Quote:
Originally Posted by ApK
I don't see evidence that it's an issue of the DTB market not being big enough to sustain them. They have competition and the competition beat them.
That is to say, even if there was a hugely growing paper book market, and B&N was opening stores left and right, Borders may still have this problem.
|
Well, now...
There's a lot of ways to beat this dead horse.
Yes, there are other print book retailers out there.
And, yes, only Borders is doing badly enough to be in bankruptcy proceedings.
But...
None of the other competitors in the *Brick-and-mortar* bookstore business are exactly raking it in. B&N is still slowly bleeding out their cash reserves and looking for a transfusion to finance their transition to ebooks and Books-a-million is barely afloat through what looks like very tight management. (And like Borders, they've outsourced their ebook future. To B&N rather than Kobo.) Indies are still closing left and right and even the poster child of the specialty bookstore, Powell's, is in distress.
My own read is that there is a serious *over-capacity* in the B&M print book business resulting from the double whammy of online competition eroding the value of (relatively) deep in-store catalogs and department store use of heavily-discounted bestsellers as traffic draws. The latter attacks bookstore's cash cows, the former turns their (previously) best assest into a liability. As bad as Border's management has been, they merely compounded a bad situation into a disaster. B&N management hasn't been quite as bad, yet they too are closing stores, remember. They too are downsizing their chain and looking for ways out of *their* expensive storefronts and leases. Border's problem isn't just bad management but rather bad management atop a fading business model.
Border's current situation is just the beginning of a serious death-spiral for Border's and the entire B&M book retailing business. eBooks have *yet* to really impact B&M economics yet; they haven't drawn off enough customers from the cash cow side of the business to be felt. But that day is coming and coming fast.
B&M Print book retailing is going to have to be totally reinvented if it is to survive into the next decade and whatever form it takes (*if* it survives) chains of monster warehouse storefronts are *not* going to be the dominant form. They won't *all* vanish but those that survive will be few and far apart; regional draws, maybe one or two per state or major metro area. Like the above-mentioned Micro-Center, which endures long after the likes of Computerland and CompUSA vanished.
If *all* that the industry sees in the Border's bankruptcy is "bad management" this story will not end well for anybody; there will be sequels.