Quote:
Originally Posted by Rizla
The interesting question is what could B&N have done differently to survive in the US and UK markets. Or indeed, what could they still do to begin again and use their existing platform?
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Definitely an uphill battle at this point.
Do something to leverage all of the customers in their membership program?
Stop trying to tie deals and stuff to customers visiting the retail stores (maybe they don't do this anymore?).
I'm not a fan of exclusives, but they could do something to get exclusives with popular indie authors. Maybe in exchange for exclusivity offer some kind of print distribution in their stores through Sterling (B&N's publishing house).
Instead of trying to compete with tablets and the Samsung partnership focus on getting the reading apps really good and then pay tablet manufacturers to be the only pre-installed reading app on the device?
I agree they need to be different that Amazon, but you can only be so different. One thing that Amazon has that's a big selling feature (Google has it too?) is the whole Whispersync, send to kindle, cloud thing. I don't really use it, but it seems quite popular with a lot of folks. B&N should try to take that concept and if not make it better at least offer some version of it.