Globe & Mail - Indigo faces digital reckoning

[Giggleton]

Originally Posted by elcreative

How can you have a "near infinite increase in sales" from a very definitely finite group of buyers??? Hyperbole gets extremely boring after a while...

I'm talking about reaching the limit of all readers, as in every human being will be capable of reading from an ereading device. The number of sales at that point would be close enough to infinite. Interestingly enough the only way to reach that limit is to abolish copyright. We ain't gonna get there by locking the texts down I can tell you that much.

[Frida Fantastic]

Originally Posted by J. Strnad

Just reading through the comments, Indigo seems to have enormous PR troubles! Man, people posting comments just friggin' HATE that chain! Looks like they're scoring 0 on the sympathy meter.

To be honest, I'm not very sympathetic towards them either. As a compulsive reader and a Canadian, Chapters just doesn't provide a whole lot of value to me. The local store has a pretty limited selection, but it has a sprawling size. 50% of the space is dedicated to junk bargain books (e.g. another book about Princess D.) or toys/housewares. Also, everything is cheaper on Amazon.

The overall combo of (1) limited selection (2) not fun to browse in (for me), (3) and relatively more expensive than other options makes it a no go for me. So instead I have Amazon, specialty indie book stores, and used book stores. There's a nicer couple of stores in downtown Vancouver, but I never buy from them either when the used bookstore with a crazy SF selection is just across the street

[Kali Yuga]

Originally Posted by SensualPoet

Indigo continues to be profitable -- barely -- which is in contrast to the Borders / Barnes & Noble situation in the US.

Just FYI, B&N is still profitable, iirc -- or would be if they weren't investing heavily in ebooks. Borders is the one that's dead meat.

Originally Posted by SensualPoet

But what is clear is the management really hasn't a formal strategy to improve the physical retailing business: add more toys, private label housewares, more food related items, cafés, bring back comfy chairs ....

None of that solves the problem that physical stores, including mega-stores, can only carry a small fraction of the number of titles of an online site. Most ebook stores already carry 10x more titles than a typical mega-store.

Cafes might in some cases get people in the door, but that doesn't help if they just browse books there and buy them online -- or that it pits them against established coffee shops. As to selling toys and so forth, a) there are lots of other places to buy stuff like that, and b) the more junk you add, the more you dilute the brand.

Originally Posted by SensualPoet

Remarkably, for the owner of Kobo, there isn't a peep on how to integrate offsite sales with onsite ones. Every Kobo sold in store ought to be tagged to the location and percentage of sales be earmarked back to that store.

Uhh... Why?

Kobo almost certainly already gets general demographic and geographic data, e.g. they'll know that units sold in NYC and Toronto. They certainly know the addresses of the people buying ebooks through them. There is absolutely no reason to throw away revenues to a store that doesn't contribute to sales.

Originally Posted by SensualPoet

...the wifi editions should be able to receive a Kobo / Indigo blog and report events at the local store. The cross-selling opportunities are intense, inexpensive to implement and apparently overlooked.

No, I think we can overlook them, since these kinds of gimmicks are not going to produce nearly enough revenue to keep open a chain of megastores with massive overhead. Especially since the strongest competitors are online sites with lower overhead that can squeeze more revenue out of each sale.

[SensualPoet]

Originally Posted by Kali Yuga

Just FYI, B&N is still profitable, iirc -- or would be if they weren't investing heavily in ebooks.

We have a different view on what "profitable" is.

Originally Posted by Kali Yuga

None of that solves the problem that physical stores, including mega-stores, can only carry a small fraction of the number of titles of an online site. Most ebook stores already carry 10x more titles than a typical mega-store.

It's not necessary for a bricks and mortar store to carry as many books as an online store. The whole point of the local store is that it is a "curated" selection. (That's fancy pants talk for offering a selection of titles relevant to the local community.)

Originally Posted by Kali Yuga

Kobo almost certainly already gets general demographic and geographic data, e.g. they'll know that units sold in NYC and Toronto. They certainly know the addresses of the people buying ebooks through them. There is absolutely no reason to throw away revenues to a store that doesn't contribute to sales.

You missed my point. I was suggesting Kobo, in Canada, knows exactly which Kobo was sold at which Indigo location and ought to use that info to direct market and cross-market physical books and ebooks. To encourage b&m store managers, some portion of every future Kobo ebook on a device sold in his/her store gets credited back. Someone coming into the store asking for title X, finding it is out of stock, should be pitched the ebook and the Kobo with it. Bestseller sales cards ought to flag "Also available for your Kobo". As Indigo continues to evolve, tying itself to Kobo purchasing / reading activities makes good business sense. It will be a very long time yet before all books are digital and the public stops being interested in paper editions.

[SensualPoet]

Originally Posted by J. Strnad

Just reading through the comments, Indigo seems to have enormous PR troubles! Man, people posting comments just friggin' HATE that chain! Looks like they're scoring 0 on the sympathy meter.

Actually, Indigo is much better liked than you'd ever suspect from the lunatic ravings of many posters of the Globe and Mail comments section. You'll also notice multiple postings by the same folks frothing at the mouth about partisan (usually ultra-right wing) politics that has nothing to do with the issue at hand and rarely reflects anything in the article.

This same pointless poison is targeted at any Canadian big business and the arts community at large with utterly numbing consistency within the narrow-minded universe of Globe and Mail commenters. (There are some comments worth reading that actually stick intelligently to a given issue, but you do have to wade through a lot of creepy stuff.) The trade-off is the newspaper itself is worth reading.

[ficbot]

Well, the Globe is...the Globe My dad used to tell an old joke about how the three Toronto dailies would have reported the sinking of the Titanic. The Sun: Captain has sex with passenger as ship sinks. The Star: Star reporter saves drowning puppy off sinking ship. The Globe: Record financial losses as most expensive ship sips; thousands die too...

[bZkindle]

Originally Posted by bashfulbanshee

To be honest, I'm not very sympathetic towards them either. As a compulsive reader and a Canadian, Chapters just doesn't provide a whole lot of value to me. The local store has a pretty limited selection, but it has a sprawling size. 50% of the space is dedicated to junk bargain books (e.g. another book about Princess D.) or toys/housewares. Also, everything is cheaper on Amazon.

The overall combo of (1) limited selection (2) not fun to browse in (for me), (3) and relatively more expensive than other options makes it a no go for me. So instead I have Amazon, specialty indie book stores, and used book stores. There's a nicer couple of stores in downtown Vancouver, but I never buy from them either when the used bookstore with a crazy SF selection is just across the street

I'm with you there. It's the McDonald's of bookstores. Nothing I have any interest in.

Originally Posted by SensualPoet

Actually, Indigo is much better liked than you'd ever suspect from the lunatic ravings of many posters of the Globe and Mail comments section. You'll also notice multiple postings by the same folks frothing at the mouth about partisan (usually ultra-right wing) politics that has nothing to do with the issue at hand and rarely reflects anything in the article.

This same pointless poison is targeted at any Canadian big business and the arts community at large with utterly numbing consistency within the narrow-minded universe of Globe and Mail commenters. (There are some comments worth reading that actually stick intelligently to a given issue, but you do have to wade through a lot of creepy stuff.) The trade-off is the newspaper itself is worth reading.

They seem like pretty reasonable comments to me.