[DMcCunney]

Originally Posted by Andrew H.

Amazon has a larger market share than either. It wouldn't surprise me if it had a larger market share than both..

Depends on what product you are talking about. Amazon began with books, but has grown far beyond that. Amazon has a larger market share in books, but Walmart may have a larger market share in everything else.

I think that even having experienced mom & pop bookstores puts you in the top 5% of the population.

I doubt it. I'm in a major metropolitan area, but so are a lot of others. There used to be a fair number of independent bookstores, but competition from the big chains was too much. There was an article in the NYT a couple of years ago on one in NJ which was closing its doors. An author who had read at the store previously came by to do a final reading and signing as a favor to the owners. A couple of women came up to get books of his signed, and matter-of-factly announced they had actually bought them at one of the big chain's branches because they were cheaper. This pretty much describes what is happening to the independents.

When I was a kid, the fairly typical town in which I grew up had no independent bookstores; only "Book and Card" stores, where the books were on spinners or displayed on shelves withe the cover out.

Those still exist, Chances are excellent the books are placed there by the rack jobber that services the store, and the store itself exercises no choice in the selection. The store primarily sells cards and gifts, with books as a sideline. I see the same thing locally in the discount drugstores.

These were replaced (in 1980 or so) by Waldenbooks and B.Dalton at the mall. This was a huge step up; it's hard to describe how great these stores were. They had so many books that they even displayed some *spine out* - as they didn't have room to display everything cover out!

That's the norm, not the exception. I saw statistics some years back that indicated there were about 50,000 books published each year in the US, and the average bookstore had room to shelve perhaps 5,000 - 8,000. New books and featured titles got full cover displays. Others were spine out.

I have a fair sized two story Borders near me, and a four floor Barnes and Noble superstore a bit father away. They have more books cover out, but most are spine out. There are simply too many books to display with all covers out, no matter how big your store is.

Around 1995-98, Barnes and Noble opened and the B.Dalton closed and the Waldenbooks went on life support. I had moved away by then, to much larger cities, but it was amazing to come back and see a bookstore like this in the town I grew up in.

Waldenbooks is a unit of the Borders Group these days, and at least some of their stores have been renamed Borders Express. B. Dalton's was started by the Dayton's department store chain, located in malls, and competed with Waldenbooks. Barnes and Noble bought them from Dayton's in 1987, and operated them through 2009, closing the last 50 stores by January 2010.

So no mom & pops were harmed when B&N opened. Although I do have to wonder whether this was an example of overexpansion, Amazon notwithstanding.

At the time, probably not. It was retail consolidation, as the chains started squeezing out the independents in attempts to gain market share and economies of scale. It's been made worse in recent years because book unit sales have been flat or down, and revenues have increased only due to price increases. Ebooks have increased the pressure, but the problems existed well before they came about. There have simply been too many books chasing too few readers. Publishers have gone through wrenching rounds of consolidation, and retailers have followed in their wake.
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Dennis