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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: 4, Interesting) by bradley13 on Monday December 04 2017, @08:20AM (12 children)
I mean, who'd've thunk it: a bookstore that sells books!
I used to love going into bookstores to browse. Shelves filled with a broad selection of books, you could easily discover new authors. In good bookstores, the staff in each section actually knew the selection, and could make good suggestions.
Gradually - even before Amazon became such a power - the stores started carrying the same-old-stuff. All the big titles from years past, reprinted and reprinted and reprinted, plus whatever was on today's best-seller list. No more unusual titles, no more new authors. You'd go into a bookstore and...nothing new. But now they had teddy bears! Yeah, that's why I went into the bookstore, to buy stuffed animals!
The big pubishers are also part of the problem, of course. They are the ones who kept pushing the old cash cows, apparently not understanding that we've already read them. The customers who read dozens of books per year don't need another copy of Asimov's Foundation, or Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, because we already have three of each. We want new authors, new stories. Add on the SJW convergence (pink SF), and gaaaaaah...
Of course, the competition from Amazon worsened the situation, but the publishers bookstores had already dug their own graves. I haven't been inside a bookstore for years. I buy mostly from indy authors now.
Everyone is somebody else's weirdo.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 04 2017, @10:35AM (6 children)
I agree for the most part, although their ebook offerings falling down probably has something to do with shooting themselves in the foot by helping to fix the prices of ebooks to be on par with physical books. As a result, people didn't want ebooks nearly as much anymore but if they were down with getting the physical editions Amazon was beating them in both selection and price.
(Score: 2) by bradley13 on Monday December 04 2017, @01:18PM (5 children)
You're right: The early ebook prices were a problem. Publishers thought they could charge as much (sometimes more) than for a physical book, despite the obvious savings in production, printing, transportation, etc.. On top of that, the early eReaders weren't very good, which made the experience less than ideal.
That, at least, has pretty much sorted itself out. The only remaining problem is DRM. I use a Kindle, but I want my books in *my* media library, able to read them with whatever reader I want. Amazon's new DRM is a pain to circumvent - I wish they would just stop. The music world has discovered that it can live without DRM, so why not the book world?
Everyone is somebody else's weirdo.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 04 2017, @01:29PM (3 children)
Ironically this is why I am among the "dismal" number of Nook users. You can entirely skip Barnes & Noble and side-load content as you would a flash drive.
(Score: 4, Informative) by takyon on Monday December 04 2017, @02:24PM (1 child)
I have never found it too difficult to get downloaded ebooks onto a Kindle. Just use Calibre [wikipedia.org], which is able to convert the files and handle metadata and stuff, and organize your books to an extent. Not as simple as treating the e-reader as USB storage, but potentially saves time. I don't own a Kindle anymore, and I am not sure when/if I will dive back into e-readers (I don't have a tablet either). PDFs were really slow/crappy on Kindle, despite their obvious utility for illustrated works and being fairly common on download sites. I'm sure .CBZ comics converted to PDF or MOBI would have been terrible on Kindle, as well as in black and white.
I noticed that there were a few color Nook models, although those use tablet screens and not e-ink. I have expected Amazon to put out a color e-reader, but it never happened.
If there is not a decent color e-reader in the next couple of years, I will probably pick up a tablet. Battery life and performance has improved tremendously in laptops in the last few years, and I'm sure tablets have seen a similar trend. It seems that quantum dot [engadget.com] (but not OLED?) displays use less power, and a move to 10nm or 7nm ARM could improve battery life to an amount that is acceptable even if it can't match e-ink. And then you can use your tablet for color PDFs/CBZs, video, music, and web browsing.
The only viable alternative I see would be a tablet-sized version of YotaPhone [rbth.com].
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 04 2017, @03:07PM
Indeed, that's part of why I don't have a Kindle. They make it so easy to get content from other stores onto their devices, but more or less impossible to take Kindle content and put it on 3rd party devices. I still don't get how they got away with doing that without any sort of antitrust action being taken.
Then again, the DoJ was fine when Apple was abusing the hell out of it's near monopoly in the music space to push those crappy iPods.
(Score: 2) by NotSanguine on Monday December 04 2017, @03:11PM
You can do this with the Kindle as well. I received one as a gift some years ago, and while I do have over 12,000 ebooks, I have yet to purchase one from Amazon.
I side-load books without issue and manage (as well as convert formats) using Calibre [calibre-ebook.com], which is cross-platform, open source [github.com] and free.
If I was unable to do so, I'd have stuck to paper books, which I prefer but, especially when traveling, I can bring dozens of books with me on my kindle.
No, no, you're not thinking; you're just being logical. --Niels Bohr
(Score: 2) by Sourcery42 on Monday December 04 2017, @03:31PM
Why because then people might share books they've purchased with their friends and families and deny those benevolent publishers much needed revenue. What's that you say? People could easily do that with traditional, physical books, and such practices should essentially already be baked into their business model? Poppycock!
(Score: 3, Insightful) by VLM on Monday December 04 2017, @10:03PM (3 children)
Eventually I think all legacy brick and mortar non-food non-clothes retail will converge from all directions upon crappy generic gifts. There really isn't a purpose for them anymore. There will be a million places and a billion square feet all devoted to selling crappy gifts and nothing else on the market will be available except for online.
I was at a B+N a couple weeks ago and all I could find to buy was a gift for a family member, a specific cookbook. They sure have a lot of legacy optical media in a cavernous empty sixth of the store with no browsing customers at all, what a dumb merchandising mistake. The large board game selection is obscure in that its too euro/war/complicated for normies but its too intro level for real gamers, I suppose that fits the gift stereotype where grannie can buy something in the correct theme and the kids can return it for what they really want. I also noticed they have pretty much given up on merchandising tech type books. They sell almost exclusively gift books now, very little you'd buy for yourself.
The most interesting place to find tech type books, or really any non-fiction, is book resale stores of which there are a couple regional chains. Theres a chain named "half price books" that covers the civilized USA, pretty much anywhere more than 500 miles from the coasts. Today I found a book titled "Mathematical Astronomy Morsels" strangely appealing and interesting. Like "computer recreations" column from the 80s meets an astronomy magazine in a collection of essays format. That entire genre of non-fiction is missing from B+N, they gave up.
One interesting concept that isn't entirely insane is the local B+N at the mall is across the street from the pop-up store that sells seasonal junk, so ... merge? I could see a day where there's a book buying season, wedged in with Halloween costume season and Christmas ornament season. Spring has valentines day. Maybe dog days of summer would be a good popup book store season.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Monday December 04 2017, @10:07PM (2 children)
Figured it out just after posting. The three retail genres will be food, clothing, and gift shop. Think of tourist traps with their "gift shop". Someday soon the only non-food non-clothes store will be endless gift shops as far as the eye can see. Eat it, wear it, or give it away, nothing else possible.
(Score: 2) by bzipitidoo on Tuesday December 05 2017, @12:14AM (1 child)
No, no. It's 4 things, and they are:
music
movies
microcode (software)
high-speed pizza delivery
(Score: 2) by VLM on Wednesday December 06 2017, @10:58PM
yeah yeah. That's a book where I alternate between "wouldn't it be great to see a great movie adaptation" and "wouldn't it be horrible to see a messed up movie adaptation".
(Score: 2) by Joe Desertrat on Monday December 04 2017, @10:50PM
Most of the books I buy now are used, and quite a high percentage of them are out of print or just not found in the big chain bookstores. Most of them cost a whole lot less as well, if you have the choice of buying 10 or so books for $50 or 2-3 books for the same price, there is not much debate.
I suspect things will be much worse in the future, with printed books new and used dwindling in supply. E-Book availability may suffer from copyrights extended well past any reasonable length and DRM on the various readers, so consumers may have nowhere to turn.