Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The unnecessary demise of Barnes and Noble

audreyii-fic.tumblr.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

221–230 of 461 posts

Re: The unnecessary demise of Barnes and Noble

#221

Post by lmm »

ryanwaggoner wrote: post #50
ivraatiems wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It sucks, but I'm not sure there's a better option. Maybe the best we can do is try and structure a society where getting laid off from a decent job isn't so damaging and scary on a personal level. Maybe we need to acknowledge that we're moving towards having a society where "everyone has a job that earns them their living" is untenable, because there will be less work for humans to do than humans to do it, and we…

Maybe, but it seems a weird argument to make during record low unemployment. Yes, I'm aware of labor force participation rates, and that the pay for many of these jobs is too low, AI is predicted to destroy jobs, etc, but that's not what we're talking about, right? Amazon employs way more people than B&N, the company they put out of business. Maybe those jobs should be better (OK, they definitely should), but that's…

> Amazon employs way more people than B&N, the company they put out of business. Maybe those jobs should be better (OK, they definitely should), but that's different from saying there are no jobs, isn't it?

Amazon doesn't employ them, they contract certain services from them. Your first post talks about "getting laid off" but it won't even be that, it'll be not extending their contract.

Most people can still, for the time being, contribute to the economy - but already not at a level where the economy is comfortable hiring them for the long term. The "jobs" Amazon offers are explicitly designed to be automated away.

Re: The unnecessary demise of Barnes and Noble

#222

Post by kuang_eleven »

A sidenote in the article, but I'd like to know why people think that Amazon treats books as a loss-leader... Last I checked in tech news, it was the common assumption that Amazon retail in general has razor-thin margins or might even be losing money, but AWS was making money hand over fist.

Re: The unnecessary demise of Barnes and Noble

#223

Post by icebraining »

watwut wrote: post #198
blhack wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not the one near me (in Phoenix, near Arizona State University). It's a major anchor in a shopping center, and is busy every time I'm ever in there. The employees are also really helpful. This Christmas, I was trying to find some books as a christmas gift, and the staff made a bunch of suggestions based on books that they had actually personally read. Sidenote: finding appropriate books for 8-14 year old girls is rea…

Isn't majority of books for them? Anyway, try Asimov if she is closer to 14. 14 is when that stuff is still interesting. Edit: why the fuck would someone downvote this?

Maybe someone took umbrage with the idea that Asimov stops being interesting after 14?

Re: The unnecessary demise of Barnes and Noble

#224

Post by grey-area »

randomsearch wrote: post #217
grey-area wrote: post #216

The industry is experiencing a secular decline. There is no way back to profit for booksellers and publishers, because fewer people are buying paper books, nowhere near enough to sustain the existing industry, and authors can simply publish direct via schemes like Amazon. They've tried overpricing ebooks, taking things off Amazon, setting up their own online readers/stores (nook). Every publisher is now having real t…

Book sales are increasing in the UK and US https://www.google.co.uk/amp/s/amp.theguardian.com/books/dat...

I've worked in the publishing industry in the UK - it is experiencing long term decline. To illustrate this, see the multitude of publishers merging, cutting staff and closing imprints. Very few publishers are making money any more. The story is the same for bookstores - there is one significant UK-wide chain now (Waterstones).

The article you cite doesn't even show healthy figures - it shows a bump in 2015, then fall to almost zero growth in 2016 for the UK, and a dramatic decline in growth for the US from 2015 to 2016. Hardly signs of a healthy industry. This is just the kind of cherry-picked data the industry has been deluding itself with for years. The figures produced by the industry are unreliable, and the interpretation of those is equally suspect, as evidenced by the article you've found. They've tried to manipulate stats by doing things like pricing ebooks higher or just below physical books for example.

Barnes and Noble will close soon (as this article predicts), as will all the other big brick and mortar booksellers, and soon after that mass-market paper books are doomed as Amazon has little incentive to promote them over ebooks, and no interest in sustaining publishers.

Re: The unnecessary demise of Barnes and Noble

#225

Post by lmm »

mrbrowning wrote: post #109

Bezos cheerleaders and their ilk never seem to be willing to acknowledge that creating wealth is much harder than extracting it, and either out of bad faith or naivety will misidentify ventures that specialize in the latter as being exemplars of the former. In this case, we have the incalculable loss of so many person-years of experience in a deep topic, literature, that’s being shrugged away as a case of the market…

Bezos has created a lot of wealth, made a lot of lives better. I've got a lot of joy out of reading the kind of books that would probably never be published on paper, and certainly never recommended by those with "person-years of experience in a deep topic, literature", because Amazon opens it all up so that virtually anyone can publish and their books sink or swim on their merits, and their algorithms can recommend things to those of us with weirder tastes just as easily as it can recommend the literary establishment line.

Re: The unnecessary demise of Barnes and Noble

#226

Post by icebraining »

barsonme wrote: post #79
aorloff wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For any company that can, increasing cash flow is a great way to proceed assuming you don't muck around with the balance sheet. Unfortunately, I don't see a way for BN to really do that, the sun set on their business a long, long time ago. Sure they could morph into some kind of WeWork/Starbucks thing, but its not like that's an open playing field begging for competition either.

For the record, I do like that idea. I recently started working remote, and while I like my office it's nice to go to a coffee shop and get out of the house for a while. But, the WiFi usually sucks and it can be too noisy. A quiet place with decent WiFi and coffee would be superb. I don't know what books other professions need, but it'd be pretty neat to go and checkout TAOCP (or something) and do some work for a whi…

The stores of the French chain Fnac - which sells mainly books, movies and consumer digital equipment - often have coffeeshops inside, where you can sit with a book if you buy something. And during working hours, they're usually quiet enough. I'm not sure if they have wifi, but I've seen people studying there.

Re: The unnecessary demise of Barnes and Noble

#227

Post by watwut »

icebraining wrote: post #223
watwut wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't majority of books for them? Anyway, try Asimov if she is closer to 14. 14 is when that stuff is still interesting. Edit: why the fuck would someone downvote this?

Maybe someone took umbrage with the idea that Asimov stops being interesting after 14?

Good point, thank you. I did not realized I might be implying that.

Questions about society, future and such are very interesting at that age, older people tend to be interested in different things (at least I went that way). Asimov packs it together with kinda normal fun to read story which kids at that age like too.

Re: The unnecessary demise of Barnes and Noble

#228

Post by verylittlemeat »

visarga wrote: post #149
ivraatiems wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It sucks, but I'm not sure there's a better option. Maybe the best we can do is try and structure a society where getting laid off from a decent job isn't so damaging and scary on a personal level. Maybe we need to acknowledge that we're moving towards having a society where "everyone has a job that earns them their living" is untenable, because there will be less work for humans to do than humans to do it, and we…

> Maybe we need to acknowledge that we're moving towards having a society where "everyone has a job that earns them their living" is untenable No, we need a society that guarantees everyone a job, a job that will generate the income necessary for survival. We shouldn't give up agency and become simple wards of the state, waiting hand stretched ahead for the UBI to fall from the crumblings at the tech billionaires tab…

I welcome the crumblings of the tech billionaires table. Let them think they're the masters of the universe while subsidizing my ability to spend my time the way I want.

Let the tech billionaires be saddled with the moralizing virtues of self-reliance and feelings of humiliation. Certain societies raise their youth to value work as a means of proving themselves. The truth is that perspective is completely subjective and in many ways a pathology more than a guiding principle.

Humans will work. That is what we do. If we're alive we will create reasons to do things. The problem is who is deciding the values we're supposed to work toward. Distributing work will fail because people don't agree on what is important and will even act against their own self interest. When that happens what do you do? Do you punish them? Do you leave them to die? Do you ostracize them from the community? That's why the system we have now in the industrialized west works at all, because it allows us the illusion of choice. Our shared language of moralizing and virtue signaling is how we cope with the fact that we actually don't have a choice, we're just pragmatically putting our heads down and picking our poison.

With UBI it's scary to think of millions of people unmoored from work because work is a form of social control. UBI will turn hundreds of years of social convention on its head. As much as we want to believe it there are no iron laws of culture. Some values will be destroyed and new values will be born. That's the nature of change.

Our descendants at some undefined point in the future will find our moralizing about work absolutely quaint.

Re: The unnecessary demise of Barnes and Noble

#229

Post by b1daly »

ryanwaggoner wrote: post #91
cowpig wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've done a lot of hiring, and have found that salary demands are weakly inversely proportional to performance. That is to say, people whose salary demands are at the lower end of the salary range for that career have outperformed those whose demands are at the higher end. My sample size is small but significant. Food for thought.

That's interesting, but I'm pretty skeptical, and I don't even think it's relevant here, unless you were hiring executives for large but dying companies? Here's more food for thought: the five biggest companies in the US are all data-driven tech companies that are renowned for paying ridiculously high compensation. Why wouldn't they apply your framework to both save on hiring costs and boost performance?

The five biggest companies in the US by revenue or profit are not data-driven tech companies.

None of the top ten US companies, by revenue, fit that description.

http://fortune.com/fortune500/

Ranked by profit, only Alphabet squeaks into the top ten at number five.

http://fortune.com/fortune500/list/filtered?sortBy=profits&f...

I’m not seeing much correlation here between rank of CEO compensation and company performance.

https://aflcio.org/paywatch/highest-paid-ceos

The fame of the high salaries at tech companies relates primarily to technical staff, not executive pay. These companies are also located in some of the most expensive areas to live.

Re: The unnecessary demise of Barnes and Noble

#230

Post by LogicX »

Taking a thought from another thread...

What if B&N merged with wework?

Wework just bought meetup.com - now you have more locations for meetups. B&N often has pretty good locations, and covers areas of the country wework doesn't akready have prescence. There's already a coffee shop built into B&N

If you implemented a cashierless checkout process, and had ship from location, you now can compete with Amazon, and the retail prescence is an attractor for weworkers and meetups.

I'm not sure of the B&N commercial real estate holdings, but wework seems to be all into that.

Of all the possible fates of B&N - If I saw that happen, I'd be be pretty pleased with it.

Post reply on HN