperback. I go in needing to get Tom Sawyer and the only option they have is $15.95.
They took the computers out where I could look up a book.
If I manage to find a series of books I want, there is a good chance the first book in the series is missing, since that is the most likely to be purchased. I could then ask at the counter, where they'll tell me they can order it for me.
The shelves themselves have fewer, larger books -- many place front cover out -- occupying fewer shelves. There is just no hunt left in B&N anymore. There is no discovery of something from the back catalog.
They stopped having a "new releases" part of their main sections, so if I want to find a new release in SF/Fantasy it means having to look at all the books in that section.
Granted, that section is a lot smaller now, with books front-cover-out, as you say. But it's still kind of a sucky move for steady customers.
I used to visit the local B&N every week. Now it's down to every few months, when I know exactly what I want to find there. And the B&N is about a quarter toys and board games now (this is not an exaggeration). We're down to two bookstores in our city of 600K+ people, hard to believe.
I had the same experience. One of the main reasons I went to B&N was to look at the new books. Now that they are hidden, there is little point to going in there.
I asked a manager about it, and they told me it was a corporate directive.
Borders did the same re-arrangement about a year before they went under. There used to be a half-bookshelf or so of "released this week" titles where any regular customer could walk in and immediately see and grab a new book by a favorite author, or maybe a new book by an unfamiliar author. Nope, you had to search the whole section.
I really wonder if these corporate directives are made by people who like bookstores, or read.
There's been a lot of C-Suite cat fighting at B&N - mostly between minority owner Leonard Riggio and various revolving CEOs he's brought in and then fired. See e.g.
Honestly I'm amazed Riggio got as much as he did for the sale. I suppose there's a fair amount of value in the property portfolio, but the book business as a whole is in a very rocky place.
Mine has the same number of shelves as far as I can tell, but reduced the overall number of books on a given shelf. They keep the shelves looking full by drastically increasing the number of books with outward-facing covers.
I know it sounds like a minor change, but it really gives me an uncanny valley feeling.
Most of them have sections of games and toys that used to be book shelves. The former nook area is taken over by diary/journals and artsy stuff. Twenty years ago, all of that was books.
Something I've noticed is that small bookstores, particularly used bookstores, cram in way more books per square foot of floor space. Books from floor to ceiling, often with so many shelves crammed into the building that you wonder if the average-sized American can actually squeeze into the store. I wager I've seen some used bookstores smaller than my college dorm room with more books than a B&N.
It's a cozier atmosphere too, more conducive to hanging out for a while digging around for things that look interesting. An all around more enjoyable experience than B&N or Borders ever were.
>I suspect they will switch over to a more curated model (like AmazonBooks) - basically only new and select books. Smaller store, less footprint, and less product to buy and eat costs on. And then they can compete on costs more.
That's understandable, but a bit of a bummer. Part of the joy of B&N is being able to just go and browse--finding something you didn't know you were looking for.
With it downsized, I imagine we'll get something closer to the bookstore at an airport: nothing but the most recent Tom Clancy novels and such.
I suppose the best-case scenario would be like your neighborhood comic book store, where you can place the order and B&N would ship it to store from one of their warehouses.
In the long run, most book stores are doomed. There's no way around it no matter how nostalgic some are for physical books - the medium is an obsolete novelty with the advent of smartphones/tablets. Some book stores will remain but it'll be a niche thing like vinyl records and horseback riding.
This common prediction has not at all been borne out by facts. Physical books still remain popular -- maybe not as popular as thirty years ago, but there's a lot of reasons why that would be the case (general availability of entertainment from competing media). Most importantly, there was a 2017 study that showed that young children prefer reading physical books to reading books electronically.
Physical books have been with us much longer, culturally speaking, than vinyl records were. We're talking millennia. It's going to take much more than the iPad to kill them off.
The eInk device is a better comparison, and according to research(1) it's comparable in most ways to paper reading, but it has some problems with helping people maintain chronological order.
I don't know anyone who reads significant numbers of books on smartphone/tablets. It's either print books, ebooks, or audiobooks. And looking at print book sales over the last decade, there hasn't been a consistent downwards trend.
Personally, I like to buy print books because I can give them away to friends or family after I read them. I also get a lot of print books from my local library, because there's nearly always less of a wait than for ebooks, due to the obnoxious DRM/copyright terms that ebooks for libraries entail.
The combination of form-factor and genre makes a huge difference in how I consume books.
For instance, I have no trouble reading most fiction on either my Kindle or my phone - I'm reading through in a linear fashion, and there usually isn't much besides text. I usually don't have to hold every detail in my head, and can just flow along.
If I get into non-fiction, that is usually where I switch over to either print, or failing that, reading on my computer. Sometimes I can get by with my large-format Kindle DX clone, but that can be dicey. With non-fiction, there is usually a lot more paging back and forth; I may be reading a paragraph, and want to go back and double-check a map or table of figures, or re-read a section that I didn't grok the first time. There might also be footnotes or endnotes that one wants to skip to, and the experience isn't great in most reading apps. It's also considerably easier to read non-fiction on a larger screen or a textbook-size physical copy, I find - for instance, any kind of programming book usually has large blocks of code listings, and looking at those on a 27" 1080p monitor or a physical book where I can see the whole thing at full size, on two facing pages, is much easier than on a 5" phone screen.
Personally, I have read a few thousand books but I have not bought a physical book for myself in years.
When I ride the subway and I see a lot of people reading on devices and relatively few books. Book sales seem to be propped up by gifts, where regular readers love the convenience.
This is especially true of older readers who love being able to increase the fount size.
>before we doom and gloom about B&N, it's important to remember that independent bookstores are doing great
It’s funny watching a movie like You’ve Got Mail today when the trend was reversed. That movie hasn’t aged well for many reasons now that I think about it.
If the bookstore setting is played out, perhaps something fresher would be a perfume store? Or a music store? Or a leather goods retailer? These all still exist! :)
Actual idea: Treat your local bookstore like a library. They don't care if you read their books as long as you stay in store and are respectful. Plus they have actual up to date selection with no waiting list for new releases. And spending money at the cafe is probably higher margin for them anyway.
That used to be more of a thing in the 1990s. The big chains used to have lots of seating, even sofas, and as a fast reader who can read a typical 300 page book in a couple of hours, I used to spend most of my weekends reading books for free in big bookstores. They've wised up. There isn't a lot of seating these days.
Ya, on my reading for english classes I'd do that for my reading assignments. For my engineering and programming classes, i'd take copious notes. It was entirely wonderful. I'd stay at the store from open till close and enjoy all those hours.
Guess our bookstore is just behind the times then, because ours has a really big cafe with nice chairs and tables and such. I've read 200+ books there in the past decade.
Edit: I guess I should also mention that ours was a Borders and then after they went out of business it reopened as a Books-A-Million maybe a year later. I think it was something else before it was Borders, but that was before my time.
So why is Barnes and Nobles struggling? A couple of important points:
Their inventory and footprint IS HUGE. Large inventory with low turnover is a margin-killer in retail. And I doubt they make much money off the books in their shelves - real money is in the piled selection and special coffee table books and new features and what have you.
Wide inventory is their advantage over the smaller stores, but it comes at a huge cost and forces them to keep prices high. Remember, in retail, selection costs money consumers have to pay. Smaller stores can get away with a random selection and stacking books all over the place (the hunt is part of the experience). If someone can't find a copy of the Republic at B&N, they probably lost a customer.
I suspect they will switch over to a more curated model (like AmazonBooks) - basically only new and select books. Smaller store, less footprint, and less product to buy and eat costs on. And then they can compete on costs more.