Barnes and Noble's surprising turnaround
tedgioia.substack.com
tedgioia.substack.com
If I want a specific book, I already know where to go: the internet. No physical store is ever going to compete on inventory ever again. Amazon will eat you alive.
I go to bookstores to discover new books, and to enjoy the feeling of being around books and the people who love them. The CEO realized this, and leaned in hard.
It's a really, really smart recognition of when passion for the product is actually a business advantage, and not just a warm fuzzy.
It's very hard to do good recommendations -- even for Amazon/Goodreads! -- without people who care about what they're recommending. Those recommendations are now a bookstore's real product.
Boy was I wrong, and I'll happily eat crow for how wrong I was. The new library building is beautiful, super inviting and some of my favorite architecture anywhere. I love going there to work or read. They also do a great job making the building welcoming and accessible to all, while at the same time preventing it from getting trashed by the homeless (looking at you SF public library) with a simple no sleeping/no lying down rule.
Welcoming, inviting public spaces can do very well if people understand why they are desirable.
It has become an incredibly valuable community hub. Books are a bit of an excuse to enjoy its architecture and function. I've been there for countless hours with my children as they have grown up.
I'm also consistently impressed by the staff. In a time when every business is complaining about staffing and using it as an excuse for bad quality and bad service, it seems that most libraries are staffed with total professionals who do their job day in and day out and do it well.
I even met the librarian who invented the phrase “surfing the internet” at a librarian conference. Yes, a librarian was there to coin phrases at the dawn of the web!
Many Canadian cities are upgrading their libraries and i for one am overjoyed to see that!
They have spaces for business meetings, rooms for night classes, groups to meet and so on!
They really are a wonderful mix of community services.
Plus libraries are still a great place to take young children. They often have seperate kids areas where you can spend an hour or two with toddlers.
Libraries arnt stuffy old quiet buildings anymore!
The building is open until 11pm 4 days a week, with reduced hours on Friday and Saturday; closed on Sunday. I guess it's no surprise that the website describes as more of a "Multifunctioneel Centrum" as opposed to just a library!
It's a great place, just wish there was free parking.
Because the less well off may not have enough devices or internet access to do things digitally. It's also good if you have young kids. You can't read that book which has different textures for all the animals digitally.
Is that really still true? I've traveled in many poor counties where people live in shacks with no plumbing, yet still all have internet connected smartphones. Only in the most remote villages with no electricity or phone signal are people still truly disconnected.
(I haven't been to the SF public library in a while, but the few times I went in as a Mozilla intern the staff were so rude I ended up buying books and selling them at a used bookstore when finished rather than be treated rudely by folks who were within a year or two of me, from the same department I graduated from. Maybe there's a reason people don't respect that space, and it's not just because they're mentally ill and/or down on their luck.)
A few have managed to keep going (mostly due to the communities taking direct control) and they have done wonders in keep up with the times.
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Library_of_Birmingham * https://www.oodihelsinki.fi/en/ * https://wellcomecollection.org/pages/Wuw19yIAAK1Z3Smm * https://www.gladstoneslibrary.org/
others?
> The new library building is beautiful, super inviting and some of my favorite architecture anywhere. I love going there to work or read.
Im confused. Why did you initially oppose it? Seems like you like it because its nice but surely that wasn't your original concern.
The worst thing being that, of course, the libraries in rich neighborhoods have no homeless people and are generally nicer.
They are important - maybe the most important - library customers.
No way I would ever risk buying such books from Amazon. I am concerned about the condition it would arrive in, scams and delays.
I bought a second book based on a librarian's recommendation. There was only 5 or 6 books of the kind I was interested in. It made choosing one easier.
Amazon is tainted brand.
I started looking for rare, expensive and/or old books that I know about, and at the first result page I realized how futile it was, between unknown quality, unknown marketplace sellers, unreliable listings, the chance of scammers, and the ridiculously inaccurate mass of irrelevant search results that drown out relevant ones.
Other people actually recommended, in harsh terms, to buy electronics etc. on Amazon and get books and games from proper sources.
It is quite obvious to the mass public, not a special insight, that Amazon doesn't love to sell stuff: not only books and media, but anything except maybe Prime subscriptions.
It is unfortunate but understandable if you get scammed buying a pair of "certified" Apple earbuds or lightening cables from a Chinese seller at a price 70% less than you'd pay at Apple, Fair enough and buyer beware.
But if you can't even buy a BOOK that's sold by Amazon itself without getting scammed, then it seems we have a serious problem, and it is not surprising that Amazon stock is down over 50%.
It's really off-putting. In a bookstore, I can stand there ten minutes and make sure the book is worthwhile. Technical books are expensive.
Amazon treats me like a deadbeat, even though I buy lots of books from them.
For anything other than a novel, that's usually the least representative sample. That'll give you the copyright, table of contents (admittedly useful) and the Preface and the Introduction and a page with a couple of quotations on it.
Not really great to judge the quality of writing / code samples or whatever you're interested in.
I always used to use zlib for "flicking through" a book the way you would in a bookshop to see if it was worth buying it.
We have a local chain that sells well curated used books and it's brilliant. Picked up my copy of Godel, Escher, Bach because I saw it on the shelf and flipped through and was like 'Yes, please!'
Note that this is only for print editions. For Kindle editions it does not have "Surprise Me". For those "Look Inside" seems to just show you the same sample that you get if you ask it to send a sample to your Kindle.
I've found this is often completely useless for music books and math books as the sample doesn't get far enough in to actually have any music or math notation, and it is terrible handling of such notation that often makes an otherwise good Kindle book unreadable.
I once bought a Kindle edition of "Proofs from the Book" and it had been produced apparently using OCR which didn't know how to handle anything other than normal letters, digits, and common symbols. Things like integral signs, summation signs, and set relationship symbols showed up as whitespace.
Another math book I bought had many of the equations as graphics. Reading on the Kindle app on a computer or tablet was fine. The images were scaled to a reasonable size and were quite readable. On an eInk Kindle however they were not scaled. They were tiny and required more magnification than my best magnifying glass had for me to read them comfortably. I had to tap them to get a menu that would let me show the image full screen. This made reading the book incredibly tedious both from the slowness of the Kindle and only being able to see one equation at a time this way.
Did you use the present tense to describe the past, before James Daunt took over, perhaps? I could understand "the key insight was that bookstores were no longer places to get books," but the entire article seems to be about how B&N has become a place to get books, because the CEO loves books, and empowers local stores to also love books and therefore sell them well.
But it's more of a place to discover books. That's what the CEO did.
For a long time, the fact that the bookstore was the _only_ place to “get books” occluded the fact that it was the _best_ place to explore and appreciate books. Amazon stripped away the veneer by showing that, actually, bookstores weren’t so ideal for “getting books” after all (book not carried, book not in stock, can’t find the right shelf, etc). Daunt is therefore succeeding by refocusing on “loving books,” as you put it, rather than on transacting books.
You might “get books” at a bookstore, but that’s probably not why you went there in the first place.
it’s maddening the direction these companies are pulling us towards.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indigo_Books_and_Music
They are a case study in business school that selling tchotchkes and trinkets is more profitable than books. I disagree with GP's article. It is the same myth in tech that "engineers make better founders" and "companies ran by execs with engineering backgrounds are more successful". It is feel-good masturbation for professionals without objective data backing it. In this case they are running with "booklovers run better bookstores". Not necessarily generalizable to all booksellers. The pandemic has shown that cheap rates play an oversized role in picking winners and losers.
I think the lesson may be that B&N wanted to be a successful bookstore and they achieved that by doing a better job serving book buyers mostly by giving individual stores more autonomy. That doesn’t mean another chain couldn’t succeed by turning into a books & trinkets store with a focus on high margin trinkets.
But one thing especially is the “friend activity”. There are some friends that I have connected with whom have a similar reading preference to me. Discovering what they are reading / have read and rated has influenced my buying decisions quite often. When I lived near those friends, we would talk about the books as we had more contact, but since moving halfway across the world that does not happen as often. Goodreads is great for that (imo).
In a store the person has to go out of their way every time they recommend the same book. It's one-to-one vs. one-to-many. There's more of a chance they really do think highly of the book, maybe even years after reading it. That's valuable.
The recommendations you would get inside a bookstore have nothing to do with this kind of experience. You are having an actual conversation about what you like and are looking for.
But is that a property of the recommendations or of the circumstances under which they are received?
It's possible that the quality of a recommendation generated by an AI based on psychological profiles is superior, so that if it was followed, the book would be enjoyed. But it's not being followed, because it appears too unlikely and the reader doesn't trust the AI.
If that's true, the competitive advantage of the physical interaction would not actually be the recommendations themselves, but the atmosphere it creates which makes readers susceptible to listening to them.
Now, some people, maybe most even, will try and do the same to you. But not all, and store owner can optimize for those who won't.
I might want to revisit this in a year or two.
But I feel like they succumbed to the same problem B&N did here, for different reasons -- they became full of kitchen gadgets and devices, because people were buying more things and less books on Amazon itself, and the stores started to mirror that.
Bookstores always were places to make discoveries, to learn, to have people recommend books for you. My first bookstore experiences go back to the late 70s, and the ones that stick in my mind as memorable? Two stores that had fiercely opinionated voracious readers as employees, who both knew books and their customers. (I could literally go there, as a kid, and ask "what book do I want to get my dad for Christmas", and they'd inevitably make fabulous recommendations that I wasn't old enough yet to figure out by myself)
This extends beyond bookstores - all stores are ultimately in the business of caring about customers and being deeply knowledgable about what they sell. The rest is logistics.
FWIW, this was considered common sense when I was in library school 20 years ago: that is to say, it was presented to us as a fact rather than a question. I don't think this was a unique or novel insight by B&N, rather a question of execution in the transformation of an already large company and, I suppose, the financial discipline to survive the competition.
Borders is already out of business, and BAM! looks like it's on its way (it's no longer public so financials are difficult to know, but part time employees report that they get more or fewer hours based on how many gift cards they sell, which indicates cash flow problems).
BN is the only one doing well, and it's my opinion that this is due to being a comfortable place to buy and read books. By contrast, book selection at BAM! is atrocious, and the cafes all seem cold, uninviting, and surrounded by gimmicks and toys.
That cannibalizes the bookstore you like to visit.
My apartment is running out of space for all these books, and maybe the solution to this is that I need to borrow from the library more often instead of buying my own books. I really wish I could have an e-reader, but again, I don't want to spend money on things that will lock me into a single vendor indefinitely and might just arbitrarily go away.
I learned my lesson in the early-00s when online music purchases were DRM'd and I lost a lot of my collection due to Yahoo music shutting down. I also remember one of the problems being that purchases made in one store would not be compatible with a competitor's MP3 player, which locked you into a single vendor. Couldn't switch to iPod because it didn't work with the DRM that was designed for my Dell DJ (which was a POS that broke all the time but I had to stick with it because of my existing music collection).
I'd hate to have that same problem but with books instead of music.
I organize by age (using a ring buffer method) and have an honest “am I going to read this again?” review of my oldest shelf every few months or so.
https://github.com/joeycastillo/The-Open-Book
This may be up your alley.
I think used bookstores failed because they didn’t curate their selections enough. You can’t go into one expecting to find a specific book — you go there to discover new books. When the shelves are packed with books nobody wants, it removes the reason to go there
is obviously to get a bigger apartment.
Also there are book scanners out there, but don't know the price on these.
Books or music as a service, when you think you've bought them, is terrible.
I personally read on a Barnes & Noble Nook, my fourth e-ink reader. I absolutely love it, I would go so far as to say that the current generation has a _better_ reading experience than dead trees. But I use Calibre and remove the DRM, for the same reasons that you state. I view the books not as entertainment but rather as culture. Culture worth preserving.
My wife and I are ruthless about not collecting stuff
Except for the CEO, who prided himself on not knowing anything about the field. He saw not knowing the niche as a perk; he'd focus on the "business side" only, leaving the rest to everyone else.
Got the offer, turned it down because of that.
The problem with the GP’s description is that the CEO took pride in not knowing the business. A good enabler type CEO who is an outsider to the business would certainly make an effort to build expertise and even passion about the business.
Looks like the hedge fund installed the new ceo when they purchased Barnes and Noble.
That hedge fund is probably filled with MBAs.
There's one MBA on their management committee. Heavily outnumbered by JDs.
I'm kind of astounded the article didn't talk about Paul Singer at all. It seems like a massive oversight to not dig into the money behind Barnes and Noble.
Foley was passionate to the moon and back about the product, but didn't have the business chops to follow.
Had Peloton been driven by MBAs when they went public, they never in a million years would they have taken on the types of inane liabilities that Foley and co did because they were more product driven than business driven.
Things like their massive factory build outs/buy outs and slow burn perfectionist approaches to product development would likely have been thrown out the door in exchange for slapping their label on existing hardware and shoving as many experiences down as many channels as possible.
And sure that'd leave them being called sell-outs by their original fans, but ironically that's where they're now being forced to exist since those fans were a great Kickstarter target market, but a completely inadequate target market at that scale.
And yes, in such a capital heavy field like fitness hardware, there would have been massive VC pressure.
The only way to drive that would have been to essentially show "they scale like software, not hardware". So sell investors on rapidly increasing revenue while sweeping the massive (even by tech standards) burn rate under the rug as temporary.
100% agreed. Not that it isn't possible, but I'd like to start with a product person because a product person will fight for what matters to the customer and I'd prefer to be in that camp.
Satya Nadella after Balmer would be another example. Balmer did great things for MSFT stock ticker, but so much of the 90's love was lost. Satya has a massive uphill battle but with Github, VSCode and other efforts - I do believe he sincerely cares.
This is like the political narrative, economy was doing badly under party X, starts doing well under Y so Y must be better. No, there were cycles and much of what happens under Y was started by X, and/or both had a lot less control than people think.
We've all seen videos of Ballmer, he was obviously a very passionate leader. Gates, Ballmer, Nadella, they're all business people and probably as evil as the other, just so happens that it is now more of a business imperative for Nadella to be seen as a good player in tech.
That's interesting to hear.
My eyes are getting older and I find the accessibility facilities in Windows 11 (and Mint as it happens) far more helpful than those on my M1 Air (little things like the ability to scale far more of the textual aspects of the OS in Windows).
Balmer made office the massive cash cow it is today through amazing licensing - again great stuff for $msft, but there was no product through his tenure that people were like yea, Microsoft! The iphone was dismissed and the windows phone was too late and couldn't play catch up.
Today people are starting to care about Microsoft again. Definitely not 90s love but man I love VSCode. I really do.
But it is rare enough that it is worth pointing.
The last line of code I wrote “for fun” was in 1996. The number of things I’ve done as hobbies since then is a mile long.
Love comes and goes. Wonder is forever.
>Jane Friedman
>Speaking as a publishing industry reporter & observer, I couldn't agree more with your assessment of James Daunt's leadership and business strategy. Unfortunately, the picture isn't quite as bright for B&N as those numbers would have you believe. B&N stores were once quite large (e.g., 25,000 square feet); the new stores opening are less than half that in some cases. And they're largely re-opening stores that closed during the pandemic.
>It's also concerning that during a record two years for book sales (the pandemic was great for book sales of all kinds), Barnes & Noble didn't see the same percentage increase, indicating they've lost market share. Some industry insiders believe the current private equity owner is trying to position the company favorably for sale.
Also, a loss of market share in a growing economy is also not a bad thing as long as it’s accompanied by increased profitability. What this means is that B&N has basically maintained their revenues, while significantly reducing their costs, which as the clear market leader in the space sets them up very well to pursue a more considered growth strategy based on the current environment as opposed to the pre-Amazon environment, which is what their original stores were based on.
Also, those larger stores didn’t mean much in terms of B&N as a bookseller because they were largely filled with their coffee shops and selling toys and Knick knacks.
Rent and/or property taxes and maintenance are massive overheads. Considering that bookshops are no longer trying to have every possible book someone could want in direct inventory, big shops aren't needed for any but the flagship stores.
When you see a store bulk up with crap stuffed everywhere, it’s often tied to loading up on debt and sometimes bankruptcy risk.
IMO, Barnes and Noble sees an opportunity with the struggles of Amazon in retail and the decline of Starbucks. Starbucks used to pride itself as a “third place”… now the drive through is the priority, the seating has been reduced, and the management seems more interested in fighting labor than having happy hospitality employees.
People who read tend to have money. It seems like a winning combination to have people with money hanging out in your retail establishment. Plus they can riff off of Target’s super successful pickup model that is every mom’s favorite thing ever.
This makes me think you did not enter a bookstore before you checked out Amazon's version. Many do exactly this for the big, recognizable hits they expect to sell more of.
Also it is a symptom of JIT logistics and inventory minimization, not really a UX concern.
Yeah, I worked at a chain bookstore years before Amazon ever opened a physical store and the entire bestsellers display was done covers out, as were all the endcaps. Within the aisles, we organized books so that some of the books on every shelf would be cover out, which sometimes optimizes for space, and makes for a more aesthetically pleasing shelf layout and allows for the more prominent display of popular titles and eye-catching covers.
Setting up shelves this way was part of the training and a constant practice, adjusting the display of stock throughout the day as items are purchased, removed, and returned. The entire store got a once over every night at closing.
I'm going to classify this as a "just do a good job." We people like to understand the world with stories. Plot points. Twists. Heroes, antiheroes, antagonists... That's a bias.
All of the failed B&N strategies were snappy headlines... good stories: Online sales, digital sales & ereader, bookstore cafes, restaurant business...
These are all strategies you can put on a slide and sell to a board or executive team. An investment blogger can summarize them in a tweet. People can easily form opinions about them. You either think it's a good idea, or a bad one... and expect success or failure to follow smoothly from the goodness of the decision.
IRL though, execution matters. Almost every war ever fought was determined in battlefields, not palaces. That's true for Russia in Ukraine, the US in Afghanistan... and we'll shortly forget this lesson about both. From the outside, it's always easier to credit political-level decisions and forget about execution. I think this is a major recurring fallacy. Real outcomes are not deterministic. They're usually determined by execution.
Ted Gioia does a great job of creating a narrative frame here. But, it sounds like successes actually came from sub-narrative decisions. How purchasing is managed. Pricing & promotion policies. Responsibility splits between HQ & stores. These are all mundane, "housekeeping" issues... execution details.
Strategic decisions obviously matter. They're also interesting, especially to low engagement outsiders... including shareholders. They do not matter nearly as much as tactics. Tactics > Strategy, in life as in chess. This is the kind of thing that gets lost in 2nd hand accounts.
On the first point, floor space devoted to books compared to the past at the same stores has continued to decline, with, in one case, the entire space formerly devoted to non-book items now devoted just to games and toys, and spaces that were, before the pandemic, devoted to books now devoted DVDs, vinyl records, and other legacy media.
On the second, the two sections of books that have not lost space seem to be (1) the bargain book section (which is also largely merchandised to show the whole fronts of books rather than spines like the rest of the store, so it is the least titles per unit of shelf space) and the self-help section; the rest of the sections have been compressed as the non-book areas have spread. If we define “intellectual stimulation” in terms of engaging a recurring customer base, I suppose that meets the description; but I don’t think it’s what people would normally read the description as implying.
I do think that the article, amidst the noise, identifies the key factor: giving stores control over stocking books that appeal to their customer base rather than relying on a mix of promotional agreements with publishers and HQ buyer selections. This leads to a selection more tailored to the local market, and more conservatively chosen – not in the political sense, but in the sense of what will sell vs. what publishers hope to make sell by placement.
I know what you’re trying to say here - that local booksellers will play it more safe than publishers who might support a new author for example - but I think this is a mistaken perspective.
First of all we are likely to see lots of small scale experiments where local booksellers will try different books based on their own instincts. That’s controlled risk taking and is likely to be less conservative than a global publisher.
Then they will be closer to their actual readers and so will have a better understanding of what new books / authors will work for their actual customers.
Finally this favours quality over other factors. If a local bookseller recommends a book they are putting their own credibility - and financial performance - on the line. They want readers to come back to their store rather than just sell that book.
I’m not even talking up to date with the latest ChatGPT hotness, but any serious programming books written in the last 7 years - especially timeless classics that matter regardless of the technology. Rather that the same Sam’s Learn C++ book that’s been gathering dust for 20 years.
I suspect there actually is a market there, but the problem is you need a very particular book store manager that can curate this well. I guess it would have to be a labor of love, as financially the people who would do this well are busy making much more money as developers.
This finished the destruction of the technical books sections of Half Price Books.
The first half of the destruction was online shopping. No longer could you find an entire technical library hitting the store because someone just died and their family dumped everything to Half Price. The most valuable books got skimmed off immediately and never made it to the shelves anymore.
However, for a while the "standard" kind of technical books still hit the shelves so you could snag them at decent prices. However, shoplifting became sufficiently rampant that Half Price seems to have even removed those. Now, you can only get those books online, and the only books remaining on the shelves have the quality that results from them having effectively have no resale value at all.
I never minded buying IT books even when I wasn’t in the best financial situation. 40-50 bucks for a good book could bring almost limitless rewards. One thing though, I needed to browse and skim through the book to decide whether it was a purchase or not. Most books I bought like that were thoroughly studied. I can’t say the same thing about books I bought online though.
The catalog is still coming together, but "serious programming books" is a key offering.
I’ve never failed to go back there and find something fascinating I have never heard of before. Though most of the people studying/working in that room will always wonder what kind of person sincerely gets excited about this stuff.
What I find however, is nothing like it used to be, at least in certain locations. I'm sure it varies by location but I miss the one closest to Redmond (Microsoft) which (at least when I went there around 2000) had multiple full rows of computer books including highly technical ones that you don't see anymore in person.
I'm actually surprired there's a narrative of "B&N is coming back." Their stores, what few times I've had the misfortune of wandering inside in recent years, are still excruciatingly beige, useless, and (in the words of the TLA) "crucifyingly boring."
The best I've encountered is Foyles in London, though even that had cut back substantially prior to the pandemic when I was last there.
“Daunt also removed legal textbooks, technical guides, reference books from the shelves. In return, he stocked more books that customers were delighted to discover which led to an increase in sales.” [0]
If there is “a market there”, it’s probably as a specialised store.
[0] https://startupmarketer.co/how-a-physical-bookseller-turned-...
I believe it was owned by an ex-Lotus employee named Rick Treitman. If someone knows him, he might have some insights into the business.
Borders was always so much better for technical books :(
- James Daunt is now CEO of both B&N and Waterstones in the UK. Waterstones is a sizeable business in its own right with over 300 stores and totally dominates high street bookselling in the UK.
- Both B&N and Waterstones are owned by Elliot Management who bought B&N after acquiring Waterstones.
- Daunt only got his chance to run Waterstones after being installed by (now sanctioned) Russian Oligarch Alexander Mamut who bought the chain for $66m. I think it's fair to say this was a significant piece of risk taking as Waterstones was, at best, weeks away from insolvency and probably would have ceased to exist in anything like its present form. Of course, at that point Daunt's model was unproven (except in his own handful of London bookstores).
Here is James Daunt in his own words (from pre B&N):
In the 2010s, just when ebooks became popular, a lot of bookstores opened in my city and others I know, both of the large chain and small independent variety. My thought was "are they crazy or what? Physical books are obviously a declining business, most people will just read ebooks. Most of these stores are doomed to close, as bookstores will become something very niche". Boy, was I wrong... the reality, while I don't have sales figures and just speak as a layman, is that they didn't close, but rather the opposite: even more of then opened during the rest of the decade and they generally seem rather lively. Have ebooks not caught on after all, or are people reading much more so that there is market for both? I don't know.
By the way, on a more personal note, ebooks made me almost stop reading for a long time. I was an avid reader until ebook readers appeared. Then I started to read in ebook form, because physical books take a lot of space, and they already occupied a lot of room at home (and the space is not just for me, I lived with my wife, and now also my son!). With this, I dropped from reading a lot to like 4 or 5 books a year, then 2, then 1 or even 0. I made myself believe that this was due to lack of time (work, not being single anymore, etc.) which was only a half truth. The other half of the truth, as shallow as it is, is that ebooks don't get me hooked as physical books do, even if the content is the same. I'm not proud of it, it's silly because the real value of a book should be in what it says, not in the physical materials, but it's how I work. I tried to change it for some years but I failed. So I came to accept it. Now I buy physical books again and even though I don't read as much as when I was younger (work+parenting takes a huge amount of time), reading is again one of the main things I do with the free time I do have, and I at least read 1-2 books a month.
Same here, though possibly not for the same reasons. I go through phases of reading a couple of ebooks a week, but if I'm not careful I get reading deserts where when I look back I've spent weeks curating/buying more ebooks and never actually getting around to reading them.
I love reading, but it's a constant battle to be a reader and not just a collector of books, something I never have an issue with when it comes to my physical collection (which is large but also largely untouched due to tired, aging eyes).
1. Amazon is a terrible place to discover surprising reads. There is one day I was navigating the bookself in Technology sector, and found one book on the story of how Android is created. I didn't know this book exist, but now my interests can't be contained, and I want it NOW. The sense of discovery is awesome, and I am willing to pay for it.
2. B&N membership gives you basically a 10% discount StarBucks (unofficially, but pretty much the same), which is a sweet deal.
3. Amazon sometimes screwed up book versions. For example, I bought book 1&2 of the same series from Amazon, and book 1 arrived in UK format, while book 2 in US. This is an intolerable mistake for me as a collector. So I have to repurchase book 1 later from B&N in US format as I can no longer trust Amazon for it.
Overall, B&N now, is more of a socializing place for me than a retailer. I still use Amazon for books I can't find, but I don't mind pay a few more bucks to buy from B&N. Sometimes it is not all about money.
To me, a Barnes and Noble still symbolizes the joy and worldliness of reading. Whenever I'm with family and shopping, if I'm not out to buy anything I still opt to spend some time reading in a B&N. I'm glad this chain is back on its feet and growing again. For lots of places, and lots of people, B&N is a lifeline.
This is perhaps the passage from the article that resonated the most with me:
> If you want to sell music, you must love those songs. If you want to succeed in journalism, you must love those newspapers. If you want to succeed in movies, you must love the cinema.
> But this kind of love is rare nowadays. I often see record labels promote new artists for all sorts of gimmicky reasons—even labels I once trusted such as Deutsche Grammophon or Concord. I’ve come to doubt whether the people in charge really love the music.
It is so much more pleasant to go somewhere, and feel like you're being served a good selection of recommendations, new and old. Even better if you can talk to someone at the store and get their feedback and ideas. But in Blockbusters' end days, all they hired were teenagers not even old enough to rent from their Mature section.
There was no way they were going to compete with digital streaming services on sheer volume. But at the time of its collapse, every time I would step inside a Blockbuster - all I would see is non-movie related stuff being peddled at me. Posters, plush, popcorn, toys, etc.
The "new releases" movies were in the back, the best quality films hard to find, jumbled in with all the rest. The rest of the store just seemed to be wasted space. I always thought if they dedicated less space to the new releases and spent more time curating valuable films from all eras, they'd make a return to form.. especially with their name.
Movie and gaming deals ruined Blockbuster. And at the end, their $15/month ala carte plan just put them in the hole. They had such a good price before.. it was something like $3/night to rent. Then they raised the price to $7/2 night. It seems about the same price but no one really wants to rent it for 2 nights and the $7 priced most of the movie-goers out of the market. Then they tried the ala carte "Silver" or "Platinum" plan or whatever it was (it was probably a regional thing).
It's the same principle here with B&N.
Movies in disks, comes with friction which isn’t worth IMO.
I have lived bookshops since I was young, I always felt like I might find something amazing and secret in them. They held a kind of mystic for me (1990s).
This changed in the 2000s. I do miss the massive borders books we had. I do have to say the all the Waterstones I've been into in the last 15 years have all those toys, calenders, etc the OP doesn't like; and the bigger stores all have Costas.
I don't buy books now, I just go to the library.
That said, their technology could still be better. Ordering something online for local pickup works, but there’s a surprisingly long delay (sometimes days!) between placing an order and it being ready for pickup. Target is a lot faster, for example, despite having much larger stores.
And that makes sense, anyone looking for a good price is going online, if you are in the store you are not price sensitive. And of course this means B&N is much more profitable than they would be otherwise.
Lowes is doing this too - their prices for plumbing products are insane - $12 for something that goes for $2 online, but they are betting that anyone buying in the store needs it NOW and will pay anything.
I'm left wondering if B&N has turned itself around or is simply riding a wave of post pandemic reading which will crest leaving B&N once again over built and in trouble
Some will do very badly! Others will be successful but unattractive. But on average the result will be better and if that ensures the survival of the chain the that's probably a good thing.
Can you see how this completely contradicts the approach - leaving aside the fact it’s a sample size of one and that none of us have access to financials etc.
It's the same reason why vinyl is continuing to grow. People want something they can actually own. Books are not immune to this and there is something inherently more satisfying about having a bookshelf with the books you've read versus a library of ebooks.
I don't recall how he explained this, but it might've been that older folks don't want to accumulate more stuff while younger people have room to grow a collection as well as the point you make about wanting to acquire non-digital goods (and, relatedly, perhaps to have experiences that take them away from their screens).
Combine stores like B&N and Half-Price with alternative online resources like AbeBooks, Discogs, e-bay, etc., and you really don't need inconsistent crap like Amazon in your life anymore.
I can't be the only one who is fed up with the bait & switch experiences. Being an asshole or otherwise indifferent to the customer is eventually going to add up over time.
Honestly, if I was more skeptical + motivated, I'd be looking into if this post was actually a paid ad because my reaction is "where is the closest Barnes and Noble?"
I frequent B&N because I badly want a seller of new books ro survive, but I so seldom buy anything there anymore, I find I'm visiting less and less.
The music section was outstanding; it was clearly curated by multiple music lovers and I saw stuff that I would never have guessed would be available on vinyl in a chain store.
Probably around 40% of the bookshelves were dedicated to stuff teenagers or younger would like, and they had a ton of sci-fi and fantasy (both adult and children), including a bunch of copies of a fantasy book my daughter wanted that the B&N website said was available online only.
I was impressed.
I doubt Amazon saw those as profitable, and they either didn't track well how much my purchases (and I'm assuming others) declined when it was no longer easy to deal with a person, or decided the impending labor/unionization battles would be best avoided.
And B&N has become a media-heavy giftshop.
It was also by far the best place to buy board games this year, since they had a 50% off sale Dec. 26 and 27 on all their games and many of their stores have a fair selection of titles. (Some sample prices on some hot titles: Ark Nova for $37, Ruins of Arnak and Everdell for $30/each).
From what I was told by a B&N worker, this was an extension of the 2-day post-xmas 50%-off-all-hardcovers sale that they'd started doing recently.
I haven't shopped in one in a while but after seeing how much stuff they have that I'm interested I'll be back. They even had lego sets that were sold out elsewhere.
The toys there are some of our favorites (Lego and Calico Critters) and they have a lot of fun toys you’ve never heard of but are fun for the kids to try.
It's been many years since I've seen a bookstore so full of books and customers (outside of Powell's in Portland). I noted two major differences from how B&N was many years ago. First, the proportion given over to fiction is much greater. Second, there is an enormous youth section, maybe a third of the store.
Regardless, can't agree more that a CEO whose interest is in something besides money-grabbing at the expense of the health of the business is actually how you make a store successful. Somewhat more cynical about the long-term health because it seems like once stores become appealing, they'll cash in on that by going back to money-grabbing, but we'll see...
I’m not surprised that the guy who turned around Waterstones in the UK can do BN in the US.
The answer was, “corporate controls everything.”
The employees did get one single end point for “staff recommendations,” but that’s it.
Everything else in BN was turning into Spencer’s Gifts. I was half expecting sex toys and supermodel posters to appear.
To hear they put the stores back into local control and that it’s been successful is one of the most hopeful signs for our collective future.
Staffed and stocked by people who like good books for people who like good books.
Leigh's Books in Sunnyvale (if you're a Bay Area person) is like this too. They were still there before the pandemic. Hope they're still there. It's staffed and stocked by people who know books. Bad Animal in Santa Cruz has an eclectic collection that stocks decent texts, but maybe not as wide a selection as Leigh's and Arundel. But if you're in Santa Cruz they're worth checking out. Go for the books, stay for the veggie foie gras.
Towards the end of Borders in both Santa Cruz and Palo Alto, it seemed there were a LOT of self-help, travel and outdated tech books. Seemed to be all stuff that people used the web to read, but the chain was going to waste shelf-space on it until someone bought it. The coffee shop in my local Borders in Santa Cruz back in the day was as good as you would find in corporate coffee. A decent cuppa joe for me and an extremely nice hot chocolate for the kiddo. But we never went there for the books. We went to Logos down the street (now sadly closed) and wandered up to Borders (also closed) for a very decent hot chocolate.
Good to see //someone// worked out a business model that worked.
Here's the thing though, profit and loss people get made decision makers. And it is a super simple decision process "Do I take $10M from this publisher to push their book or do I try to find books people are willing to buy?" well the easy answer is take the money. But as this story points out, it is the wrong answer. Once you're taking money like this your interests are no longer aligned with your customer, they are aligned with the publishers you buy from.
That said, the store I've been to most doesn't seem to have changed its layout from selling games/puzzles + coffee bar + bookstore. (something mentioned in the article as being phased out) but perhaps that will change as they get around to it.
Now if someone would do this transformation for a grocery chain I would love to have one of those near me!
This is exactly what my local B&N does. Not yours?
So there's that.
I wonder if this was the true reason, or if he simply wanted to stop discounting, and this was the reason that was scored highest by his PR team.
Apparently, Amazon is doing a terrible job at counterfeit technical books across the board. eg: https://twitter.com/fchollet/status/1550932671022239745?s=20
I will now try to buy any books direct from the publisher or from a store like Barnes & Noble rather than Amazon.
The reason why CEOs have so much impact is because they are at the top of a tree and make all the important decisions. this isn't a consequence of the amazing (or terrible) nature of CEOs, it's just the outcome of the corporate structure.
With a little imagination, we can imagine other corporate structures...
Perhaps it's too late for many stores but I'd love it if we were actually on some kind of partial "rebalancing" of retail.
For reference, this page[0] about Paige on their website states that it was able to create "a library-quality, perfect bound, acid-free 300-page paperback book in roughly four minutes. These books are indistinguishable from paperbacks produced by major publishing houses."
[0] https://www.harvard.com/shelves/in_store_book_printing/about...
Definitely earmarking to visit a store before the end of the year to grab a couple of good books.
When James Daunt was named CEO, the changes were immediate. The spacer boxes appeared on the shelves; as someone else mentioned, they allow books to be placed cover forward, which is better for visual appeal. The front cover is what book designers design for. It also reduces the number of books on the shelves, which helps keep inventory lean.
They rearranged the shelves on the store floor so you had fewer rows of parallel shelves like an old-school library. In my store, shelves were arranged to create a little enclaves for mystery and detective fiction and for hardback fiction. The store layout is more varied and interesting.
On several occasions, I've seen guys who were, from their conversations, some kind of "store layout consultants" talking to the managers and discussing moving stuff around and changing displays.
The folks who worked at the store were very encouraged. Many had been through the big layoff in 2018 (when a lot of full-timers were abruptly let go - see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16389342). They liked the new changes - it was clear that the company was finally being run by someone who understood books. (I read somewhere - can't find the link - that Daunt even thinks about the angle of the shelves, because he thinks a certain angle is best for visibility.)
The company seemed to be more realistic about what wasn't working. Most significantly, the Nook section near the door disappeared. Other smaller things that weren't selling (like Lamy fountain pens) also disappeared. Inventory in general is more controlled: They started turning over the magazines much faster, to the point where if I was interested in a magazine I found I couldn't wait too long.
The technical book section isn't what it used to be, but they do carry a lot of No Starch books. I'm not a programmer, but I have a few No Starch books and e-books. I like the publisher (and given the problems with their books being counterfeited on Amazon, I'd rather buy a paper version in store if I want one).
Some stuff they've done in my store doesn't make sense to me - for instance, separating fiction into hardback and paperback. The classics section has been partially separated by publisher. I don't think that's how people look for books: They ask for "Crime and Punishment", not the paperback edition of "Crime and Punishment", or the Penguin edition. People want to see all the editions of "Crime and Punishment" together so they can compare and choose. Right or wrong, at least these are changes which reflect someone thinking about books.
The pandemic closure was a setback, and a lot of people who used to work at my store didn't return to work. But the store has come back pretty well. There's nothing else like Barnes & Noble, so I hope these changes work out.
Eh, that makes sense to me: I really don't like hardback and will never voluntarily buy one, because manipulating the covers separate from the pages distracts from reading and makes me feel like I need 3-4 hands to manage it.
Have to disagree here. Yes, I looked at the toys in the book store, precisely because Toys R' Us was gone, along with the local toy store. I ended up buying Pokémon plush toys at a video game store in the mall.
I believe it though and because it is hard, it is unlikely to repeat in other industries. I love my job, but the amount of time for me personally to provide discovery is hard. Need total buy in from an organization and it seems like something on the verge of bankruptcy is the best place to see it happen.
Except it really wasn't, as this story says, at least for books. People apparently just want to buy books, and if you sell them books, may be they'll buy them.
I don't know, I wish other types of companies (ahem, game companies) figure this out, you can make money without trying to be genshin impact. I'm really convinced the current tiktok/influencer/advertizer mindset that tries to ring people's brains dry really isn't that profitable in situations other than exceptions, it's essentially just groupthink and bandwagoning where people are chasing one off successes, whereas being boring (just selling a product) can be pretty profitable.
I recently visited B&N and the feeling of moving around and sitting with books after spending all week in front of screen was quite refreshing.
This reminded me of what Marie Kondo says about keeping your own personal books.
-Put every single one of your books in a pile on the floor.
-Take each book in your hand and see if it sparks joy.
-Remove the ones that don't spark joy from your home.
-Find ways to store your remaining books.
Okay, I thought of B&N as a defunct random junk store. I think I'll go take a look. I wonder if these B&Ns have local identities or if somehow they have a common book load. From this article it would appear the former.
Also getting a firm grounding in the fundamentals let’s you quickly take in new learning as mostly the new stuff is a rehash/reimplementation/pivot on old ideas.
they need to get a better distro -> store pipeline
and they need amazon-like lockers in their store to order online and pickup in store 24/7
i'd never use amazon again!!
That's me. You do you.
the store is full of people.
people standing and reading magazines (i could hardly elbow to my aviation mag).
kids are playing.
folks sipping starbucks.
my hands hurted after checkout.
Mechanical keyboards, anyone?
The way typical retail stores are run these days is a lot like the Fast Food model -- consistency above all else -- where the food has the same (lousy) taste no matter where it's made. Having spent a lot of time buying last minute gifts, retail, this year ... short of some stores being a mirror of others, each brand has the same products in the same places.
This works well at Walmart, Target, and other general retailers (the kind of commodity "super-store" arrangement I stopped visiting a long time ago). Those retailers have recognized I don't even want to walk into the store -- even my grocery store will bag my things and pop them in my car for me.
Barnes & Noble seems to have figured out that it's really easy to buy a book. The previous management[0] thought they employed only cashiers, re-stockers and "where can I find"ers (the latter of which were impossible to find). When financial struggles hit, the few employees who were there "because they loved books" left because their jobs were slowly turning into "warehouse fulfillment for internet orders." Our local location shut down shortly thereafter. Further proof that this new strategy works is that the huge location was replaced by a combination book, record and other media store which is run "like a record shop" and feels like a mom-and-pop despite the square footage.
This strategy works everywhere. Because I have a Microcenter location within 30 minutes of me, I buy 80% of my computer equipment retail. I wanted to physically touch the laptop I was buying so I stopped in on a Saturday. I don't ask for or want help, usually, because ... I'm a developer and I come in pretty ridiculously researched ... but that didn't stop no less than four people from asking to assist -- all while I stayed in the same section of the store. Overhearing them serve other clients, I was impressed at how well they knew their products. And if you haven't been into one of these places ... the one over here took over a six screen cinemaplex. It's massive. They have multiple models of 3D printers/filaments/accessories, multiple models of soldering irons and bench power supplies, IC components (loose LEDs/resistors/capacitors/basic motor drivers/timers), Ardinos/Pis (well...sometimes) and piles of accessories for it. Some of these things are really hard to buy confidently online or are really convenient if they can be returned/replaced with the correct part in an hour. They carry high-end, low-end and everything in-between[1]. I used to say that "I shop there first because I don't want to support their business" but that's granting myself credit I don't deserve. Frankly, the one gripe I've ever had about that place -- slow checkout[2] was remedied by common feeder and online pickup.
People tend to complain everywhere about lack of floor staff, but waiting behind three people for the "one person in the whole computer department" at Best Buy was typical of all electronics retailers 15 years ago. I worked at CompUSA (I left a couple of years after the Windows 95 launch -- before they became a general electronics retailer) for 5 years -- we were half the size. Average floor staffing was two in hardware (three, sometimes, since there'd always be a guy or two who only sold Macs), two in software/accessories, one handling both depending on customers. Microcenter had at least 4 people just in the laptop/desktop section, three in the upgrades/parts, one in mac, one in the Maker area and several in the 10-or-so-floor-to-ceiling aisles (that most electronics retailers ditched to control shrink).
Contrast that with my trip to Best Buy where three kids stood around talking to one another while I drooled over a Lenovo laptop. Had any one of them walked up to me I would have been easy to persuade into buying that day. I ended up picking it up from Microcenter (and it ended up being the best deal, too).
The takeaway, I think, is that the one thing Amazon can't give me is the intelligence/personal interaction with another human being who knows what they are selling[3] and can give me confidence that the choice I'm making is the right one. This has to be done carefully, of course. One of the advantages of buying online is the lack of pressure applied by a sales-person. The places I seek out for retail shopping are ones where the staff is knowledgeable, consultative, friendly and not pushing me to buy something right now.
[0] I've never worked for them or a competitor and it's been decades since I've touched retail, but a friend's adult child worked there just before our location shut down.
[1] My children act like we're going to the dentist when I tell them I need to make a quick stop there. There's no such thing.
[2] They still need work here. A little while back I ended up there with only one of my credit cards. The chip failed. I handed them my ID, figuring they'd run it via magnetic strip having positive proof that I'm the cardholder. A manager was brought up, and I even discovered I had my passport in my jacket pocket. It was a hard no for a sub-$100 purchase ... that kind of pissed me off ... if I hadn't had so many great past experiences, I probably would have sworn them off for good (as it was, I didn't return for several months).
[3] Hell, Amazon can't seem to give me results for what I specifically ask for. Can we please stop filling search results with answers "just because they are sort of like the thing you searched for"? It doesn't work when "OLED Laptop" returns 400 results and the first page has two which have anything OLED related in them, let alone an OLED screen. Even when you're given a filter for AMOLED or OLED, most of the OLED results are then missing. It happens with nearly every thing I search for using just Amazon's search. I find Google Image Search with `site:amazon.com` is the only way I can find things sometimes.