31–40 of 58 posts
My local library let's me reserve books online, and if they don't have a book, they usually have it at another library in the county and will ship it to my local library and hold it for me.
And this all costs me $0 (yeah, okay, taxes, but you know what I mean)
In the last year or two I've decided B&N is done (caveat, sample size of one). Watching it through the years it has been clear that it was on a downward descent, but lately it looks like they've given up, again maybe only my location. 20-25 years ago, B&N was packed end to end with books. Books were spine out unless they were popular and trying to draw someone in. Coffee table books were limited to a rack or two of s…
I've overhead cafe managers talking about how much of the store's sales are from the cafe. You can't build a 20,000 square feet Starbucks and be competitive. That really is the draw, though - making B&N a place to hang out. People spend hours there at a time.
Being interested in books or niche music was a pretty good filter for people. My book stacks are based on walking down the street with $20 in my pocket, and spending it somewhere I thought I would encounter some curated random personal encounters.
It was never about the products, it was about the community around it. The ability for owners to shoe out undesirable people is what made them attractive places to be. It was a rare retail experience where men and women could meet. Today the people in a "book" store full of scented candles and twee knicknacks that happens to sell books is too random a selection to make it a destination for anyone.
From what I can tell by the big box chain here, today, books are used as a loss leader to provide a decorative bourgeois shopping theme park experience. They mainly sell chocolate sugar candies, magazines (all of which exist on a spectrum of aspirational porn), and brickabrack from slave labour factories.
B&N's strategy will be interesting, as either they will be in the culture business, or the sugar-porn-junk business.
The key is curation. Walk into a book store and look around. From different points in the bookstore count how many titles you can see. Which titles can you see entirely and which can you only see the spine of? Count them. Now go to Amazon.com and perform the same experience. Count how many titles you can view at any given time. 10? I buy and read a lot of books. What makes a good bookstore stand out is its selection.…
The key is curation. Walk into a book store and look around. From different points in the bookstore count how many titles you can see. Which titles can you see entirely and which can you only see the spine of? Count them. Now go to Amazon.com and perform the same experience. Count how many titles you can view at any given time. 10? I buy and read a lot of books. What makes a good bookstore stand out is its selection.…
This is true for you and other discerning readers. A lot of people just want the new Jack Reacher. I doubt there is enough volume or profitability here but who knows. Interestingly, the only department to actually make money in B&N in the last few years, is the board game section. I think this is how they win. Being more of a general edutainment destination and focusing on kids stuff. 6 page kids picture books cost $…
I worked at Starbucks in Store Planning while they were trying to figure out how to makes their stores be a "third place" (early 1990s). Small stages for unplugged sets. Fire places. Big tables for study groups.
I'm just a computer guy, but I always felt Starbuck's merchandising strategy sabotaged those efforts.
WotC had great success for a short while as board gaming host, destination. Mox, the largest I know of today, seems to be successful. https://www.moxboardinghouse.com
I would love to see Barnes & Noble pivoting to become a third place. Especially something kid friendly. (My kid was super into Pokemon.)
Basically a public library vibe with a cafe, that also sells some stuff, located in a mall.
I don't get the point of book stores when there's libraries. My local library let's me reserve books online, and if they don't have a book, they usually have it at another library in the county and will ship it to my local library and hold it for me. And this all costs me $0 (yeah, okay, taxes, but you know what I mean)
1. Books are pretty cheap. If you're looking for something more than 15 years old, you can probably find a cool-looking used paperback on eBay for $4-5 shipped. This isn't as cheap as "free at the library" but my book habit still sets me back 2. Some people (including me) like books as aesthetic objects. Maybe there is some element of "mmm, I am so smart" when I look at my bookcase, but it's also just a nice wooden case with a bunch of colorful objects in it. I like having it around.
3. It's fun to look at your old books and remember what it was like to read them. My books are physical objects that I actively thought about, held in my hands, and carried around for a week or whatever years ago, so it's a surprisingly effective way of conjuring up time and place.
4. Giving away books to friends is fun and makes it more likely they'll actually read the thing.
5. As a kid I loved big shelves with lots of books, they suggested so much possibility and I'm glad my parents had so many. If I ever have a kid I would enjoy providing them with a similar environment.
So buying books doesn't make much sense from a pure information acquisition standpoint, but there are some more idiosyncratic benefits.
The key is curation. Walk into a book store and look around. From different points in the bookstore count how many titles you can see. Which titles can you see entirely and which can you only see the spine of? Count them. Now go to Amazon.com and perform the same experience. Count how many titles you can view at any given time. 10? I buy and read a lot of books. What makes a good bookstore stand out is its selection.…
This is true for you and other discerning readers. A lot of people just want the new Jack Reacher. I doubt there is enough volume or profitability here but who knows. Interestingly, the only department to actually make money in B&N in the last few years, is the board game section. I think this is how they win. Being more of a general edutainment destination and focusing on kids stuff. 6 page kids picture books cost $…
I don't know what the experience is in the US, but in the UK, Waterstones' insight has been that it's not worth competing for those customers. They'll just buy the new Jack Reacher from a supermarket or, at best, WH Smiths (the stationery store). To be price-competitive with the supermarkets, you have to discount so heavily that you'll lose money on every sale anyway.
Waterstones have targeted the discerning reader and are doing well at it. This appears to be an attempt to replicate Waterstones in the US.
I don't get the point of book stores when there's libraries. My local library let's me reserve books online, and if they don't have a book, they usually have it at another library in the county and will ship it to my local library and hold it for me. And this all costs me $0 (yeah, okay, taxes, but you know what I mean)
1. New popular books take months or even years (looking at you harry potter, got a call from my local branch 2 years after I bought the book that it was ready to pick up) to become available. I know a lot of people can wait, but maybe you need to read it sooner so you can talk about it with your friends while it is in the zeitgeist. Maybe you don't want to wait half a year only to have it for 2 weeks before it goes to the next person with a hold
2) You mention interlibrary loans, every library can do that but every library has different polices and because there is a cost (somebody has to pay to have Dan Brown shipped from Kirkwood to Albuquerque) most place limits on how often, fiction vs non-fiction, etc. It won't help you at all with 1) because if's nationally popular, every branch is checked out.
3) Can't markup a library book, which to me is one of the only advantages of a paper tree-killer vs my e-ink reader.
The key is curation. Walk into a book store and look around. From different points in the bookstore count how many titles you can see. Which titles can you see entirely and which can you only see the spine of? Count them. Now go to Amazon.com and perform the same experience. Count how many titles you can view at any given time. 10? I buy and read a lot of books. What makes a good bookstore stand out is its selection.…