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Comment by 11thEarlOfMar | Hacker News Reader

It's sad in a way, but I drove past a Barnes & Noble while traveling through Lincoln, Nebraska and thought, "oh, I haven't seen one of those in a while. I thought they were out of business."

Then thinking a little further, "Yeah, just like vinyl records. Oh. And CDs. And VHS tapes. And DVDs. Shit. The hazards of living in the future."

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I went in a Barnes & Noble recently and found they had a surprising amount of vinyl. Decent stuff for a good price, too. Also DVDs. I have a bluray player and do get them when they are in $5 bins, but otherwise DVDs are fine for me and super cheap now. Can't complain.

I also recently ordered 12 books in a series from the Barnes and Noble website because they were about 5% cheaper overall than on Amazon.

> books, vinyl, DVDs, bluray

Wow, we covered a lot of technological development rather quickly there.

I hope they stay open a few more years. Its my favorite stores. This company's eventual demise is one of the many things I hate about "living in the future".

We are going to run out of stores we can browse, see people, use their bathroom without dirty looks, and a friendly staff.

When I go in there, I think about how they could compete, and can't think of much. I like the stores so much I would consider spending my money on a monthly membership. Yes, like a gym membership. It would have to be reasonable, like $10/month, but I would gladly pay it for the honor of sitting at their tables.

I know I need to buy more books there. I don't understand the individuals who pull 15 books off the shelf, leaves them on the floor, and buys the one book they want on Amazon.(I understand the low income buyer, but not being disrespectful by not putting books back.)

They are putting a lot of toys in the stores. I guess that's a good idea. They have so much potential shelf space, I would like to see used books in their stores. Used technical books would be nice. So many customers would give them their old books.

I feel like I'm writing their obituary.

> When I go in there, I think about how they could compete, and can't think of much.

Hybrid Library and bookstore. (Not the same books :)

Your $10/month membership gets you access to the library, and a discount on books.

[UK, but I assume same everywhere] Libraries have their own set of massive problems though, usage has been dropping off for years. Public libraries keep steadily expanding the internet services relative to books. They're still central to a small group of people's lives, but that's generally contingent to them being free. Private fee-based libraries already exist, have done forever. There's never been an issue with having those libraries allow sale of some titles at discount due to bulk buying, but that's always going to exclude some interesting/rare titles (which could well be mitigated in part by ebooks, but then this goes full circle; why do you need a physical shop). University libraries are generally accessible to anyone for a fee, but are maybe too specialist and tooled toward courses to be universally useful (+ there's that balance to be made between learning and land value which seems to be swinging heavily toward the latter).

I really, really hope there is some path that would work here (i value books over any other possession, I'm a member of 2 public libraries, my old University's library, and a private library, so I'm pretty partisan) but I'm sceptical as to survival prospects of that line of thinking.

[plug, just member] the Lit and Phil in Newcastle - if you're in the the North East of England, it's an incredible, beautiful thing, and well worth the small yearly fee

There are plenty of Barns & Noble's around Los Angeles. They're usually located in town centers (Americana at Brand, The Commons, etc.) and most of them are treated as such with open reading areas for children and a coffee shop for adults and students. It's one of my daughters' favorite spots, I hope that element doesn't go away anytime soon.

Vinyl is very much alive

It's the only physical music medium I'm really willing to buy, CDs are useless since I use streaming services and cassette tapes are just bad. The fact that there's a boom in vinyl is great for me because I love the art and colored vinyls that often are made.

Streaming is convenient, but I think it's not a substitute for CDs. The value of CDs is that they provide a canonical and lossless recording, which isn't provided by vinyl, tapes, or streaming services (AFAIK).

Of course, lossless digital audio files are even better.

Canonical and lossless recording doesn't matter when you're listening to remastered recordings.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loudness_war

Most CD's sound on par with vinyl to me. More "accurate" reproduction certainly, but accuracy doesn't matter when the mastering is done by a monkey being prodded by a record exec.

I love Barnes & Noble, especially their huge selection combined with the possibility to read the books in their café. Actually, I go to NYC regularly partly because of B&N.

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