B&N CEO Fired

[pwalker8]

Originally Posted by Fbone

This would require an extensive amount of market research. What may work in one locale will fail in another. Will people make a special stop to buy a book or two? What about areas where all the indie bookstores have gone out of business?

Or it could be retail in general. Too many stores and not enough people with excessive discretionary spending.

This. Retail has long been in a state of flux. Having a location with the right customer mix near by is the key. In my neck of the woods, a number of indies that use to have a significant customer base have gone belly up over the years because either they moved to get a cheaper rent, and thus move away from their customer base, or their customer base moved away from them. I've seen it happen with businesses from book stores to bagel shops (I'm pretty sure the evil publishers didn't have anything to do with the bagel shops going belly up, though some here might disagree). I've seen indie book stores come and go, well before B&N moved into the area, much less Amazon.

[MGlitch]

Originally Posted by Fbone

This would require an extensive amount of market research. What may work in one locale will fail in another. Will people make a special stop to buy a book or two? What about areas where all the indie bookstores have gone out of business?

Or it could be retail in general. Too many stores and not enough people with excessive discretionary spending.

BN could potentially make big stores work, Waterstones is doing it in the UK with the same core product. What BN isn't doing, which WS did, is to allow those stores to adapt to the community.

Walking in to any given BN feels about the same. Small layout changes will occur based on the physical layout of the store, but special displays will be essentially the same. The stores get hit with large quantities of books that those working in them -know- will not sell in their area. And there is often little they can actually do about it for a few months at the least.

I don't hold out much hope that BN will be around in 10 or 15 years. If they are the bookspace will likely be even more minimal than it is now.

[fjtorres]

Originally Posted by MGlitch

BN could potentially make big stores work, Waterstones is doing it in the UK with the same core product. What BN isn't doing, which WS did, is to allow those stores to adapt to the community.

Walking in to any given BN feels about the same. Small layout changes will occur based on the physical layout of the store, but special displays will be essentially the same. The stores get hit with large quantities of books that those working in them -know- will not sell in their area. And there is often little they can actually do about it for a few months at the least.

I don't hold out much hope that BN will be around in 10 or 15 years. If they are the bookspace will likely be even more minimal than it is now.

The problem big bookstores face is that B&M bookselling today is a pareto-like business where the bulk of the revenues come from the narrative prose frontlist (a few hundred titles a year) and the bulk of the costs come from the backlist.

Back in the heyday of the warehouses, before online and before the boost in used book accessibility, the deep store catalog was a draw: people would travel significant distances to get to that backlist that was otherwise hard or impossible to get to. Today, not only can you get all those books more easily online but also a couple *million* more. Back then, a big storefront was a plus. Today a big storefront is just an expensive real estate lease.

It is no accident that the big specialty stores like Best Buy, Sports Authority, Bed, Bath & Beyond, etc are all downsizing or closing: they can't compete on selection with online. And they can't compete on price with the big store overhead holding them back. The only thing they can compete on is immediacy and for a good chunk of the market, selection + lower price trumps immediacy.

For books in particular, B&N faces the further challenge that the frontlist titles they depend on for the bulk of their revenue are available everywhere. There are thousands of *other* outlets for the exact same books. For somebody looking for the latest book from a big name author going to B&N offers little benefit over getting it at Walgreens, Safeway, Costco, or whatever. This is the same issue that sunk the majority of the generic ADEPT ebook stores and which is hampering Google and Apple and to a lesser extent Kobo: too much dependence on selling the exact same books as everybody else, usually at the exact same price. No competitive advantage. No particular reason for somebody to choose them over all others.

Immediacy means you get your books wherever is closest. And that could just as easily be an indie store, a newsstand, or a supermarket as a B&N.