Quote:
Originally Posted by Fbone
Indies face the same difficulties as B&N- expensive leases, small inventory, payroll, price conscious shoppers, online competition.
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Definitely. The advantage they have is being able to select stock based on local demand. If the locals want vampire novels, they can stock the whole Anita Blake series, the Ann Rice set, and the Twilight books. If the locals don't care about vampire novels, they can skip all of those and stock extra military adventures instead. Or whatever. B&N had some consideration of local interests, but not much; national corporate rules required that they carry and promote certain titles regardless of how much interest the local crowds had--the idea was "these are the popular books; push the and the locals will buy them."
And the attitude extends to their other items. I was in B&N a couple of months ago, considering getting a Nook Classic to replace my dying PRS-505, and saw the Huge! Colorful! Display! for the tablets... they had the Classic for less than $100, which was within my budget. I didn't think it had the all features I wanted but maybe it had enough, so I went to ask.
They didn't have a feature list. Didn't have an info-card for it. Didn't know its storage capacity or filetype support. That convinced me that, even if it *did* have the features I consider bare-minimum for purchasing a new ereader, I didn't want to buy one from them; obviously, I wouldn't have access to any support for it.