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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: 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.