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Originally Posted by Fbone
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Originally Posted by DMcCunney
How? Price below cost and take a loss on every sale to build market share? There's a limit to how much any retailer can afford to do that and stay in business. And the dedicated book chains are under heavy pressure as it is, and many are showing losses. Lots of folks are placing bets on how long Borders will survive, for example. (And there were rumors Barnes and Noble might buy them that foundered on the question of where B&N would get the money. It would be a case of betting two sick companies would make a healthy one, which is not a bet lenders are enthusiastic about making.)
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I don't know how but with thousands of business and marketing majors graduating each year there must be a way. |
What if there
isn't? That's the unpalatable choice a lot of people are looking at.
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Bookstores are failing now. What do they have to lose by not trying something creative? Bold? Daring?
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That depends on what it costs them to do it. Most of them don't have a lot of spare cash to lose. I'm not sure any can afford to do the "Lose money on every ebook sale to gain market share" tactic. And even if they do, how long do they do it? What happens when they decide to
raise prices? (Which they'll
have to at some point.) One of the criticisms publishers leveled at Amazon was that they were accustoming the market to unrealistically low ebook prices. You can argue over the truth of that claim, but you'll still face a backlash if you get your customers accustomed to a lower price, then raise it dramatically. (And it
would be a dramatic raise if you were pricing low enough to compete with Amazon, and simply wanted to stop
losing money, let alone make any.)
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The booksellers in the UK cant compete with Amazon on hardcovers so all that's left are ebooks. They need a physical store, device or app with superior shopping and reading experiences. Without those what is left?
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I can't speak for the bookstores in the UK, but in the US, the majority of shelf space goes to paperbacks, and they generate the majority of sales. Not all books
have a hardcover edition. Most are published only in paperback. I'm betting the same is true for the UK.
And ebooks are a problem for the brick and mortar retailers. Sony, for example, was talking in the early Sony Reader days about partnering with retailers, and having the reader sold in bookstores. (Barnes and Noble is doing that with the nook.) My question was "That's fine, but how do you create a continuing engagement with the customer? Once they've come into the store and bought a reader, what will get them to come
back, if they can order and download the book
from the reader, with no need to come into the store?"
B&N is attempting to address that with the nook by using the built-in networking to browse in the store and read ebooks, the same way you can pull a physical book off the shelf and start reading.
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Dennis