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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: 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.