Barnes and Noble Sets Itself Free | Hacker News Reader

Barnes and Noble Sets Itself Free

nytimes.com

92 pointsprismatic79 comments

Since he embarked on the Barnes & Noble redesign in 2020, Mr. Daunt has demonstrated that consistency doesn’t rank very high on his priority list. New York City has nine Barnes & Noble stores featuring four different logos above the front doors.

A lot of brands benefit from uniformity, knowing that your coffee or burger at Starbucks/McDonalds/wherever is functionally the same in Tokyo or Toronto. I think book stores and other "cultural spaces" might not benefit from this, and the more local flavor, the better. So, this lack of consistency might be more deliberate than it seems.

(As an aside, I dislike the uniformity of global brands and my favorite chain locations were ones unique to the location. This Costa Coffee in Sopot, Poland, being one of the more interesting examples: https://www.tripadvisor.com/LocationPhotoDirectLink-g274735-...)

If nothing else, uniformity doesn't add as much value to a brand that isn't selling its own product. Nobody really worries that the copy of a book they buy in one shop will be different to a copy bought in another. There are likely some benefits to consistency, like a familiar store layout or knowing that a shop will stock a good range of books, but these are kind of ancillary to the product (and my experience is that these things aren't that consistent across big chains anyway).

There is a great book shop in Dublin, Ireland called Hodges Figgis. It was bought by the UK chain Waterstones in 2011, but you wouldn't know it - they wisely decided not to interfere at all with such a locally beloved brand.

> There is a great book shop in Dublin, Ireland called Hodges Figgis. It was bought by the UK chain Waterstones in 2011, but you wouldn't know it - they wisely decided not to interfere at all with such a locally beloved brand.

In a sign that this works, there used to be a few actual Waterstones branches in Dublin, too, but they didn't survive the general decline in the bookselling industry.

I think Waterstones also own a couple of formerly independent shops in London where they've left the branding and operations alone, for similar reasons.

(From the article, the new Barnes and Noble chief exec previously ran Waterstones.)

They bought Blackwells in Oxford fairly recently. I'm keeping my fingers crossed that it doesn't change too much.

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2022/feb/28/waterstones-ac...

The owners of Waterstones took over Barnes and Noble and put Waterstones management in charge. Seems to have worked

The Southwold Waterstones was controversial when it opened: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/feb/27/waterstones-ch...

Same with Hatchards (close to Waterstones' Picadilly shoppe).

So they're indistinguishable from a local business other than having corporate amounts of capital to weather storms, policies to control workers and inventory (what books to stock), and they send their profits out of the community. Neat

A bookshop able to weather a storm? The horror!

That's why you gotta always learn what is run/made by whom. The logo is irrelevant...

> weather storms

This is good. Means they're less likely to be impacted by temporary fads and I can count on them being around in a decade

> Policies to control workers and inventory

Policies are good and usually law abiding. Meaning that they treat their employees fairly, pay taxes and obey labor laws or they'll get sued.

> send their profits out of the community

The main beneficiaries are the patrons and people working there, who are as likely to live in the community than a mom and pop shop. The profit margin, if any, accrues to stock holders which are widely distributed to people with 401ks pensions and others. I'm okay with that

> Meaning that they treat their employees fairly

The existence of a policy doesn't make it fair, in fact the reason I abhor 1-size-fits-all policies is because of places like Amazon warehouses where you're fired for being late X times ("sorry, it's policy, my hands are tied :( ). Corporate policies are there to protect the company from lawsuits, and as a consequence they erode the agency of individuals which is literally dehumanizing. It's one step away from a human and one toward a robot. people should be treated like humans.

I don't know, I like policies. What's the alternative? Different rules for different people? How does that square with anti discrimination. Because I am willing to bet the ones that get disproportionate punishment will be a historically marginalized group. Same rules for everyone is a good thing. And it adds transparency and order.

Treating someone like a human doesn't mean firing someone for being late while not firing someone that does the same thing. Make the late policy lenient and applied consistently. That's more human

This requires the humans applying the policy to apply them fairly. For example, I've seen "friends of the boss" be hired into tech roles after failing the interview. The policy of needing to pass an interview panel is only for those not a friend of someone higher up. Technically the policy is fair, in practice it is not.

That is before we get into whether or not those policies treat people well.

But I don't have a good alternative, other than more and better policies I suppose...

Barnes and Noble is privately held, so I’m not sure how it would be in anyone’s 401k.

Lots of "local businesses" are like that globally now.

For example, go to a pub in the UK - it's almost always owned by Greene King which itself is owned by a Hong Kong holding company called CK Asset Holdings [0] that has also provided VC to startups like Siri.

Or in North America, AB InBev and Molson Coors now have significant or majority ownership in most breweries, juice, and sparkling water companies, and according to a buddy of mine working at one of those are looking into taking minority ownership positions in local coffee shops and bars.

If Publishers had capital, they probably would have considered doing something similar with community bookstores. Heck, Barnes and Nobles operates the Harvard Coop and the MIT Coop (the student bookstores for Harvard and MIT)

P.S. Before the inevitable MBA bashing starts up, Private Equity and IB doesn't really hire from MBA programs (Wharton, Booth, GSB, and CBS are the only exceptions) - they prefer hiring directly out of undergrad at a couple target schools (Ivies, MIT, Claremont Colleges, UChicago, Northwestern, Stanford, Duke, USC, SMU, UC Berkeley Haas+EECS, UCLA, NYU Stern, UMich Ross, UT McCombs, GTown McDonough) and train internally. MBAs tend to end up in operational roles such as Consulting, Tech, or (if you were a flamed out ex-IB/PE/VC or attended undergrad abroad) VC-IB-PE.

[0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CK_Asset_Holdings

My neighborhood in Brooklyn had our B&N move a few blocks and open in a new space. The new space is very different and very inviting. Bright lights, comfy chairs, lighter colors everywhere. I think it's less square footage but feels easier to get lost in (in a good way).

http://web.archive.org/web/20231018011209/https://www.nytime...

It’s not just decor. Daunt clearly respects readers and has upped the quality of books stocked, eschewing payola and tchotchkes.

Now if only Canada’s largest bookstor, Indigo, would do this. Instead their CEO is intent on moving in the opposite direction.

“Mr. Ruis is planning a major expansion in categories such as cookware, tech gadgets and beauty products. “It’s not four or five things; it’s about 400 or 500 that we’re busily beavering away, trying to bring them to market,” he says, sitting in a boardroom at Indigo’s Toronto offices.”

https://paulwells.substack.com/p/the-rideau-centre-indigo-st...

I recently visited my local Indigo after having not gone for a couple of years, and was surprised at how little space was dedicated to bookshelves. And even those shelves were surprisingly empty.

I'm sure that those other categories have higher margins, but I can't help but think that Indigo is shooting itself in the foot in the long term: none of those other products are paricularly good in quality or value and I can't imagine people would go to Indigo for many of those products. Instead, I get the sense that people go to Indigo for books, and see and buy those products while they are in the store. With an ever-decreasing selection of books, who knows how they're going to keep up the traffic required.

For what it's worth, Ruis left as CEO earlier this year and it was announced that Heather Reisman was returning to the post about a month ago.

https://globalnews.ca/news/9967909/indigo-heather-reisman-ce...

This is a great pr/marketing piece. The reality is not so rosy. Still a fan, but they make harder and harder.

The new stores and redesigns may be portrayed as "inviting browsing"... But they are rather soulless racks of shelves, with little of the unique touches that differentiated Barnes. The new designs are uncomfortable, not quite sterile but just... Meh. In effect, in the effort to put the books up front, locations now look more like the pop-up calendar remainders shops that show up every Feb in US malls.

Gone are any nods to community: chairs are few so no sitting, comparing, or even quietly chatting to fellow book shoppers. Newer locations have no bathrooms. Some have food still, but fewer options with higher prices tell the story there. While newer stores have fewer "bestsellers", they also have fewer variety of books in total, as smaller footprints force out more niche categories.

Daunt is an amazing fellow, and he loves books. Some of his changes are great to see. And Waterstones are still a joy to visit. But B&N isn't quite Waterstones.

At the end of the day, B&N have chosen to ignore the power of scale and presence, and instead act like a local shop. But, I'd rather then go to a local shop. If the local shop doesn't have my unique need covered, I expect a bigger shop to do so. And up til a few years ago, B&N would have.

B&N owned the middle-to-largr size bookstore space. Amazon was infinite, my local was curated, but what was immediate, relatively vast, and had good open hours? Instead of playing to this strength, it tried to become Amazon, then the local "upscale" toy store (Learning Express et al), and a cd/record/DVD shop, a genre "collector's" shop, anything but leveraging the things that made them. And now, they try to copy the local bookstore.

It feels like the old cartoon images of the massive American football player in the ballerina tutu. Instead of trying on every costume in the shop, perhaps B&N should have played to its strengths instead of trying to find a new thing to copy.

All that being said, I will still keep visiting, hoping that we won't lose B&N in total. But I hope they recognize why I go, sooner rather than later.

Disclosure: worked at bn.com and the nook store for a few years.

Yeah Barnes and Noble for me was a third place where I could sit down, read a book, study, read some manga, eat a cookie, spend time. The new design downgrades most of those uses and turns it in to a better place to buy books.

It's always nice to read about their "comeback" story. There are no BN stores in the UK or I think it would be worth visiting. I guess our equivalent is Waterstones? But no idea if they've been going through similar moves to appeal to customers.

my understanding i’d that the ceo who revived waterstones is now reviving BN.

From the article: “Mr. Daunt proved his book-selling bona fides as the founder of Daunt Books in London and, more recently, as the executive who rescued Waterstones, Britain’s largest bookstore chain. The hedge fund Elliott Advisors took a majority stake in Waterstones in 2018; the next year it bought Barnes & Noble for $683 million and installed Mr. Daunt, a Cambridge-educated Brit, as its leader. (He is still the managing director of Waterstones; the two chains operate separately.)”

Nice to hear of a fund that is reviving a beloved brand and not raiding it in this cynical world.

I don't have hard evidence but I suspect this is more common than you think, it's just we only read about the failures or the aggressive raiding stories (because they make juicier stories).

These funds make more money if the company they attempt to turnaround is a success, but the turnaround strategy tends to be high risk as they load the company with debt. So we mostly hear about the failures.

Further, I'd observe that most of the companies getting bought by funds for turnaround are.. in need of a turnaround. So many of them were on the path to failing if left to their own devices anyhow.

That said there are structural legal/tax issues that benefit "corporate raiders" in these these take-private deals.

This doesn’t surprise me at all. Waterstones have been pushing the “tat” further from the entrance and really are focused on being what bookstores were pre-Amazon.

My local Waterstones is the last surviving dedicated book store in the city and is really a destination as much as anything else. They run a lot of activities in their coffee shop too (book clubs and such).

I was certain covid would have been the final nail in the coffin but their renewed focus really is working - they’re thriving in a way they haven’t been in 20 years.

The "tat"?

Noun (UK)

anything that looks cheap, is of low quality, or in bad condition:

Like most souvenir shops, it sells a lot of old tat.

https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/tat

Exactly - In this case by tat I mean things like Harry Potter drinking flasks, Hunger Games calendars, and vaguely book-related trinkets that can be sold for under £5.

(The kind of high-margin items that you didn’t come to the shop for and most people won’t buy anyway.)

It means "rubbish" (or "trash").

Clearly you didn't read the article

Waterstones and B&N are the same company.

It is nice to see the store doing well. Unfortunately, my partner and I are pretty much all-in on ebooks at this point, aside from the odd graphic novel or coffee table book. I did manage to convince her to switch away from her Kindle to a Nook, with the idea that at least B&N would continue to get a cut of the sales when she stops buying physical. But even then, it's unlikely that a purchased Nook title would benefit our nearby store specifically, unless B&N somehow tracks the store from which the device was purchased.

Meanwhile, I'm rocking a Kobo, so, the only recurring business from me they're getting these days is the tin of tea I buy at their cafe.

Nonetheless, I still enjoy going there to browse. The new management seems to have a better "vision" of what the store should be, whereas the previous few years just screamed desperation. The place was starting to feel like half bookstore, half Toys 'R Us.

I wish they served beer and wine there.

I wish they sold BOOKS. My local B&N (15 miles north of Philly) has converted 25% of shelf space to toys. The tradeoff: just 2 shelves of computer-related books, now titled "Technology", most of which are about using Windows or Office.

Does this trend reflect the dumbing down of B&N or its customers?

....or does it reflect how we consume our information about technology these days? How quickly are tech-books out of date?

VLSI design books written in the 1990s/2000s are still relevant today. This is one of the areas which are arguably at the forefront of knowledge advancement, and yet the tools of the trade, concepts, languages are still the same.

Okay, but who actually walks into a physical book shop and expects to find a highly technical book relevant to less than 0.01% of the population? Unless it's attached to the CS/EE campus of an university.

How many Verilog books an average bookstore branch is going to push monthly you think?

It reflects the reality of the internet existing and it being the year 2023 not 2003 I think?

Why on earth would a book store carry any relevant computer technical books nowadays?

>Why on earth would a book store carry any relevant computer technical books nowadays?

Because books can explain concepts better than any other medium. Books aren't great for reference/howto because that info goes out of date quickly. E.g. I'm not going to buy a book about browser APIs, I'll use MDN. But I will buy a book about SPA design or HCI. I'll certainly buy a book about a topic like performance analysis or comparing different approaches to ORMs or practical cryptography. The specific libraries will go out of date quickly, but the concepts will be useful for a very long time (and even the specifics will be at least somewhat correct for longer than you'd expect).

Like everyone else, technical people have had their attention span removed, segmented, and captured by capital such that "sitting down and reading a book (about a technical subject)" is met with horror. There is hope: the brain is quite plastic and even if you've let yours soak in the sensation stew of your phone 8 hours a day for years now, you can regain this important function soon enough. A well-written tech book is such a pleasure! A long narrative, coherent and filled with nuance...it's an important style of communication and I don't think we want to lose it.

I didn't say technical books were irrelevant, I asked why a book store would carry them. The people most interested in computer related technical books are those who most heavily use the internet and therefore are most likely to be the ones who buy via amazon or directly from the author.

That's before we consider that such technical books are going to be a niche within a niche, in other words, not something to put in a mainstream book store.

Historically you might have even needed to find out specialist bookstores for such books or had them ordered specially via the bookstore.

>I didn't say technical books were irrelevant, I asked why a book store would carry them.

Oh, sorry. It's because book stores want to carry books that are relevant. There is a catch-22 in what you say, because you're right that we've gotten used to buying books online (alibris, not amazon please) which makes bookstores carry them less, which makes us less likely to buy them in bookstores... The spiral downward is real; the opposite, a spiral upward, can also be real with a little effort. Bookstores are filled with books about niche interests, why not ours?

It probably reflects the reality of trying to sell computer books in 2023, and what kind of people are willing to buy those books in a mainstream bookstore. Computer books lose relevancy quickly as their information becomes out-of-date, and people who buy them are more likely to look online for the lowest price.

Books on the latest office version lose relevancy quickly. However there.are timeless books on things like algorithms as well.

Booksellers rarely understand which those are though.

I’ve considered volunteering my services to small used bookstores to help them decide which computer books to buy. Seems like a win-win: I’d get first shot at anything interesting that arrives, and they’d have a way to separate the wheat from the chaff.

Good point. I mostly buy fiction or self improvement/productivity books. Technology can work if it’s not application specific like a book design patterns for software.

if it’s about how to use MS Word, a google search or youtube video will probably tell me what I need to know.

I still miss the Computer Literacy stores in Silicon Valley but that era is long gone.

I thought the same recently, but tech changes so quickly that I don't think, except for a place known to be densely tech oriented, have a market for books that go out of date in 1-2 years.

Mentioned in the article; this was their previous hail-mary strategy, which the new guy is now dismantling.

Makes perfect sense to me. I used to have a lot of computer books on my shelves. They're all gone. Internet access is just a given these days, so there's very little reason to have reference documentation in print.

And for more complex matters, a good youtube video is superior. Modern software can have extremely complex interfaces. It's much easier to follow along with a Blender video than to gain the same knowledge from a book.

I'm finding myself slipping back to books again now. It's very hard to sift the wheat from the chaff with online stuff.

Agree —- as someone who previously only owned software books for coursework in the early ‘10s, I’ve built up a growing collection over the past 3 years. The quality of book content is generally much higher than blog posts and SO answers, and I’ve never been one for eBooks / PDFs.

Plus, it makes my home office feel more in tune with my profession. I like to see the books on the shelf and leaf through them while waiting for my CI to build.

Mine still has an iOS 5 book on those two shelves. 11 years old.

At my B&N they replaced the music and movies section with the larger toys section and added more writing products. They didn’t take away any space for books. Having the toy section is actually nice since the demise of Toys R Us.

I used to buy computer books there, but I mostly buy Manning ebooks now.

The Waterstones bookshop on Tottenham Court Road, London, has a coffee shop and bar in the basement. It's very comfortable and pleasant, although I haven't been in for about five years now.

Sadly, the stock of specialised books is much reduced. The mathematics section used to have its own room, ruled with a rod of iron by a fearsome Russian (?) lady. Now reduced to a couple of shelves. Coffee you can get anywhere ...

I'm wondering how Foyles competes now. It used to be a near-mythical warren of floor to ceiling piles of obscure technical and academic books. At some point in the mid 00s it moved to a cleaner slightly newer building and became tidier and more antiseptic.

The old building has been replaced by a bizarre wrinkly pink-ish box.

I haven't been for years. I'm curious if it's gone more mainstream.

Definitely more mainstream, corporate, antiseptic. Still one of the best (if not the best) big bookshops in London, still worth a visit (but do have a schlepp down to Goldsboro and Any Amount further down the road).

The location in my town serves food and beer/wine. At one point they had at least five B&N Kitchen locations, but it looks like they're down to two:

https://www.barnesandnoblekitchen.com/locations/

To me, it makes sense to get rid of the full kitchen but keep the coffee, beer, and wine.

It's not clear to me what the benefit of chains is (before anyone says consistency that's definitely not it) to consumers and markets. I guess the idea was supposed to be something like leveraging economies of scale, but most chains are just fronts for broader supply chains with multiple other clients--it's pretty rare that there's a specific like, Applebee's supply chain. But isn't it clear by now that it's all around bad?

Chains have the money to invest in a large store. 90% of the books in any store are not of interest to any particular reader. However each reader wants a different set. Tiny bookstores often only have 5 books that might interest someone, and when you finish those you have nothing to buy there until they change inventory. A large store will have enough inventory that you can come back for more.

Eh I think books are a weird example here because really we should just have libraries (the mechanism here is if there isn't a book you want you have them order it, which is exactly what libraries do, ergo why bookstores).

But I can't really think of anything else that's good for this example. It's not like a huge McDonald's is a good idea. Hardware stores were all independent shops bought up by like Ace and True Value (or closed by Wal-Mart, etc.) so like, nothing really changed (a small hardware store is still a small Ace hardware store). Basically anything else (furniture, carpet) has some floor display models and a catalog you can browse. Which is also what B&N does when they don't have the book you want. Maybe like a Menards or Lowe's? But again they're just like a weird superstore that's part appliance store, part hardware store, part greenhouse and part lumber yard. Feels like we'd actually get broader inventory at individual stores for those things.

Well since you have constrained the answers we can tell you aren’t actually curious so let me just say you are a genius and you have figured it out. Chains are pointless and I wouldn’t be surprised if they haven’t all shut down by the end of the week after reading what you wrote.

Consistency is definitely the benefit of chains, especially for travelers. That was one of the original reasons chains like Howard Johnson’s did so well. Today, when abroad, it is still helpful to know that a chain will have predictable food, even if you didn’t fly halfway around the world to eat at McDonalds. Sometimes comfort and convenience beats out novelty.

I mean, fast food is my chief inconsistency case. Have you had fries at more than 1 franchise? They're always different.

Consistency matters between restaurants, not between franchises. McDonalds fries may vary slightly from one location to the next, but they are more similar to each other than to other restaurants' fries.

Consistency has many different axes though. Maybe when I was 7 or something I was really keen to the difference between Wendy's fries and McDonald's fries, but now I only care if fries are good or not, and no fast food restaurant has consistently good anything because you can't do food at this scale and have consistently good food. The assembly line generates 30 weird chicken nuggets every 1000 and no one's checking. This is what I mean by "it's not consistency": at the scale of these chains the (underpaid, mistreated) workers' eyes glaze over and metrics like "% fecal matter" start popping up

The answers include

* Consistency: you know every store in a chain is going to be within a standard deviation or so of every other

* Economies of scale

* Developing specific supply chains for their business. Sure there's not a specific Applebee's supply chain company, but there are specific product managers at supply chain companies for Applebee's products, and when you take the set of product managers, warehouse space, supply contracts, etc across the whole supply chain industry it results in a specific supply chain for a specific company in a way you can't get if you're a small business

I really like your 3rd point here because, yeah, I don't think we'd have the efficient supply chains we do now without huge chains to ensure profitability. I think you have to say that's been a huge boon to efficiency.

But I also think it's generally bad and weird. Like how many people know that between the major orange juice brands the only difference is the different perfume they use in the concoction? Supply chains are incentivized to deliver huge loads of essentially crap that breaks constantly so demand stays high, or food that's totally loaded with fat/sugar/salt so you eat way more. Plus like, where does that profit go (not the 99% right)?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com