Quote:
Originally Posted by soondai
I honestly still can't picture how they can match Amazon on the pbook side.
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Easy. Build a good web site and give their customers a good shopping experience.
You don't have to match Amazon prices every minute of every day on every title. It's not all about price. (Notice all the futile griping about Prime pricing?)
Before the conspiracy put them out of business, plenty of much smaller ebookstores used creative retail techniques to hold their own against Amazon.
Amazon is no invincible juggernaut. You can compete with them if you are smart enough.
B&N has in fact done okay in protecting their B&M bookstores. But that is precisely their problem: they sacrificed a good chunk of their future to protect a small part of their present. Not onlike Kodak, who invented digital photography but marginalized it to protect film and ended up with neither.
Don't forget B&N was investing in ebook readers in the last century and ebooks early in this one. They *knew* ebooks were coming.
Their problem has been execution. Competence in pbook B&M not translating online and their continual copying of others without understanding why Sony, Amazon, and Apple did what they did and why it was bad to imitate them if they couldn't follow through.
As to the big stores, remember B&N bought out entire chains of small, efficient bookstores... to close them. They chose to make customers go to them instead of going to them. Even now, they still could adapt by going small--Best Buy is doing it. It's not too late for them. But they're not even trying.
They simply bet on the wrong business model. Over and over, even after it was clear it was a losing bet.