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Barnes & Noble will shift to smaller stores and is turning to books to attempt to save its business:
The retailer had hoped that toys, games and other items would shore up its results, especially as Amazon.com Inc. ate away at its traditional business. But its non-book sales have flagged the past two quarters, and now the company is putting its focus back firmly on reading.
Barnes & Noble will "place a greater emphasis on books, while further narrowing our non-book assortment," Chief Executive Officer Demos Parneros said in a statement.
The failed foray is just one of the challenges bearing down on the chain. Customer traffic is down, and Barnes & Noble is losing market share. Though the release of "Harry Potter and the Cursed Child" reinvigorated sales a year ago, the company is now paying for that blip: Same-store sales fell 6.3 percent last quarter, with about half of that decline coming from the drop-off in Harry Potter demand.
Barnes & Noble's Nook e-book business also has languished, a further sign of Amazon's tightening grip on readers. It all added up to a loss of 41 cents a share in the fiscal second quarter, compared with a deficit of 29 cents a year earlier. Analysts projected a 26-cent loss for the period, which ended Oct. 28.
Barnes & Noble may benefit from short leases, allowing it to close or downsize stores as needed. New stores may be only about 40% as large as the average existing location.
Headline credit where it is due.
Also at WSJ:
"There's too much stuff in the stores," said Barnes & Noble Inc. Chief Executive Demos Parneros, in an interview after the company's earnings call. "We're drawing a line in the sand and reducing the assortment of gift items and what I'd call tchotchkes. For example, we love journals. But we have way too many. We're refocusing on books."
Related: Amazon Opens Physical Bookstore in Seattle
Amazon Books Opens in New York City
(Score: 1) by khallow on Monday December 04 2017, @06:46AM (14 children)
(Score: 2) by takyon on Monday December 04 2017, @10:40AM (1 child)
I'm a little shocked that Nook [wikipedia.org] still exists. They spun it off and partnered with Microsoft, bought back control of it, and partnered with Samsung on new hardware.
That's a good idea for getting people into their stores, especially into cafes in college towns. Except that the Nook market share is dismal [the-digital-reader.com].
Barnes & Noble is like the slightly upscale and more competent looking version of Books-A-Million [wikipedia.org], the other big box books store with similarly cavernous air-conditioned locations.
The holiday season is what keeps stores like this alive. You look at the "tchotchkes" and other crap sold and B&N, and I can guarantee you will find many journals, greeting cards, stationary sets, RC helicopters, slime science kits, plush dolls, Game of Thrones action figures, and other non-book junk. I'm sure they sell a lot of it as Christmas gifts, but do they really need to stock 100 varieties of journals? Apparently not.
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(Score: 4, Informative) by etherscythe on Monday December 04 2017, @05:59PM
It won't for long. [the-digital-reader.com] I was about 2 seconds from pulling the trigger on the new Nook Glowlight 3 Black Friday deal when I found out about this and decided I'm going to get a Kobo Aura ONE with my tax refund instead. No sense investing in an ecosystem that will not be maintained, no matter the "in-store support forever" guarantee. I'm hoping my library doesn't up and vanish before I get it converted into non-DRM format.
In case anyone's wondering, I'm boycotting Amazon as the reason I'm not getting a Kindle. Kobo does not have a huge presence in the US, but I'll be damned if Bezos gets any more of my money after the political stunt Amazon pulled on Wikileaks years ago with the Manning affair. I'm depressed to see how Amazon has flourished since then, with as hard as it is to avoid that place these days from a convenience and selection standpoint.
"Fake News: anything reported outside of my own personally chosen echo chamber"
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Oakenshield on Monday December 04 2017, @01:33PM (10 children)
There is a (formerly) independent bookstore around here that moved to an open air mall. It looks like it's housed in an aircraft hanger. This place is absolutely huge. Before the buyout and move, it used to be one of my date night destinations. My wife and I would go to dinner and spend a fortune on books and magazines there afterwards. The place was much smaller but had a great selection, including and entire room of computer books floor to ceiling.
Now the new gigantor store has almost nothing but games, toys, stuffed animals, and a section with enough calendars - year around - to fill a WalMart. The books they do have look just like the same selection at the much closer Barnes and Noble. My last trip there, I searched for three separate magazines and came up zero for three. Their computer book selection now consists of one shelving unit, four feet wide with not a single programming book to be had. They were all of the "iPads for Seniors for Dummies" variety. This is in a building that you could park a couple Goodyear Blimps. This seems to be Barnes and Nobles recent business model too.
The last two times I stopped at Barnes and Noble were for picking up reading books for my kid's English class. Both times, they did not have the book but offered to order it for me. I ended up ordering from Amazon because it shipped quicker and it didn't require me to make another trip out to the store. I used to love to browse book stores, but now, they have nothing for me.
I won't miss the gigantic selection of journals, the card games, the fancy coffees or the toys, but I do miss the days of decent book stores that actually stock good books.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Monday December 04 2017, @02:06PM (6 children)
I'm pretty sure every Barnes & Noble or Books-A-Million I've been to (years ago) has had a shelf of programming books. Maybe basic tier and outdated stuff, but definitely covering C++, Java, Visual Basic, and HTML development or JavaScript at the least.
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(Score: 2) by NotSanguine on Monday December 04 2017, @03:00PM
It was decades ago that I regularly visited Barnes & Noble.
It *was* a wonderful place. I remember reading Green Eggs & Ham there aloud with a very attractive classmate while in high school.
I used to go in there all the time to browse and would always find something interesting to read. They always (especially at their former flagship store [wikipedia.org]) had an enormous selection across a wide variety of topics.
Their stores today hold little interest for me, as they don't have the breadth of subjects or a decent selection of the subjects they do have.
It's sad to see a venerable and storied company like B&N go to hell, but it's not so surprising, given that actually reading an entire book seems to be too much work for most these days.
No, no, you're not thinking; you're just being logical. --Niels Bohr
(Score: 2) by Oakenshield on Monday December 04 2017, @03:16PM (4 children)
This former independent is owned by Books-a-Million. And no. They had nothing. It was all how-to-use type books (Windows 10, MacOS, IOS, Android, Photoshop, Office, etc) I specifically asked if they had any other computer books and was told that their dinky little four foot section was it. The Barnes and Noble has a much better selection of computer books - one small row - but nothing even close to the old "independent" store or the old Borders I used to visit.
Now if I want something computer related, I go straight to Amazon, Half.com or ABE Books now.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by darnkitten on Tuesday December 05 2017, @01:20AM (3 children)
(Score: 2) by darnkitten on Tuesday December 05 2017, @02:58AM
sorry-forgot to close the quote tag...
(Score: 2) by Oakenshield on Wednesday December 06 2017, @02:42PM (1 child)
Wow! I did not realize half.com was gone too. Damn... It makes me wonder if we are headed into a brave new world of illiteracy.
(Score: 2) by darnkitten on Wednesday December 06 2017, @07:10PM
Well, eBay had been trying to get rid of half.com since they opened the eBay Stores, but the buyers and sellers simply refused to migrate to a platform unsuited to selling books. After years of trying to cripple the site and failing to get people to switch over, they finally decided to pull the plug.
It's a shame, though--If they had doubled down, instead of conceding to Amazon as soon as it started selling used books, eBay/Half.com could have competed well against their rival giant.
I believe we've always been in a largely illiterate world--some people are readers, but the vast majority are viewers, and read only when it can't be avoided..
I do think, though, that we are going through an adjustment period, as electronic reading materials find their niche in the literary ecosystem. At the library I run, after a multi-year decline in readership, the numbers for the last two years show a steady build in the reading of print materials. If you add in the e-materials we provide, the statistics seem to suggest more people are reading in general, as many of the patrons now consuming e-books were habitual non-readers of print books (largely due to a perceived lack of time--now that they can carry their books on their devices, they can read in spare moments). A number of patrons have also tried the e-book thing, and discovered they actually prefer physical books.
We may also be seeing a trend away from impersonal service in libraries and bookstores and a return to individual contact with patrons or customers. We can see this in the failure of the large brick-and-mortar retailers, who can't compete with Amazon's algorithms and a marked increase in the independent booksellers, who can offer more personalized service.
Similarly, I run a small rural library, under 20,000 volumes, but I curate the collection for my patrons, and I make an effort to see that if they walk in the door, they walk out with a book in hand, or preferably two, one of which should be slightly outside what they are used to reading. I also order books in, if I can't satisfy their needs on the premises, with the help of a co-operative arrangement with ten other rural libraries and a fantastic volunteer courier network, as well as the state and national interlibrary systems. I am also seeing larger libraries require more floor time for employees, requiring them to actually go out and talk with the patrons and show them books, rather than sit behind their desks, waiting to be approached.
Overall, I am cautiously optimistic--the face of the reading world is changing, but I hope we are learning the right lessons and getting it right more often than we have in the past few years.
(Score: 2) by bzipitidoo on Monday December 04 2017, @10:53PM (2 children)
And so is the private bookstore. Publishers and the ever more artificial scarcity of their business model can die in a fire. It's time our public libraries and schools be allowed to take full advantage of technology and go all in on digital formats and networking. The only things the private bookstore ever had on the public library was lots of the latest, plus catering to the desire to own your own print copy of popular classics. Now with the Age of Information, I see no reason for the public library to continue being a backwater and paying the list price for print books when it is so easy to switch to digital.
One of my biggest problems was lack of shelf space. Some books had to go to make room for new ones, but more often, I just didn't buy. Another problem was high prices. I think publishers blundered badly in the 1980s when they hiked the price of paperbacks at double the rate of inflation-- a $1.95 paperback in 1980 was $4.95 by 1990. Just as cost smashing technology was around the corner, and computer gaming was emerging as a powerful new form of entertainment luring people away from books and TV, publishers got greedy and drove prices up, speeding up the exodus of their customers.
Ebooks solves the problems of space and costs. I love being able to carry around an entire wall's worth of printed material in my pocket. But even more, I'd love not having to keep copies around. It'd be huge knowing I could download and redownload whenever I wanted. Your book collection could be a simple list of titles. But no, we still have to hoard printed books like they're gold, in part to ward off accusations of "digital theft". It's totally upside down how these publisher ownership scumbags have managed to take our natural right to share and copy, equated it to theft, and have most of the public believing that.
(Score: 2) by darnkitten on Wednesday December 06 2017, @07:35PM (1 child)
I'm copying part of one of my responses from the Vid.me thread (with a couple of additions), because I think it is relevant to bzipitidoo's comment in this thread. (and because I forgot to hit "submit" on that comment last night, and didn't post it until just now).
(Score: 2) by bzipitidoo on Thursday December 07 2017, @04:02PM
I've been wondering what we can do to help our public libraries with this problem. It's a big problem and I can't think of any easy answer. You clearly know much more about the dirty deals publishers manage to impose on public libraries.
Maybe a letter writing campaign to our politicians? Would have to be a heck of a lot of letters to move them.
I doubt letters to the editors of any newspaper would see the light of day. They'd probably decide a letter that advocated against copyright was subversive and a threat to their business and the American way and refuse to consider publishing it, with great anger and prejudice. Exposing the dirt could help, but again that would take some cooperation from the media, and they are acting decidedly uncooperative. There may be offbeat publications that would do it.
So, perhaps national competition would move things? I've heard Egypt would like to rebuild and expand the famous Library of Alexandria with modern technology. But they probably can't afford to defy US copyright law, not with the all the holds the US has on them. So, maybe Iran? Or, what about the BRIC nations? An advantage of India is that many of them know and use English. Russia has a long tradition of shamelessly copying Western science, in their desperate scramble to keep up. Anyway, I understand that's a direction RMS has been exploring.
Un-brainwashing US citizens would be good. As an example of how thoroughly some are brainwashed, consider the collectible card game genre. The first and I think still chief of those games is Magic the Gathering. Try to enter a contest with a deck of proxies (copies of the cards) and see what kind of anger that provokes, because it will. Those fool players will get all righteous and leap to defend the manufacturer's so-called rights. They don't really care about that, what has them hooked is that allowing copies would deflate the artificially high valuation of their collected cards. Plus, if they think they can get your deck disqualified on those grounds, they will go for the easy victory. You must show them that you own (or at least have) originals of everything you proxied. They won't like it, but they do understand not wanting to put wear and tear on the originals, as they feel the same way. Sadly, Magic is in large part a game of money, with significant advantage to those players who can afford to pay and pay to collect good cards, and it seems the wealthy players would like to keep it that way. Takes thousands of dollars to compete in Magic. That everyone (except the manufacturer) would be better off if copies were no big deal seems not to matter to even the poor players. It's weird. I got out of Magic years ago, and wish I'd never got in.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 04 2017, @02:51PM
They're being run by morons. I had a couple of Nooks and each generation got less and less full featured, the most recent versions lack a microsd card slot. But, it doesn't much matter because the people running the ebook division are complete assholes. It used to be that you could download the books and use Adobe Editions to put them on the ebook reader, but that's gone.
They upgraded all their books to a new version that can't be cracked, which makes is massively harder for me to read my books or back them up, so I refuse to buy any more of them. I wound up buying my newer ones from Amazon since I might as well when it's a choice between B&N and Amazon.