Even as the book business consolidates, the physical object displayed in an actual place will continue to be an important part of the ecosystem. “People can’t live online all the time.”īookstores offer discoverability, not just the latest Dan Brown or Carl Hiaasen book on the front table, but sometimes treasures deep in the stacks, a long tail of midlist authors and specialty books. “We need to have a diversity of distribution channels to be healthy, and Amazon may want it all, but they are smart enough to know that,” he said.
#The one minute cure barnes and noble skin
Morgan Entrekin, publisher at Grove/Atlantic, says everyone has skin in the retail game. Not long ago, I was walking by an airport bookstore and thought, “What if this was the only place to buy books?” Similar to Hollywood, only the blockbusters would get shelf space.Īfter Borders called it quits two years ago this week, Barnes & Noble became the last big chain where publishers could get the exposure for their books that allows readers to discover them, and to sell all manner of books big and small that are still part of the foundation of the industry. Having a bookstore in your neighborhood, as opposed to one that is bookmarked on your browser, is an invitation. Sales of e-books fell immediately after Borders went under, leading some to suggest that reduced opportunity to browse the physical artifact resulted in less online buying. One of the parties that might want to root for Barnes & Noble is Amazon. In the fiscal year that ended in April, the retail stores and Web site generated earnings of $374.2 million before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization, a 16 percent increase, even as sales declined almost 6 percent. As Bloomberg News pointed out on Thursday, Leonard Riggio, the 72-year-old architect of Barnes & Noble’s national buildup, is still considering buying the physical stores and taking them private, in part because the fundamentals of that business are still solid, if not spectacular. During last Christmas season, Nook sales were down 12.6 percent compared with the period a year earlier.īut the current spate of bad news may mask underlying strengths. And as consumers moved from e-readers to tablets to take advantage of multiple functions like video, the Nook ended up in a corner. At a time when legacy media companies are derided for letting the future overtake them, Barnes & Noble aggressively innovated.Īmazon, however, not only had the Kindle, but consumer relationships, inventory and technical know-how that could not be overcome. When most media companies get into the device business, what pops out is clunky and useless, but the Nook is an excellent reading device that drew critical praise and, initially, buyers. In my view, Barnes & Noble is a company that did the right thing, and got clobbered anyway. At the beginning of last week, the chief executive of Barnes & Noble left the company after a grim earnings report that highlighted a failed strategy to have the company’s Nook device compete in the crowded tablet space. Watching the readers lounge in chairs with a view of Route 3, it was hard to reconcile the pageantry of retailing with the brutal recent headlines about the book business.Īt the beginning of July, the Big Six publishers became the Big Five with the blending of Penguin and Random House.
Nearby, two apparent siblings, one sporting pink hair and the other purple, traded loud opinions over the True Crime display. For reasons I wasn’t quite clear about but nonetheless found charming, an older couple used a book on vegetarian cooking to cover up a copy of “The Art of Seduction” on the shelf. In one aisle, a father and daughter were having a spirited generational discussion over the side-by-side covers of “The Great Gatsby,” one of which bore an image of Leonardo DiCaprio.
With its high ceilings, wide aisles and a large Starbucks, it is the kind of retail outlet that gives big-box stores a good name. On Thursday night in Clifton, N.J., Barnes & Noble was a way station, a third place between work and home where people sought respite and diversion.
0 kommentar(er)
