Worried about brick and mortar stores

There are other bookstores other places, some small independent, some not so small, smaller chains, etc.

There are big chains in other countries nearby.

My general hatred of B&N knows little bounds (and I luckily have access to a number of bookstores), so I don't really care if they bite it. I realize the implications, but I hope a chain would rise in its place that was less awful? There was something I read recently comparing B&N to Amazon in the 'they were the most hated, ate their competitors, now people look upon them fondly,' way. I'll see if I can figure out where I saw it.

Here's a NYer piece discussing the financial troubles of B&N and the Nook and all. Short, informative.

Oh, here's the one I was thinking of. Other NY-named mag, heh.

In the few weeks since Barnes & Noble announced the resignation of CEO William Lynch on the heels of huge losses in its digital division, the media coverage has ranged from alarm bells to death knells, but most of it has been strikingly elegiac for a company so recently reviled as a monopolizing monster...

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There are other brick and mortar stores that carry books. Bigger indies--Powells, Books-a-Million, Waterstones, etc--as well as the smaller ones.

The death of B&N would be unfortunate, much like the death of Borders was a blow to commercial publishing. However, there are still plenty of places print books are sold aside from Amazon, eBay, and indie book stores. Chain supermarkets, Target, Wal-Mart, Sam's Club, Costco, etc, all generally carry a selection of books. Libraries carry books. Specialty shops often carry a small selection of books they think their audience will like--look at ThinkGeek, for example.

The paperback and bound book may be in danger of going the way of the dinosaur, and that will be hastened if B&N goes under, but there are still a lot of places to buy dead tree books. Don't panic yet.

So it goes.

I don't foresee books going extinct. However, I think it's very realistic that they become much more eclectic, more like novelties or collector's items than anything else.

Think about people who listen to music on vinyl, for example. They have their own community and subculture. I can easily see something similar forming once physical books become a little harder to find.

Writing is writing, I never worried about the demise of brick and mortar anything. Not even brick and mortar brick and mortar stores.

Jeff

WeaselFire said:

Writing is writing, I never worried about the demise of brick and mortar anything. Not even brick and mortar brick and mortar stores.

Jeff

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Didn't you know? Everyone buys their bricks and mortar online nowadays

I have the same issue. B&N is the only bookstore here in Sacramento with anything like a selection across all genres. There are a few indies here, but they're very specialized, and none have much in the way of my favorite genres.

How I envy Portlandians their Powell's books. Sacramento just isn't as into reading, I guess. Sad, considering we're the state Capital.

Mind you, B&N doesn't have as many books as it once did either. Seems to be going down the Borders rat hole, with more of an emphasis on toys, puzzles, games and calendars. At least they don't seem to be dedicating more and more of their floor space to CDs the way Borders did in the last couple of years before its demise (no one told them about itunes, evidently).

I've had the same concerns. I don't think stores like Wal-Mart are going to fill the gap left by large stores that specialize in books. I won't set foot in a Wal-Mart for all kinds of reasons, but I doubt they have a large selection of mid-list SF and fantasy (or other genre) authors in their fiction section.

If they become the place where middle America does most of their in person browsing for paper books, then it will definitely change the dynamics. For me, the main advantage of going to a "real" bookstore over online or e-book shopping, is the ability to visually browse titles in my preferred genres (and sometimes outside of them too) and to discover new authors I've never heard of.

Amazon still makes it hard to look for something you don't know you're looking for.

If it gets harder and harder for new and mid list authors to be "discovered" by readers, then it stands to reason that publishers will invest fewer and fewer of their resources in bringing new authors into the fold. Bad news for those of us who want to pursue traditional publishing.

We used to be overloaded with book stores, from chains down to second hand book stores. The only one left is B&N.

But, I also don't remember the last time I bought a print book for myself. I got a Kindle two years ago and since then, I buy mainly ebooks.

There's a small chain out here that adds a store or two every year. There not as large as a multi-level B&N, but they're bigger than most indies.

It is funny how all the bibliophiles are now mourning the demise of Borders and the imminent demise of B&N.

Back in the 90s, the big box stores were Teh Ebil. Ruthless, greedy corporations brutally crushing poor independent bookstores and replacing them with soulless acres of shelves with no cats in sight. Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan even made a movie about it. They were going to bring about the demise of literature. They killed the midlist. They were eeeeeeeeeevil.

Now they're the underdogs on the ropes, and Amazon is the Evil Empire.

Times change, folks. Media changes. (And I always hated cats in bookstores.) But yes, I will be sad if B&N goes under too.

It had been a while since I visited an actual bookstore, so long that, when I walked into a Books-a-Million yesterday, I was surprised to see T-shirts, board games, and plenty of other knickknacks taking up floor space. It made me realize that books alone weren't keeping it up, hence the necessity for all the toys.

A.P.M. said:

And I'm getting worried. Where I live, Barnes and Noble is the only bookstore around. I would love to get traditionally published one day, but the only reason I want that is to be able to go into my local book store and see my book.

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... it's always possible bookstores may go completely
under and cease to exist. So I'd be prepared to adapt
to that to some degree if the time ever comes about.

Being pub'd traditionally will still have rewards:
- potentially large readership
- loot
- exposure

So not altogether so bleak ;-)

I would be sorry to see B&N go under, but I have to say I almost never go to my local one, though I used to shop there a lot. It changed management, going from a nice all around bookstore to a wannabe upscale store. A lot of genre fiction of all kinds vanished, to be replaced with large sections aimed at specific demographics. Instead of the friendly staff I was used to, the counters were manned by the sort of people who work in indie music stores, the ones who sniff and say, "So you're still listening to *that*?" It stopped being a place where I could find what I was looking for.

Amadan said:

It is funny how all the bibliophiles are now mourning the demise of Borders and the imminent demise of B&N.

Back in the 90s, the big box stores were Teh Ebil. Ruthless, greedy corporations brutally crushing poor independent bookstores and replacing them with soulless acres of shelves with no cats in sight. Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan even made a movie about it. They were going to bring about the demise of literature. They killed the midlist. They were eeeeeeeeeevil.

Now they're the underdogs on the ropes, and Amazon is the Evil Empire.

Times change, folks. Media changes. (And I always hated cats in bookstores.) But yes, I will be sad if B&N goes under too.

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Yeah, when Borders moved into Davis (my former college town), the owners of a local indy bookstore led the unsuccessful charge to keep them out. Decades later, the indy bookstore is still there, and they've even expanded and purchased a slot in the mall that once held the old Tower Records and Books across the causeway in Sacramento.

Last laughs and all.

They've never had a huge selection of the sorts of books I like to read, though. I suspect that most indy bookstores that survive will be more specialized. There's one down in San Diego that specializes in SF and F, and it sounds really cool. I don't think Sacramento has enough nerds to support something like that, unfortunately.

The big chain around here that I like is Half-Price Books, which has been carrying more and more new books and music alongside their used books and music. Eventually they may be like a Mediaplay combined with The Exchange, which would be awesome.

sunandshadow said:

The big chain around here that I like is Half-Price Books, which has been carrying more and more new books and music alongside their used books and music. Eventually they may be like a Mediaplay combined with The Exchange, which would be awesome.

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Half Price Books isn't bad - it still feels more like a bookstore than B&N has lately - but I felt a distinct shift in the atmosphere when they added the new best-sellers and other trinkets. They also don't pay out nearly as well as they used to for used books... so little I'm better off just donating them.

I work in an indie bookshop. We're flourishing, and so are many of our fellow SIBA (Southern Independent Booksellers Alliance) members. I don't know about box stores, but indies aren't dead yet.

Dave of Mars said:

It had been a while since I visited an actual bookstore, so long that, when I walked into a Books-a-Million yesterday, I was surprised to see T-shirts, board games, and plenty of other knickknacks taking up floor space. It made me realize that books alone weren't keeping it up, hence the necessity for all the toys.

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This is a chicken-and-egg thing to me though. Maybe someone actually knows some kind of statistic about it, but anecdotally, I don't know how to tell.

Barnes & Noble went heavily toward toys, games, all manner of stationary stuff, etc., even more to my eye than Borders had. Clearly they believe this to be necessary or beneficial to the bottom line.

However, the independent bookstores I know and visit have no such thing. They might have a few games at the register or a table of calendars or something (one I know of has the most awesome kid's section ever, the whole second story of the shop, basically, which has a dedicated tiny kid area, with their books, tiny chairs, floor pillows, a box of toys to just play with, places for parents to sit to read to the kids, books for older kids moving around the floor with an area selling puzzles, one for stuffed toys, etc., many connected [a Beatrix Potter display, etc.] that's different to me than the B&N type of random non-book stuff everyplace) but they're 90% books.

Many have been around for decades and seem to be doing well, so do bookstores need tons of toys for revenue, or were the big box ones not making revenue they wanted for other reasons and turned to that? Is it helping? Doesn't seem so, but who knows what it'd be if B&N turned to 90% books.

IDSalways said:

There's a small chain out here that adds a store or two every year. There not as large as a multi-level B&N, but they're bigger than most indies.

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Is that Books-A-Million? It says they have 250+ stores.

Amadan said:

It is funny how all the bibliophiles are now mourning the demise of Borders and the imminent demise of B&N.

Back in the 90s, the big box stores were Teh Ebil. Ruthless, greedy corporations brutally crushing poor independent bookstores and replacing them with soulless acres of shelves with no cats in sight. Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan even made a movie about it. They were going to bring about the demise of literature. They killed the midlist. They were eeeeeeeeeevil.

Now they're the underdogs on the ropes, and Amazon is the Evil Empire.

Times change, folks. Media changes. (And I always hated cats in bookstores.) But yes, I will be sad if B&N goes under too.

Click to expand...

I haven't been to Highland Hardware since they changed the name to Highland Woodworking, but I remember they had a store cat. ISTR there was one or more interesting independent bookstores in that area of town, too.

But yeah, Borders and B&N were EVIL because they drove so many of the smaller bookstores out of business (I recall Oxford, open on Christmas Day, and Oxford Too, Atlanta's largest used bookstore until the chain closed late 1990s), but since then the Big Boxes have been virtually the ONLY bookstores around (and their coffeeshops were convenient places to have NaNoWriMo write-ins - I recall buying a newly published book the start of November that I didn't read until December).

You know times are hard when even Teh Evul Places are going out of business.


I'm wondering if in the future there will be some prestige for a new author to have a print run of 5,000 hardbacks made and put up for sale, in addition to ebooks. There will probably always be those Espresso book printing machines, but I'm sure it's nowhere near the same.

I love BnN. I always have, I always will. In fact, aside from my university bookstore I've only been in one other bookstore. It was a mom and pop store. And I never went back. I don't know.

I'll be sad if BnN went under completely. My purchases would come entirely from Amazon. I don't want to lose the feeling of getting lost in the store for hours on end.

The B&N here used to be 3/4 books, 1/4 movies/tv on dvd/music. Now? It's half books and half toys. I can't take my son there without having a battle over buying him toys instead of books (how can this be my son???? Toys over books? Heresy!) They still have some movies, but they are way overpriced. I could pay $50 for Season 3 of Downton Abbey at B&N or buy it from Amazon for $25 - where do you think I bought it? I do wish they'd get rid of the toys. Seems to me, this is the same mistake Borders made and look what happened to them.

I suspect the toys/CDs/bric-a-brac/tschotchkie phenomenon was because corporate entitites can't just be profitable, they have to increase profits every year, or the shareholders fire the CEO and replace him with someone who can figure out how to sell off assets, lay off workers, or do something else that will bump the stock price for a few quarters. So basically, when you have a fairly flat market (absent phenomena like Harry Potter, you probably aren't going to see a growing number of people buying books every year), and one that's actually being eaten away by things like ebooks, you can be profitable enough to stay in business but not profitable enough to increase earnings every year. Hence the attempt to expand into "growth areas." Which I think was a mistake for both Borders and B&N.

cornflake said:

This is a chicken-and-egg thing to me though. Maybe someone actually knows some kind of statistic about it, but anecdotally, I don't know how to tell.

Barnes & Noble went heavily toward toys, games, all manner of stationary stuff, etc., even more to my eye than Borders had. Clearly they believe this to be necessary or beneficial to the bottom line.

However, the independent bookstores I know and visit have no such thing. They might have a few games at the register or a table of calendars or something (one I know of has the most awesome kid's section ever, the whole second story of the shop, basically, which has a dedicated tiny kid area, with their books, tiny chairs, floor pillows, a box of toys to just play with, places for parents to sit to read to the kids, books for older kids moving around the floor with an area selling puzzles, one for stuffed toys, etc., many connected [a Beatrix Potter display, etc.] that's different to me than the B&N type of random non-book stuff everyplace) but they're 90% books.

Many have been around for decades and seem to be doing well, so do bookstores need tons of toys for revenue, or were the big box ones not making revenue they wanted for other reasons and turned to that? Is it helping? Doesn't seem so, but who knows what it'd be if B&N turned to 90% books.

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I think the biggest problem that the large chain stores have is that they simply lease too much space. Without those trinkets filling up the floorspace, they would have one big cavern of a bookstore.

The only thing I'd mourn B&N for is my Nook. Otherwise, I stopped shopping there years ago. Books-A-Million always gets my money.

Ken said:

... it's always possible bookstores may go completely
under and cease to exist.

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Maybe possible, but not probable. There are too many brick and mortar bookstores for that to happen.

If B&N goes under, there will be other bookstores, whether they are independent or chains. The only major bookstore we have where I live is now B&N, but we have all these wonderful independent bookstores that have been thriving for years.

I love reading on my Kindle Fire, but my personal library at home is filled with books. Most of them are hardcover too, which I buy at independent venues.