Quick post for today. Here’s an item in today’s paper about Barnes & Noble, which makes some points similar to my discussion here on the 11th.
NYT, Elizabeth A. Harris, posted 15 April 2022, in print today: How Barnes & Noble Went From Villain to Hero, subtitled, “To independent booksellers, the enormous chain was once a threat. Now it’s vital to their survival. And it’s doing well.”
Beginning,
After years on the decline, Barnes & Noble’s sales are up, its costs are down — and the same people who for decades saw the superchain as a supervillain are celebrating its success.
In the past, the book-selling empire, with 600 outposts across all 50 states, was seen by many readers, writers and book lovers as strong-arming publishers and gobbling up independent stores in its quest for market share.
Today, virtually the entire publishing industry is rooting for Barnes & Noble — including most independent booksellers. Its unique role in the book ecosystem, where it helps readers discover new titles and publishers stay invested in physical stores, makes it an essential anchor in a world upended by online sales and a much larger player: Amazon.
It was true for at least a couple decades, beginning in the ’90s, that the small independent bookstores resented the large chain stores, beginning with Bookstar and later with Borders and Barnes & Noble, for undercutting list prices and attracting so many customers they drove the smaller shops out of business. (Thus the science fiction shops A Change of Hobbit and Dangerous Visions, as discussed earlier.) Now, to make long story short, the small shops appreciate that B&N is helping all of theme stave off Amazon.com. Enemy of my enemy..
And all the physical stores have an advantage to online bookbuying.
Buying a book you’re looking for online is easy. You search. You click. You buy. What’s lost in that process are the accidental finds, the book you pick up in a store because of its cover, a paperback you see on a stroll through the thriller section.
No one has quite figured out how to replicate that kind of incidental discovery online. It makes bookstores hugely important not only for readers but also for all but the biggest-name writers, as well as for agents and publishers of all sizes.
One key to B&N’s recent resurgence is a return to a focus on books (as opposed to games and whatnot, which I can remember filling at least a quarter of their stores not that long ago), and a shift to local control.
While orders for locations around the country used to be placed by a central office in New York, today a diminished central office places just a minimum order for new books, leaving store managers free to choose whether to bring in more copies based on local sales.
So each store has different emphases and layouts, much as the Books Inc. stores I mentioned last time do.
(There’s another story about how at one point many thought e-books would make physical books obsolete, and that hasn’t happened either.)
