On the need for smaller bookstores:
It's gotten to the point where noted industry cheerleaders like Shatzkin have belatedly noticed that bookstores aren't traffic draws and haven't been for two decades:
http://www.idealog.com/blog/barnes-n...early-spelled/
It's a typically tail-chasing muddle of a column but he does point out some meaningful facts, like that books provide two-thirds of B&N revenues (which, given the marginal profitability of the stores means that without the toys and trinkets they'd already be dead) and that most successful non-chain book stores are much smaller, closer to 25k titles than 100k.
Also:
Quote:
What just doesn’t make it anymore, at least not nearly as frequently, is the “big bookstore”. Although there is no scientific way to prove this, most observers I’ve asked agree that the new indie stores popping up over the past few years tend to be smaller than than the Borders and older indie stores they are replacing. We are seeing book retailing become a mix of pretty small book-and-literary-centric stores and an add-on in many places: museums, gift shops, toy stores. These have always existed but they will grow. And true “bookstore” shelf space will shrink, as has space for “general” books in mass merchants. The indie bookstore share will definitely continue to grow, but whether their growth will replace what is lost at B&N and the mass merchant chains is doubtful. Every publisher I’ve asked acknowledges significant indie store growth in the past couple of years, but they are also unanimous in saying the growth has not replaced the sales and shelf space lost when Borders closed.
Barnes & Noble is clearly rethinking its strategies, but this is one component that I have never seen clearly articulated. Back when I had my “aha!” moment about what was happening with the university press books, I suggested to one B&N executive that they had to figure out how to make the 25,000-title store work.
He said, “that’s not where we are. We’re thinking about the million-title store!” In other words, “we want to manage big retail locations”. This is thinking shaped by what we can now see is an outdated understanding of what the value of a big store is. So now they’re trying to sustain slightly-smaller big locations with things other than books. (Whether they plan to go as low as 25,000 titles in stores that used to stock four or five times that many is not clear. But they did say in their recent earnings call that the new concept stores would get 60 percent of their revenues from books, rather than the 67 percent they get now.) They have added non-book merchandise; now they’re thinking about restaurants. All of that is to increase traffic and to increase sales from the traffic they already get.
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After that he goes off into la-la land suggesting that B&N pivot and become an old-school jobber.
Back to the 50's, basically.
That, folks, is
book industry™ thinking: trying to solve the problems of today with the solutions of yesterday.
Still, he did get two things right:
1- big stores don't draw any better than small ones and often draw less. Which we've known around here since the last decade.
2- B&N is wasting precious time and resources trying to make big stores work.