Barnes and Noble’s new plan is to act like an indie bookseller
bloomberg.com
bloomberg.com
Walk into a book store and look around. From different points in the bookstore count how many titles you can see. Which titles can you see entirely and which can you only see the spine of? Count them.
Now go to Amazon.com and perform the same experience. Count how many titles you can view at any given time. 10?
I buy and read a lot of books. What makes a good bookstore stand out is its selection. I want to be introduced to books that I would otherwise not know existed and frankly even with all of its algorithms Amazon sucks at this. I can walk into any bookstore and within 1 minute my eyes have scanned dozens of books. I take in their titles, size, color, binding, etc. All of this information impacts whether or not I will pick up a book to examine it further.
I enjoy the selection process and I want a bookstore that gives me that. My favorite bookstores have floor to ceiling shelves so that I can cover more ground quickly. There's no way you can reproduce this on a monitor, it's simply impossible.
Along the same lines, app icons are a fantastic way of judging whether an app is worth downloading from the the play store. Crappy icons pretty much always indicate a crappy app, in my experience, and can immediately be rejected. A polished icon doesn't necessarily mean the app is good though, just that it's worth taking a closer look at.
At the same time I'm pretty much forced to buy from Amazon and buy books in English, because only the most popular books are translated, and primarily fiction. I don't get the impression that the bookstore really care to sell a larger selection of books, just more copies for the same 20 best sellers.
Interestingly, the only department to actually make money in B&N in the last few years, is the board game section. I think this is how they win. Being more of a general edutainment destination and focusing on kids stuff. 6 page kids picture books cost $7. Parents and grandparents will drop lots on "smart" toys and gifts for kids. I'd be all in on this, expanding with more play area and story times making it a fun place to visit. They already smartly dropped CDs as they have to ability to compete there except maybe to have new releases at the register as an impulse purchases but streaming mostly killed that.
In a lot of ways B&N is like an additional public library where you can buy the books & games or just browse. I think that's what makes it different than Amazon. I also think that's their closer competition.
I worked at Starbucks in Store Planning while they were trying to figure out how to makes their stores be a "third place" (early 1990s). Small stages for unplugged sets. Fire places. Big tables for study groups.
I'm just a computer guy, but I always felt Starbuck's merchandising strategy sabotaged those efforts.
WotC had great success for a short while as board gaming host, destination. Mox, the largest I know of today, seems to be successful. https://www.moxboardinghouse.com
I would love to see Barnes & Noble pivoting to become a third place. Especially something kid friendly. (My kid was super into Pokemon.)
Basically a public library vibe with a cafe, that also sells some stuff, located in a mall.
It's a bit like that with my favorite indie bookstore, too. It's a haul for me to get there, but still occasionally schlep myself over there when I have an afternoon to myself, because I enjoy the experience of buying a new book and then sitting down to start reading it over a glass of wine in their café.
B&N could be that now, but they would need to spruce up their café. As it is, it's like an airport coffee shop, only even more unpleasant.
Indies can make it work because their costs are relatively small, and if they're good local people get attached to them.
Waterstones in the UK can just about make it work, because they choose not-too-large middle class locations and design their interiors to match.
B&N don't seem to have understood the appeal of a cozy vibe. The stores always feel like a book warehouse that's trying to impress you with its sheer scale rather than somewhere you can chill on your own terms.
So it's hard to imagine the same model working for a big corporate paying for big box/mall floor space.
I don't know what the experience is in the US, but in the UK, Waterstones' insight has been that it's not worth competing for those customers. They'll just buy the new Jack Reacher from a supermarket or, at best, WH Smiths (the stationery store). To be price-competitive with the supermarkets, you have to discount so heavily that you'll lose money on every sale anyway.
Waterstones have targeted the discerning reader and are doing well at it. This appears to be an attempt to replicate Waterstones in the US.
When I lend or trade a book with a friend, it's a transaction using those same fragments of our souls and we grow slightly closer. We now have a shared experience in those books and each understand each other's view of the world a little better.
Reading might be a largely solitary experience, but the passing of a book from one pair of hands to another achieves a communication far beyond reading a review or even a personal recommendation. Somehow the mass of the book itself carries with it a greater weight to the recommendation.
I really look forward to their development and wish them nothing but success.
This is the most beautiful neutral-yet-poignant description of a bookstore clerk I have ever read. I'm still laughing about it.
To that end, B&Ns with Starbuckses are pretty good. Would love to see an expanded seating area, better seating (arm-chairs, couches), coffee tables instead of just 'meal' tables, good outdoor lighting and/or non-harsh lighting (closer to the red spectrum than the blue), and interesting layouts.
Does anyone else feel the need for something like this in their community? In the city I live in, the only public places that are remotely like this, and allow me to sit for long periods of time someplace comfortable, are Starbuckses and the one B&N. Even other coffee shops don't have the ambience and comfortable seating of some Starbuckses. And our library has incredibly harsh lighting. I'm either stuck at home, at the office, or a Starbucks. If B&N had a large and comfortable alternative, I'd go there every day. Heck, I'd even 'subscribe' to have access to a place like this.
Their new “indie” approach sounds intriguing and akin to what Amazon Books tries to accomplish. In today’s world, the physical store can no longer compete with the web’s infinite selection, but can still offer value in curation and presentation.
Don’t know if B&N will pull it off but wish them the best. I love bookstores and would hate to see them die.
Could not agree more. I always feel like I'm taking a risk when ordering an item from Amazon, but never feel that way when shopping at say, Costco. I trust Costco's buyers to curate and vet the quality of a product for me.
20-25 years ago, B&N was packed end to end with books. Books were spine out unless they were popular and trying to draw someone in. Coffee table books were limited to a rack or two of shelves near the front for impulse buys. Games likewise had a small section.
Along came the nook. It ate up a large section of the "fiction & literature" area. Obvious classics were still there, but deep cuts were few and far between. About this same time they moved to largely selling trade paperbacks in lieu of mass market paperbacks. So my option to buy a book that was in public domain started at $17.95. My experience at this point was that I would come in and look for something and it usually wouldn't be there. They would helpfully tell me that they could order it for me. The books they did have were the obvious popular ones -- exactly the ones that I knew about and could order from home. There was virtually no discovery.
But maybe that worked. Maybe not everyone is like me. At least they were trying.
Today it looks like they've given up. The ex-nook-section has tables with some books laying out. Most sections have trade paperbacks set up cover out (meaning fewer different books, on more prominent display), and the bottom shelf is empty is large parts of the store. Basically they just aren't restocking anything but the most liquid of books.
I still go every now and then because I have kids, but Half Price Books is far more enjoyable for the possibility of finding something that I'm not particularly looking for.
I know carrying inventory is expensive. But old inventory in a bookstore should almost be considered a marketing/advertising cost. There will be a reason to browse and stay. The store will smell like a bookstore.
The discovery process at B&N is minimal and sometimes worse than Amazon. At least with Amazon, I get the "people who bought this also bought this". Especially when dealing with a series, it makes a lot of sense. The "people who looked at this also looked at that" suggestions are great when comparing which book of non-fiction to get.
Going to B&N and trying to buy a specific book in a series is pure frustration. More people read the first book, so it's commonly not in stock. Or the series isn't popular enough and the subsequent volumes aren't available.
Really, I want them to do well. I tell my kids about the golden age of big bookstores where there were books and books and books. I try to buy things where I discover them, even if that makes them more expensive because I want the ability to discover things to stick around.
The indie bookstores will probably be around forever, but I'll be super sad the day that the big book store is dead. I'm still fucked up from Borders going under.
Being interested in books or niche music was a pretty good filter for people. My book stacks are based on walking down the street with $20 in my pocket, and spending it somewhere I thought I would encounter some curated random personal encounters.
It was never about the products, it was about the community around it. The ability for owners to shoe out undesirable people is what made them attractive places to be. It was a rare retail experience where men and women could meet. Today the people in a "book" store full of scented candles and twee knicknacks that happens to sell books is too random a selection to make it a destination for anyone.
From what I can tell by the big box chain here, today, books are used as a loss leader to provide a decorative bourgeois shopping theme park experience. They mainly sell chocolate sugar candies, magazines (all of which exist on a spectrum of aspirational porn), and brickabrack from slave labour factories.
B&N's strategy will be interesting, as either they will be in the culture business, or the sugar-porn-junk business.
That really is the draw, though - making B&N a place to hang out. People spend hours there at a time.
This is a really bizarre intro. I've been going to the Union Square B&N regularly for years. It's perfectly fine, normal retail condition and as busy as ever.
The carpets are clean, the escalators don't seem to break down any more often than anywhere else, and what does a "cheap" pine table even mean? This article is making it sound like a K-Mart or something.
It just makes it hard for me to trust the rest of the article when the narrative it starts with seems so blatantly prejudiced ("littered" with "trinkets"?), from my first-hand experience.
I remember Borders saying they suffered defeat by not getting their ordering from publishers worked out correctly. They wouldn’t stock the right books based on demand and that was one of the reasons they failed.
Hoping BN can make this work.
Plus they carry used books, I always love finding the old math/engineering/music books. I don’t think B&N even carries used fiction.
In the movies, the (thinly veiled) B&N is the big bad and it examines just why that is and sort of why people were so against it for what now seems like stupid reasons:
https://slate.com/podcasts/decoder-ring/2020/03/youve-got-ma...
To me, B&N is still the big bad, even though a bigger badder entity is out there. To me, indie bookstores are far better than any B&N and amazon because they hire minimum wage workers whereas the indie store is a small business that will give an opportunity to people within the community to run the business the way they want and reaping most of the benefits of the business.
Also, indie bookstores give variety and are (hopefully) different from any other bookstore in varying degress.
My local library let's me reserve books online, and if they don't have a book, they usually have it at another library in the county and will ship it to my local library and hold it for me.
And this all costs me $0 (yeah, okay, taxes, but you know what I mean)
1. Books are pretty cheap. If you're looking for something more than 15 years old, you can probably find a cool-looking used paperback on eBay for $4-5 shipped. This isn't as cheap as "free at the library" but my book habit still sets me back <$200 a year or so, with the cost dominated by a few expensive new books.
2. Some people (including me) like books as aesthetic objects. Maybe there is some element of "mmm, I am so smart" when I look at my bookcase, but it's also just a nice wooden case with a bunch of colorful objects in it. I like having it around.
3. It's fun to look at your old books and remember what it was like to read them. My books are physical objects that I actively thought about, held in my hands, and carried around for a week or whatever years ago, so it's a surprisingly effective way of conjuring up time and place.
4. Giving away books to friends is fun and makes it more likely they'll actually read the thing.
5. As a kid I loved big shelves with lots of books, they suggested so much possibility and I'm glad my parents had so many. If I ever have a kid I would enjoy providing them with a similar environment.
So buying books doesn't make much sense from a pure information acquisition standpoint, but there are some more idiosyncratic benefits.
1. New popular books take months or even years (looking at you harry potter, got a call from my local branch 2 years after I bought the book that it was ready to pick up) to become available. I know a lot of people can wait, but maybe you need to read it sooner so you can talk about it with your friends while it is in the zeitgeist. Maybe you don't want to wait half a year only to have it for 2 weeks before it goes to the next person with a hold
2) You mention interlibrary loans, every library can do that but every library has different polices and because there is a cost (somebody has to pay to have Dan Brown shipped from Kirkwood to Albuquerque) most place limits on how often, fiction vs non-fiction, etc. It won't help you at all with 1) because if's nationally popular, every branch is checked out.
3) Can't markup a library book, which to me is one of the only advantages of a paper tree-killer vs my e-ink reader.
If there were no outlet to purchase books, very few people would want to write books because libraries couldn't replace the revenue stream from booksellers.
Libraries benefit from booksellers and vice versa.
background: I'm the partner of a librarian who's also a writer.