Barnes and Noble's surprising turnaround | Hacker News Reader

Barnes and Noble's surprising turnaround

tedgioia.substack.com

917 pointsAlbertCory484 comments

It seems like the key insight is that bookstores are no longer places to get books.

If I want a specific book, I already know where to go: the internet. No physical store is ever going to compete on inventory ever again. Amazon will eat you alive.

I go to bookstores to discover new books, and to enjoy the feeling of being around books and the people who love them. The CEO realized this, and leaned in hard.

It's a really, really smart recognition of when passion for the product is actually a business advantage, and not just a warm fuzzy.

It's very hard to do good recommendations -- even for Amazon/Goodreads! -- without people who care about what they're recommending. Those recommendations are now a bookstore's real product.

The bookstores also still have an edge in terms of getting you a book right now.

I might want to revisit this in a year or two.

Maybe if you want the latest release of a popular author. In my experience, book inventories held by bookstores have decreased dramatically, which fits with the “carrying a curated selection” narrative. If I want anything released more than two years ago, the book store rarely has it, unless it’s a staple like 1984.

Depends on the store. I can have Amazon deliver me Egan by January 6 (9 days from now), or I can walk down to the local sci-fi store and pick one up off the shelf today. Of course, Barns and Noble don't even stock his books.

Also, if your local bookstore doesn't have something in stock, they can order it for you, which helps support them.

I'm not a prime member, but it's just before midnight Wednesday 28 December. If I order by 2am then Amazon UK says I can have Greg Egan's "Diaspora" (paperback) on Friday. None of the local bookshops open until after New Year (rural UK).

I'm rarely that desperate but Amazon delivery beats petrol costs here and can take only a day longer (assuming goods are even on the shelf locally).

I can get it from bookshop.org on Friday too, but it is £15.50, vs Amazon's £10.50.

Assuming the one you get from Amazon isn't a Chinese knockoff Google Translated into another language and back in an effort to dodge copyright claims.

I can trust my local bookstores.

I concur. Books are one of the few things I am very particular about making sure I get the real thing. I don’t trust Amazon to do this.

Books just seem like such a bad thing to counterfeit. There is a super long tail of products, they weigh a lot and are expensive to ship, and aren’t expensive or high margin to begin with.

> I can get it from bookshop.org on Friday too, but it is £15.50, vs Amazon's £10.50

France and a few other countries have the right idea here - the same book always costs the same, regardless if it's on Amazon, local bookstore, big chain store. There's a unique price set country-wide for the edition, and that's it, they have to compete on other things.

We used to have that in the UK (the "Net Book Agreement") for most of the 20th century, but it collapsed in the 1990s, I think under pressure from big chain bookshops like Dillons that wanted to be able to attract customers with discounts on books.

In the US, I think most (all?) retail price "fixing" got thrown out many decades ago. But new books mostly sold at list price pretty much until Amazon came along. There were exceptions. Some places had discounts on current hardcover bestsellers. And there was one place in Cambridge that was unusual for having pretty much across the board 15% or so discounts.

Ordering books not in stock also wasn't possible at a lot of stores and, when you could, it often took many weeks.

But costs are different, so that seemed like it would harm the ability of small businesses to compete? Wouldn't it be better to have a 'most favoured nation' deal where the cost of the book to a supplier (from the publisher) is fixed. That seems like it would create better competition? I can pay more for better service, for example.

I feel like Amazon used to be a good place for discovering new books and that they decided at some point it was more profitable to steer customers toward sponsored (if that's the word for it) items. Nowadays I look at Librarything for suggestions.

Like pretty much every big tech company they have figured out that it's more profitable to give you what you don't want. If they give you what you want right away it's less time you spend looking at ads or potentially getting exposed to new things to buy. Google search results haven't become worse on accident. Amazon and eBay are the same way, poor search results create more conversions and more time engaged. It's the digital equivalent of grocery stores putting milk on the back wall.

i understand this is a drifting a bit, but to your grocery stores with milk on the back wall comment: we did a grocery store trip yesterday (full size grocery store) and i counted 7 different places they had salsa. different types of salsa at each location. four different locations (opposite corners of the store) for different types of cheese.

it’s maddening the direction these companies are pulling us towards.

Last week I needed a copy of Atlas Obscura to gift to someone. I checked my local Barnes and Nobles website, they had a a copy on a shelf so I went and bought it.

No way I would ever risk buying such books from Amazon. I am concerned about the condition it would arrive in, scams and delays.

I bought a second book based on a librarian's recommendation. There was only 5 or 6 books of the kind I was interested in. It made choosing one easier.

Amazon is tainted brand.

What is the risk when buying a book from Amazon? It might catch fire?

There was a post here, a few weeks ago, by an author, complaining that Every. Single. Copy of his book on Amazon was a fake.

Books are ridiculously easy to counterfeit, and can bring in quite a bit of cash.

Amazon has made the conscious business decision to be a counterfeit souk. I guess they make lots of money from it, and I suspect they don’t really care about their retail brand anymore. From what I hear, it’s actually a loss leader.

i thought amazon would dominate and conquer books market but they never got beyond just super basic concept of selling a book online. Finding interesting books is awful, everything is an ad. reading on kindle is ok. i have prime and once or twice a year read a free book on it.

i assume the problem is complacency. I don’t think buying real solid books has really changed on Amazon at all in past 5 years. kindle digital reader is same as it was 5 years ago. i wonder how many people work in kindle and what they actually do.

Well, Amazon used to be ahead. I vividly remember using their "Find me this out-of-print book" service once and being very positively surprised that it actually worked. Signed up for the out-of-print book, got a message about 3 months later, and BANG, there it was, in my mailbox. That was one of the moment when I thought "well, they are really doing a great job" That has changed since, especially since the website design has been fucked up with ads everywhere.

amazon a product manager focused organization in many parts of their business. Person A comes to america to study for masters or mba. A gets hired by amazon. A is under pressure to release features to increase sales or show how their feature is attributed some top or bottom line metric increase. A fears losing job under amazon cut throat culture and will optimize for exactly that. No amazon job means bye bye visa you go home. if you have family, sell everything and move back.

so as you could guess customer benefit is not primary or even second third focus.

company leadership create culture of one incentive. workers output optimizing for that incentive.

You aren't trying to say that foreign workers are responsible for all the problems at Amazon, not the American management? Come on. I dont believe these "the management is innocent" memes.

To add to that, if I'm getting cheap knockoffs (non-books in this example), I might as well get them from Shopee/Lazada etc since they almost invariably cheaper than Amazon.

Potentially silly question, but how can a book be a fake? Do you mean someone copied the title and put their own text? If I order a book, let's say Infinite Jest, I care that the book contains the words that correspond to the novel written by David Foster Wallace. If that is the case, I got what I wanted. I don't really care who printed it or what the cover looks like.

Do you care about the quality of the typesetting? How well bound the book is? What paper was used? Etc.

No, you mean you don't care that the author gets paid.

It's not only about you.

(And I know DFW is dead, but he has an estate. And living authors have bills to pay.)

Do you care about the value of your purchase? If you spend, say, $150 on a scientific textbook, and then you cannot show it in public because you would look like a pirate, you should care.

And that is the best case of a readable, complete book. Maybe you get only the first 500 pages, or the figures are cut off, or it is a degraded scan of a printed book.

The problem is of course much worse for collectible books for which even getting an official reprint or a different edition instead of the real thing would be a problem.

Not silly, morally vacant.

Aside from the issue of the original author not receiving payment, counterfeit books can actually have textual errors as well. A few years ago when the 3rd edition of The Art Of Electronics was published, I saw quite a few warnings posted online not to buy from Amazon. These counterfeits were poorly printed and had many typographical errors, many of which made the information factually incorrect and caused that specific copy to be untrustworthy. So especially for a reference text like that, a counterfeit can actually cause harm if the information isn't correct.

Well, this illustrates the issue that many corporate entities have about open-sourcing their software code.

A book is a bunch of words, delivered to a reader via some medium. In order for a book to work, the words must all be delivered in readable format; whether printed out on a physical media, or delivered electronically, as text strings.

Because of that, copying the text is trivial. I have a scanner, under my desk, that will completely scan a book, if I unbind that book, and drop in the pages. I also have software that will OCR those scans. I have heard of OCR software that does a lot better than mine.

Writing a book is hard. I mean, really hard. I've done it. It can take months for an author to write a book that I can read in a couple of days (unless the author is Mercedes Lackey, or James Patterson).

Software is similar. Once it is written, reproducing it is trivial. After all, it's just a bunch of words. To make it even more convenient, almost all software is already rendered into electronic form.

With both of these, the only thing preventing anyone from simply copying the text, is the law, and there are lots of people (nations, even) that have absolutely no respect at all for the law. They will happily copy and reproduce the text.

It's entirely possible to have counterfeits of higher quality than the original. You could, for instance, sell a fancy, gilt-edged, leather-bound version of a book that has only been released as a mass-market paperback.

But what gives it real value, is the text.

You could steal software that drives a fairly humble Web site, and convert it to drive a megasite, or a design for a limited edition, artisanal product, and turn it into a cheap, mass-market knockoff.

In any of these cases, the originator of the text; whether an author, or a programmer, derives zero gain from it, and it can actually do damage to them, as the knockoffs could have real problems, and do brand damage, or the fake book could be published with the seal of the real publisher, and that publisher could see reputational damage, if the book contains textual errors (like lots of OCR'd books do).

It's a fairly big topic, and there are organizations that are dedicated to either freeing up artistic copyright, or overenforcing it.

The basic deal, is that, if you want art, you need to compensate the artist enough to make that art. AI might be at the point where that art could be faked, but I'm not sure if we are really there, or this is all a bunch of hype.

Fakes, bad paper quality and shipping damage (esp. for hardcover books which lose a lot of their value when damaged)

I ordered a paperback a couple years ago. Kundera, not a completely obscure book. The page on Amazon showed a Harper Perennial paperback with the squiggly line drawing cover art like I was expecting.

What I received looked like the cover head been designed in Word. Solid red, some generic oil painting print, and black text. The contents of the book was even worse. It looked like it was printed on a dot matrix or something.

Needless to say I returned it and have not bought a book from Amazon since.

I bought a $200 control theory textbook from Amazon. The cover was correct. The inside was a veterinary medicine textbook by a different publisher.

That sounds like a printers error that could happen in any store.

Pirated copies have become a thing.

Splotchy hard to read type, low quality paper and binding, poorly aligned text, rough edges from blunt cutting, weird cover possibly in a different language, and the knowledge that the authors aren't getting money from your purchase.

Agreed, at this point if I want to buy a copy of a specific book I go to the local bookseller down the way and ask them to order it for me.

I bought makeup as a present for someone and while they were appreciative of the thought and time that went into my gift, they had to ask me if I got it off Amazon because they couldn't actually use it if I did. Counterfeit makeup gives her skij condition a skin rash and she's been burned more than once on that so she has to be extra cautious.

A few days ago, someone asked on a forum suggestions for spending a large Amazon gift coupon on books and games.

I started looking for rare, expensive and/or old books that I know about, and at the first result page I realized how futile it was, between unknown quality, unknown marketplace sellers, unreliable listings, the chance of scammers, and the ridiculously inaccurate mass of irrelevant search results that drown out relevant ones.

Other people actually recommended, in harsh terms, to buy electronics etc. on Amazon and get books and games from proper sources.

It is quite obvious to the mass public, not a special insight, that Amazon doesn't love to sell stuff: not only books and media, but anything except maybe Prime subscriptions.

I don't even buy electronics from Amazon much anymore. Walmart and Bestbuy will price match, good return policy and most importantly not fear of knockoffs due to how Amazon comingles.

I use Amazon as a primary source for stuff that I know are generic, don't care about knockoffs and want variety. i.e iPad cases, simple furniture

Amazing just how far Amazon has fallen due to counterfeit products and scammy sellers.

It is unfortunate but understandable if you get scammed buying a pair of "certified" Apple earbuds or lightening cables from a Chinese seller at a price 70% less than you'd pay at Apple, Fair enough and buyer beware.

But if you can't even buy a BOOK that's sold by Amazon itself without getting scammed, then it seems we have a serious problem, and it is not surprising that Amazon stock is down over 50%.

A few years ago Austin opened up a new main public library. When it was being proposed I thought "why are we spending millions and millions on a library in the digital age?".

Boy was I wrong, and I'll happily eat crow for how wrong I was. The new library building is beautiful, super inviting and some of my favorite architecture anywhere. I love going there to work or read. They also do a great job making the building welcoming and accessible to all, while at the same time preventing it from getting trashed by the homeless (looking at you SF public library) with a simple no sleeping/no lying down rule.

Welcoming, inviting public spaces can do very well if people understand why they are desirable.

The stairs are pretty terrifying if you have a fear of heights.

They make you feel like you’re thousands of miles away just from a few short floors. Personally, upvote. (Also afraid of heights a bit)

Took my boys to ACL and had to drag my 10 year old out of that library to get to the music! It’s a terrific library and I’m not a huge fan of Austin.

Maybe yours is inviting, the one near me redid sections that used to be used by the homeless or unemployed and made them "teen spaces" and directed huge chunks of money at turning the space into a community center... in the vein of a JCC or low rent country club for the folks who went to the universities surrounding it.

(I haven't been to the SF public library in a while, but the few times I went in as a Mozilla intern the staff were so rude I ended up buying books and selling them at a used bookstore when finished rather than be treated rudely by folks who were within a year or two of me, from the same department I graduated from. Maybe there's a reason people don't respect that space, and it's not just because they're mentally ill and/or down on their luck.)

the one near me redid sections that used to be used by the homeless or unemployed and made them "teen spaces" and directed huge chunks of money at turning the space into a community center

They adapted and drew in new users. How awful.

My issue is they did this at the expense of other, more disadvantaged groups.

I myself have been coming in and out of their space trying to job hunt.

(Turns out a common trope is people don't want to socialize with someone who "lives with their parents" or is un/under employed.)

So picture you're trying to study for OSCP, and you can't find a space that's quiet. In a library.

And what you'd think would happen is someone would go "oh, you're in IT? I know someone looking for that" and solve the issue.

And then instead, they treat it like a game -- or worse, start acting purposefully othering.

That is my core complaint -- that both those spaces and those resources in the monetary sense divert disproporionately to folks who, frankly, sometimes interact in ways that make me question why they strive so hard to interact with teenagers all day.

(Also, it was often not new users -- just bigger, more elaborate programs for the same rich kids from the suburbs who used to pay for special camps and programs... but now having them held in spaces those who couldn't afford them used to do self education.)

I hope taking the time and energy to type that out helps.

Someone else commented that the library is one of the last noncommercial spaces... I honestly don't have that impression at all. I got the sense if you're not using it to do remote work, or as a community center, but to... check out materials and use them... you are unwelcome unless you're buying stuff (coffee, supplies etc) or part of one of the groups that makes substantial donations when they're not making noise.

Sounds like your library sucks

what's the problem with having a part of the library be intended for young people and students? That seems like a better use of the space than having the city turn the library into a daytime homeless shelter.

Why are homeless shelter so bad that people feel the need to spend the day at the library?

Shelter is a far higher priority than reading.

I think the main reason isn't the shelter itself, but that being around a large number of fellow homeless people is dangerous because of the rampant mental health issues, drug abuse, and violent crime.

The problem is similar to what happened when low income housing (the "projects") concentrated the poor into economic ghettos.

???

If they're "poor", don't they have to rent or buy low income housing, and so "concentrate into economic ghettos"?

There is no policy concentrating the poor with each other, any more than there is a policy that concentrates the rich with each other. The market makes available different products, and different economic market segments purchase different products. With a policy, or without a policy, the poor will live with the poor.

And form "economic ghettos".

> That seems like a better use of the space than having the city turn the library into a daytime homeless shelter.

I prefer it being a homeless shelter, its cold as hell in chicago right now. It would be nice for them to have some some space there.

Whenever there is a cold wave we all wonder whats happening to the ppl left out there. It would be nice for them to have one more option. give everyone else peace of mind, lol.

I mean... That sounds great. Our library too has activities and spaces and it's brilliant. It helps bring in next generation of readers and get everybody engaged and it's awesome :-)

It's an important Third Space, and one of the only noncommercial Third Spaces left: A Third Space is a space which isn't home or work which can be used for socialization and potentially other, more goal-directed things, like informal classes. Shopping malls and other commercial spaces can be Third Spaces, but they have a profit motive which incentivizes them to kick people out for "loitering" or otherwise using the space without paying money. Libraries, lacking that incentive, can host more relaxed gatherings without having to make people do things that can be monetized.

Many regional public libraries in Australia double as wonderful community hubs!

They have spaces for business meetings, rooms for night classes, groups to meet and so on!

They really are a wonderful mix of community services.

Plus libraries are still a great place to take young children. They often have seperate kids areas where you can spend an hour or two with toddlers.

Libraries arnt stuffy old quiet buildings anymore!

Shout out to Marrickville library in Sydney. The best community centre we could have asked for.

Our local library here in the Netherlands is like this. The local archery club practices inside a few nights a week. There is a full court gymnasium, a stage and enough space to seat a few hundred people. There is a coffee bar, pool tables, plenty of seating and even a few books! ;)

The building is open until 11pm 4 days a week, with reduced hours on Friday and Saturday; closed on Sunday. I guess it's no surprise that the website describes as more of a "Multifunctioneel Centrum" as opposed to just a library!

Missoula, Montana (the veritable Hub Of The World, I know... eat your heart out, Boston) has a Makerspace in its public library, has classes for it, and allows people to reserve time so staff can provide one-on-one time and troubleshooting. It's a perfect use of the space. It also has things like D&D guilds for teens and adults and something called the Democracy Project, which is apparently a civic engagement project for teens.

Hoping you learned that this crow applies to libraries in general and not just this one library. They are way more than just books. Some of them even rent out small appliances and tools these days, as well as hosting classes.

I record episodes for my open-source-software podcast from the recording room at my city's main branch library, sparing me the need to invest in a professional-quality mic or a soundproofed acoustically-neutral room. Shoutout to the Boston Public Library.

The MLK Library in Washington, DC, has such a room or rooms. It also has a room with 3-D printers.

(For those not living in the area, this is the largest of the Washington, DC, public libraries, downtown at 9th and G NW.)

Pre-covid (and pre-renovation) it had a laser cutter too! Hoping that comes back soon. By all accounts it was really popular and well used.

The most beautiful reading room I’ve ever been in. I wanted to go into NYC’s public library reading room, but they don’t allow visitors, which was a bummer. (Or at the very least it’s strongly discouraged unless you’re truly there doing work, rather than just wanting to sit there for a few minutes and soak it in or read a little)

Maybe I'm missing something, but isn't "reading a little" the exact purpose of a reading room?"

You’d think! Whatever the sign said (I didn’t take a photo), it was clear they were discouraging people to just step in quick to look around. Perhaps truly reading wasn’t discouraged, but compared to the lack of such a sign at Boston Public Library, it felt very different.

But the number of tourists in NYC compared to Boston is probably a big difference.

It's been a few years and, at one point, they were doing renovations but I've definitely hung out in the Rose Reading Room at the NYPL in the past. And there's nothing on the NYPL's current site to suggest it's not open for just sitting and reading.

I live in NYC and showed a visitor the NYPL in July. The public was not allowed into the Rose Reading Room...only "researchers".

Bingo, it was exactly this. I was pretty bummed, being a fan of libraries in general, a fan of Ghostbusters, and a fan of nice places to read and work.

If I’m coworking in NYC sometime, maybe I’ll ask what kind of research I must be doing to get to read there. I’m guessing with the physical books only available there?

I was able to visit the main New York Public Library reading room without issues, maybe you're thinking of the LOC reading room in DC?

Fun factoid about NYPL: it's a private nonprofit, not a municipal establishment like many other libraries.

Atlanta opened a beautiful new main public library, and they treat everyone who enters like a potential criminal. They check your bags for weapons and run metal detector wands over you. Basically the worst library experience I've ever had. Once you get in there, there are hardly even any books, and they close at 6 pm. I can see why people would prefer to chill in a Barnes and Noble.

It's because of the homeless and mentally ill problem that every big city unfortunately has now. But SF is absolutely the worst.

Libraries are one of the last bastions of being able to be somewhere legally without spending money. With the homeless crisis we shouldn't be surprised that these places are used in this way - it's 100% an expected outcome.

It's a logistics and resources problem - libraries are: shelter, safety, heating/cooling, running water, restrooms, a place to sit... Truth is we don't afford that to everyone here and a lot of people ignore the cruelty/suffering. Hell - some even justify and celebrate it.

> Libraries are one of the last bastions of being able to be somewhere legally without spending money.

What other free indoor facilities existed in the past?

Churches were and arguably are, still a big one. Granted, only one day a week but still.

I think it's fine to encourage people to spend time at the library. I know as a kid, I grew a lot as a person at our local library.

They had after school activities once a week, it was about a mile down the road, so we had to learn to be responsible walking after school. The librarians were always kind to us, even though I'm sure as teenagers we probably weren't always a carbon copy of the model, upstanding citizen.

I could spend time with my friends discussing various topics, with easy information available if we couldn't agree on the facts. Plus, I kissed my wife for the first time on the bench outside. Libraries are great :)

>Churches were and arguably are, still a big one. Granted, only one day a week but still.

You're expected to donate, you're just allowed not to.

Some churches, especially catholic ones or historic buildings, are still open all week.

Not just one day a week. A lot of churches open to homeless all during the week. It makes sense because it's a waste of resources to let a large heated building sit empty the other 6 days of the week that aren't Sunday when they can use that space to help the less fortunate.

I moved out of SF during the pandemic but before that the city had homeless and mentally ill people and there was no security check at the library, and it was full of books.

As an active library user w a 4 year old and 1 year old going to the bathroom at the sf library wasn’t a good situation- so for many folks (disabled, those w young children) the library was not available to them.

https://sfist.com/2013/08/27/were_doomed_sf_main_library_bat...

And yes, with children access to a bathroom is necessary.

Also now elsewhere and going to library is so fun. We can bike etc. they are reasonably strict though. No sex, drugs, sleeping etc

It was my experience at a bathroom on the SF main public library that led me to post my comment about it. It was beyond disgusting. There was literal shit smeared all over a stall, and bathroom had essentially been commandeered by mentally ill people living there.

I contrast that with the library in Austin. Obviously, as a free, warm, comfortable space, there are tons of homeless people there. But, unlike in SF, the Austin library doesn't let them trash the place - the homeless there are just using the library like everyone else. There is a strict no sleeping/lying rule (which I've seen enforced) which prevents anyone from basically taking over a section of the library. The bathrooms have always been immaculate whenever I've used them.

IMO the Austin library's policy toward the homeless shows how you can be respectful and welcoming to all while still requiring everyone who enters to respect the building.

Every big city? Or do you mean every big American city?

Let's split the distance. Every big city has some homeless, but no western European city has such problems with homeless people and guns to the extend to be a problem that requires screening visitors to a library, or having metal detectors, and drug and gun checks in public buildings...

I think you might be prejudiced here. Homelessness is a huge problem in other parts of the world too, especially Africa and parts of Asia.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sovereign_states_by_...

And Europe too.

The below article seems to indicate and average of around 700k in the EU.

https://www.greaterchange.co.uk/post/does-europe-have-a-home...

>they treat everyone who enters like a potential criminal. They check your bags for weapons and run metal detector wands over you. Basically the worst library experience I've ever had

I don't believe there are many other parts of the world where this happens.

Some college libraries are open to the public as well, and are often really amazing spaces. I grew up going to one with multiple levels of sub-basements, and even as a kid, I just enjoyed the sense of it. Like a secret that only I knew about, full of ancient knowledge. ...No idea if it's still open to the public or not these days, but if I ever get back there I'm going to make a point of finding out.

Libraries and librarians always seem to far ahead of things on a meta level. My town (Halifax, Nova Scotia) also built a beautiful library recently. Once of the criticisms levelled at it was that it didn't really have stacks all over the place.

It has become an incredibly valuable community hub. Books are a bit of an excuse to enjoy its architecture and function. I've been there for countless hours with my children as they have grown up.

I'm also consistently impressed by the staff. In a time when every business is complaining about staffing and using it as an excuse for bad quality and bad service, it seems that most libraries are staffed with total professionals who do their job day in and day out and do it well.

I co-founded a library technology company, and I didn’t realize this until those initial discussions with my cofounders. Librarians were so far ahead of the curve of adopting electronic delivery. They came up with a variety of technologies and standards to accomplish this when nothing else had been specified or built. It’s quite inspiring.

I even met the librarian who invented the phrase “surfing the internet” at a librarian conference. Yes, a librarian was there to coin phrases at the dawn of the web!

> I even met the librarian who invented the phrase “surfing the internet”...

A bit of internet surfing turned up her story about it: https://www.netmom.com/surfing/birth-of-a-metaphor

I'm in loose circles involving archivists in addition to librarians and can confirm that they have some of the most nuanced and insightful takes on information management: discovery, curation, search, etc., especially how these systems serve human users as interfaces to knowledge. It seems obvious to say but feels important to reiterate.

See, this is why I come to the comments. That’s incredible.

My introduction to the Internet as an immigrant back in 1996 was hugely thanks to accommodating librarians at the middle school I attended. Netscape on a 486 running Win 3.11 was not ideal, but it's also where I created my first website, a Simpsons fan site on Tripod (rip).

I just looked it up. That is indeed a beautiful library!

For those who want to look I think they're referring to https://www.google.com/search?q=Halifax+Central+Library&tbm=...

The Halifax central library really is a sight to behold. That is the sort of investment i would hope the public could rally behind because it is visible and immensely useful. Even if you don't visit the actual building, the online services provided by Canadian libraries is among the best in the world.

Many Canadian cities are upgrading their libraries and i for one am overjoyed to see that!

Public libraries are great, but let's face it: in practice they are mostly welfare for the middle-class.

> When it was being proposed I thought "why are we spending millions and millions on a library in the digital age?".

> The new library building is beautiful, super inviting and some of my favorite architecture anywhere. I love going there to work or read.

Im confused. Why did you initially oppose it? Seems like you like it because its nice but surely that wasn't your original concern.

Not the author, but it seems like they are saying that, at first glance, it seems unreasonable to spend millions of dollars on a physical structure to hold books when all of the same information is housed online and accessible digitally. But, upon further consideration, there are secondary benefits that make a library a net benefit for the community.

The Calgary public library (downtown) is like this as well: unique architecture and lots of "non-book" things. I wish they did a better job with the drug users in and around it though.

Helsinki has a nice new library https://www.oodihelsinki.fi/en/

I just visited Helsinki, and if you’re ever around there, go see oodi. It’s an amazing space. They even have a small makerspace in there with 3D printers, lasercutters,…

You ought to add it to this Makerspace directory!

https://makerspaces.make.co/

>"why are we spending millions and millions on a library in the digital age?"

Because the less well off may not have enough devices or internet access to do things digitally. It's also good if you have young kids. You can't read that book which has different textures for all the animals digitally.

> Because the less well off may not have enough devices or internet access to do things digitally.

Is that really still true? I've traveled in many poor counties where people live in shacks with no plumbing, yet still all have internet connected smartphones. Only in the most remote villages with no electricity or phone signal are people still truly disconnected.

I'd argue it's not necessarily about the devices, it's about paying to rent electronic copies of books. I'm not poor, but I find that to be a prohibitively expensive way to do any appreciable amount of reading. Especially when there is a building down the street that can get me just about any book for free.

I don't know what their data plans are like or how good their network is.

In AU, you can still get really cheap prepaid plans that don't really have a lot of data all things considered. For example, right now I can get an Amaysim SIM for $100, and you get 60GB for 365 days. https://www.amaysim.com.au/plans/long-expiry-plans/

This is roughly 165MB a day. Probably amazing compared to a poor country, but it's all relative.

In FF, incognito window, uBlock origin allowed in incognito windows: - google.com is 500kB - twitter.com is 4MB - tiktok.com is 5MB - youtube.com is 6MB - facebook.com is 300kB - Commonwealth's Netbank is 2MB

This is not even considering all the other data you need for using those websites. If your mobile phone and your mobile data is your main source of connectivity, it's really easy to blow through it all just on basic things.

The data plans in most developing countries are actually quite good.

For example, the best overall plan I've used anywhere in the world is in Thailand. You can get unlimited 10Mbit service for $5 a month. The coverage is extremely good even in the mountains or islands, latency is excellent, and I've used over 100 GB without hitting any additional throttles. And that's with AIS. There are cheaper companies and plans if you wanted.

I travel to Austin with some frequency, where is this bellwether located?

Austin Central Library https://library.austintexas.gov/central-library

> looking at you SF public library

The worst thing being that, of course, the libraries in rich neighborhoods have no homeless people and are generally nicer.

Not sure that holds. Libraries in poor, small towns don't really have issues with homeless people. It's not a poverty problem, it's an urban problem.

We should do a thread of our favourite libraries:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Library_of_Birmingham * https://www.oodihelsinki.fi/en/ * https://wellcomecollection.org/pages/Wuw19yIAAK1Z3Smm * https://www.gladstoneslibrary.org/

others?

Oxford Brookes have a pretty cool space

https://www.architectmagazine.com/project-gallery/john-henry...

Laser cutters. every library should have one. https://www.oodihelsinki.fi/en/services/urban-workshop/

Check out Nashille’s library! They even have a teen-focused makerspace, with 3D printers, a music studio, rentable Ardurino kits. Check it out - inspiring.

https://www.library.nashville.org/

PS: +1 to Austin’s library. It’s an incredible space. Grab a coffee at the cafe, and hang out on the beautiful roof terrace. Breathtaking views, and it’s a great place to meet people (and what better people to meet than library people!); PS: they are building a makerspace there too - stay tuned…

Sadly in the UK, libraries continue on a decline of being underfunded, shut half the week, and sometimes sold off (usually to housing development companies).

A few have managed to keep going (mostly due to the communities taking direct control) and they have done wonders in keep up with the times.

Just want to add some weight to how awesome Austin's library is, they rent laptops, have 3D printers, even a zine section, and an upper terrace with plants and a view etc which is the perfect place for study group sessions.

It's a great place, just wish there was free parking.

My local library is similar a new building going from a Brutalist design building (depressing) to a new all glass single floor building. With 3d printers, coffee shop, and all kinds of stuff.

The library in Linden, NJ--a working class town--is beautiful. My town is much wealthier, but our library is nowhere near as nice. I definitely appreciate that a town that probably has more challenges has such a nice piece of public infrastructure.

kids.

They are important - maybe the most important - library customers.

The latest version of "look inside" has become super stingy. The default is to show you the first twenty pages or so, then you have to use "Surprise Me", which feeds me one page at a time at some random location, most of the time in the first twenty pages I've already seen. In technical books, that's not enough to get a feel for the actual content. It used to be better, you could read several pages for each "Surprise Me".

It's really off-putting. In a bookstore, I can stand there ten minutes and make sure the book is worthwhile. Technical books are expensive.

Amazon treats me like a deadbeat, even though I buy lots of books from them.

> The default is to show you the first twenty pages or so,

For anything other than a novel, that's usually the least representative sample. That'll give you the copyright, table of contents (admittedly useful) and the Preface and the Introduction and a page with a couple of quotations on it.

Not really great to judge the quality of writing / code samples or whatever you're interested in.

I always used to use zlib for "flicking through" a book the way you would in a bookshop to see if it was worth buying it.

I really, really want to look at table of contents. That should always be available.

> It's really off-putting. In a bookstore, I can stand there ten minutes and make sure the book is worthwhile. Technical books are expensive.

We have a local chain that sells well curated used books and it's brilliant. Picked up my copy of Godel, Escher, Bach because I saw it on the shelf and flipped through and was like 'Yes, please!'

> The latest version of "look inside" has become super stingy. The default is to show you the first twenty pages or so, then you have to use "Surprise Me" [...]

Note that this is only for print editions. For Kindle editions it does not have "Surprise Me". For those "Look Inside" seems to just show you the same sample that you get if you ask it to send a sample to your Kindle.

I've found this is often completely useless for music books and math books as the sample doesn't get far enough in to actually have any music or math notation, and it is terrible handling of such notation that often makes an otherwise good Kindle book unreadable.

I once bought a Kindle edition of "Proofs from the Book" and it had been produced apparently using OCR which didn't know how to handle anything other than normal letters, digits, and common symbols. Things like integral signs, summation signs, and set relationship symbols showed up as whitespace.

Another math book I bought had many of the equations as graphics. Reading on the Kindle app on a computer or tablet was fine. The images were scaled to a reasonable size and were quite readable. On an eInk Kindle however they were not scaled. They were tiny and required more magnification than my best magnifying glass had for me to read them comfortably. I had to tap them to get a menu that would let me show the image full screen. This made reading the book incredibly tedious both from the slowness of the Kindle and only being able to see one equation at a time this way.

I still like to go in to get a book the same day if its available. I'm just impatient, lol

i always walk in to a bookstore with the plan to get one book and i'm lucky if i leave with less than 4

I don't understand how the same people who hang out around bookstores + make recommendations (which you classify as "good") aren't the same people on Goodreads writing reviews/making recommendations as users (which you recommend as bad?)

Goodreads is extremely annoying to use. It’s annoying to write interesting reviews which don’t surface compared to uninteresting reviews anyway. It’s annoying to look for books with interesting reviews and searching for anything a bit specific is completely impossible. I don’t know anyone who seriously like reading and use it.

The recommendations you would get inside a bookstore have nothing to do with this kind of experience. You are having an actual conversation about what you like and are looking for.

I tried using GoodReads and my problem was it was terrible for discovery, which is the only thing I cared about. Now it’s really just a tracker for books I read on Kindle.

Try shepherd.com, I had similar frustrations and trying to build something purely around discovery in cool and unique ways.

The incentives for the reviewers are different. On-line reviewers (often) get caught up in review-counting and status-seeking. They want to be a "Top Reviewer".

In a store the person has to go out of their way every time they recommend the same book. It's one-to-one vs. one-to-many. There's more of a chance they really do think highly of the book, maybe even years after reading it. That's valuable.

My local bookstore can generally match Amazon in terms of delivery times, including next-day, although I have to go and collect it (but they're local, so they're easy to get to). They know me now too, so I just drop them an email and they reply when it's arrived. I'm in the UK though, so I guess the smaller distances may help compared to larger countries.

Bookstore buying has one benefit in that you can verify the condition of the book. I'm really sick of getting bruised books in the mail. So, with expensive hardbacks, I've shifted to ordering through a b&m so I can be sure of getting an undamaged book.

I'm puzzled where you see that "key insight" in the linked article. I came away with the feeling that the key insight was: if you want to sell books, you must love books.

Did you use the present tense to describe the past, before James Daunt took over, perhaps? I could understand "the key insight was that bookstores were no longer places to get books," but the entire article seems to be about how B&N has become a place to get books, because the CEO loves books, and empowers local stores to also love books and therefore sell them well.

I think your comment actually highlights the key insight.

For a long time, the fact that the bookstore was the _only_ place to “get books” occluded the fact that it was the _best_ place to explore and appreciate books. Amazon stripped away the veneer by showing that, actually, bookstores weren’t so ideal for “getting books” after all (book not carried, book not in stock, can’t find the right shelf, etc). Daunt is therefore succeeding by refocusing on “loving books,” as you put it, rather than on transacting books.

You might “get books” at a bookstore, but that’s probably not why you went there in the first place.

> Daunt is therefore succeeding by refocusing on “loving books,” as you put it, rather than on transacting books.

New B&N is much more focused on transacting (whether its books or other merchandise) than at any time in its past history. That’s why it works: B&N in the past has focused more than the current B&N on speculative/aspirational attempts to build demand and novel businesses (whether its effectively selling prime space for publisher’s promotions as discussed in the article, or the attempt to build B&N’s own Nook business by large dedications of space, or B&N’s bizarre restaurant business), the current version is focused on stocking and moving what the local stores know they can move.

Maybe my reading of the article is colored by the fact that I have become a frequent shopper at B&N within the last two years, but no, I go to B&N to get books, and so do many others, as evidenced by the statement in the article that sales are rising.

I don't know that I really disagree with anything you're saying about discovery and so on, but you keep describing it as a key insight of the article which doesn't seem to talk about it even a little bit. It sounds like your key insight, maybe, although the article seems to offer counter-evidence to your claim.

Really? I think it’s in there:

> Amazon seems invincible. … If [Toys R Us] couldn’t compete with Amazon, how could B&N hope to do any better?

> Daunt started giving more power to the stores,”

for example by

> ask[ing] employees in the outlets to take every book off the shelf, and re-evaluate whether it should stay.

I suppose I drew from this that those local employees were producing a better atmosphere for book-browsers than publishers’ marketing budgets had, and took that as evidence of this “discovery” strategy. Does that strike you as a stretch?

The “get books” wording may have been more confusing than clever. For my part, I hoped to convey that I (maybe you too?) go to B&N to browse books even when I’m not looking for anything in particular, not that I go for things other than books.

B&N is less of a place to get books than it was previously. Inventories are smaller.

But it's more of a place to discover books. That's what the CEO did.

This is exactly my thought process as I read the title. It was fairly obvious that Barnes & Noble pivoted their business model (starting about a decade and a half ago). It was already happening with the Borders bankruptcy; but that solidified and accelerated the change. Now BN’s business model is more aligned with general leisure (books, board games, gadgets, coffee, etc) than a “book store”.

Up north, the Indigo bookstore chain did the exact opposite.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indigo_Books_and_Music

They are a case study in business school that selling tchotchkes and trinkets is more profitable than books. I disagree with GP's article. It is the same myth in tech that "engineers make better founders" and "companies ran by execs with engineering backgrounds are more successful". It is feel-good masturbation for professionals without objective data backing it. In this case they are running with "booklovers run better bookstores". Not necessarily generalizable to all booksellers. The pandemic has shown that cheap rates play an oversized role in picking winners and losers.

Nonetheless what TFA says is absolutely true about both his original stores, Daunt Books, and Waterstones here in the UK. Waterstones is immeasurably better under his stewardship than it was before. If he’s turned around the biggest bookshop chains in both the UK and the US, he must be doing something right.

It’s possible that there’s more than one successful business model though, right?

I think the lesson may be that B&N wanted to be a successful bookstore and they achieved that by doing a better job serving book buyers mostly by giving individual stores more autonomy. That doesn’t mean another chain couldn’t succeed by turning into a books & trinkets store with a focus on high margin trinkets.

Here's the link if you want more details

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/01/books/booksupdate/indigo-...

I can see where you're coming from, there are multiple angles. B&N is setting themselves up as a bookstore for book lovers, and Inigo is setting themselves up as a book store for culture lovers.

Many paths to the same destination.

Bookstores never really were the place to get specific books. Yes, you could, but in essence you'd just place a remote order.

Bookstores always were places to make discoveries, to learn, to have people recommend books for you. My first bookstore experiences go back to the late 70s, and the ones that stick in my mind as memorable? Two stores that had fiercely opinionated voracious readers as employees, who both knew books and their customers. (I could literally go there, as a kid, and ask "what book do I want to get my dad for Christmas", and they'd inevitably make fabulous recommendations that I wasn't old enough yet to figure out by myself)

This extends beyond bookstores - all stores are ultimately in the business of caring about customers and being deeply knowledgable about what they sell. The rest is logistics.

And, historically, those remote orders were sort of an exception process whereby your order would often not get sent to the bookstore until whenever they next got a delivery from whoever the publisher was.

Huh. Now I wonder if that system is regionally different. My experience was back in Germany, and delivery times were (unless it was a rare book) pretty predictably about a week.

Still miss that store :)

I'm talking about the 1980s or so--so a long time ago. There were some big city bookstores that would have a special customer service desk but my recollection from rarely using was that it would take a while. In general, I remember special orders for books not in the store as not really being a customary thing generally. (And for out of print books being pretty much on you to look through individual stores.)

80s as well. But then, I was but a wee lass, and maybe my choices were easily available, just not in store.

Still, now I'm deeply interested in reading an account of how different book selling systems in the 80s worked. (Yes, I'm avoiding other tasks, why do you ask? ;)

Definitely. For a long while (pre-covid), bookstores where my favorite place to hang out, drink a coffee, and browse! There's still something wonderful about having a physical book in your hands.

I actually really enjoyed the Amazon Books stores when they first opened; they were full of books, and not customized recommendations to me but actually the top rated and top-selling books across US Amazon shoppers.

But I feel like they succumbed to the same problem B&N did here, for different reasons -- they became full of kitchen gadgets and devices, because people were buying more things and less books on Amazon itself, and the stores started to mirror that.

> It's very hard to do good recommendations -- even for Amazon/Goodreads! -- without people who care about what they're recommending.

But is that a property of the recommendations or of the circumstances under which they are received?

It's possible that the quality of a recommendation generated by an AI based on psychological profiles is superior, so that if it was followed, the book would be enjoyed. But it's not being followed, because it appears too unlikely and the reader doesn't trust the AI.

If that's true, the competitive advantage of the physical interaction would not actually be the recommendations themselves, but the atmosphere it creates which makes readers susceptible to listening to them.

That is not how AI works and that is not what it is designed to do. AI doesn't understand you, nor does it care to - it just puts you into a bucket and recommends a set of products people in that bucket are statistically more likely to buy and keep buying, regardless of their quality. It's only if you land in a bucket with people who only buy good stuff that you get recommended good stuff. If you even get clipped by an edge of one of the ginormous junk buckets - it's over - junk central for you.

Now, some people, maybe most even, will try and do the same to you. But not all, and store owner can optimize for those who won't.

I mostly agree, but for me Goodreads has given some good suggestions over the years as well.

But one thing especially is the “friend activity”. There are some friends that I have connected with whom have a similar reading preference to me. Discovering what they are reading / have read and rated has influenced my buying decisions quite often. When I lived near those friends, we would talk about the books as we had more contact, but since moving halfway across the world that does not happen as often. Goodreads is great for that (imo).

I am trying to make a pure book discovery site at Shepherd.com if you are interested. I'd love some feedback.

> If I want a specific book, I already know where to go: the internet.

That cannibalizes the bookstore you like to visit.

The bookstore I like to visit doesn't sell the books I want to read.

They can do the old-fashioned thing: order them for you. It may cost a bit more, but it's like in-store delivery (which is fine, if you're not too remote). It's too little, too late for B&N for this, but it can help smaller bookshops. And you'll get to know the personnel or the owner a bit better when you do.

In my experience, more often than not, Amazon ships books with very poor protection, and they arrive a little bent or creased in places. They never used to do this, but now it’s terrible. For that reason, alone, I like to buy books at actual stores.

> It seems like the key insight is that bookstores are no longer places to get books.

FWIW, this was considered common sense when I was in library school 20 years ago: that is to say, it was presented to us as a fact rather than a question. I don't think this was a unique or novel insight by B&N, rather a question of execution in the transformation of an already large company and, I suppose, the financial discipline to survive the competition.

Agreed: it's not the concept alone, but the execution. BN, Borders, BAM!, and others all tried the same strategy.

Borders is already out of business, and BAM! looks like it's on its way (it's no longer public so financials are difficult to know, but part time employees report that they get more or fewer hours based on how many gift cards they sell, which indicates cash flow problems).

BN is the only one doing well, and it's my opinion that this is due to being a comfortable place to buy and read books. By contrast, book selection at BAM! is atrocious, and the cafes all seem cold, uninviting, and surrounded by gimmicks and toys.

I shop at Barnes and Noble a lot, and I even subscribe to their membership program (for an annual fee I get 10% off purchases in-store and free shipping online). i dislike the way physical books take up so much space in my apartment but at the same time I can't in good faith buy e-books when they're covered in draconian DRM. I also can't get over the incident from the early 10s when Amazon deleted 1984 off of their customers' kindles.

My apartment is running out of space for all these books, and maybe the solution to this is that I need to borrow from the library more often instead of buying my own books. I really wish I could have an e-reader, but again, I don't want to spend money on things that will lock me into a single vendor indefinitely and might just arbitrarily go away.

I learned my lesson in the early-00s when online music purchases were DRM'd and I lost a lot of my collection due to Yahoo music shutting down. I also remember one of the problems being that purchases made in one store would not be compatible with a competitor's MP3 player, which locked you into a single vendor. Couldn't switch to iPod because it didn't work with the DRM that was designed for my Dell DJ (which was a POS that broke all the time but I had to stick with it because of my existing music collection).

I'd hate to have that same problem but with books instead of music.

I strip the DRM off of books the moment I buy them. Check that this is possible for you too, and you'll end up with a collection of DRM-free epub files that you can back up as you like.

I assume this violates the EULA of most retailers and subjects your account to possible deletion. Not saying that it's likely, but DRM restrictions seem like a matter of principle to some people. Even if you can strip the DRM you still don't legally own the product.

who cares, they can't take it from you

In this scenario I think the biggest issue with losing an account is the ability to aquire future purchases. But like I said, it's more a matter of principle for some. You own a book, you don't own a digital copy of a book.

This is the direction NFYs should have gone (could still go).

It would be great to be able to resell digital purchases, but that’s only on the consumer’s interest, so will never happen without an act of ${rule_making_body}.

This fundamentally does not work, because being able to copy is such an essential feature of electronic information. Think about it - you can never really "lose access" to information in the computer world unless you purposefully delete it completely, which cannot be realistically ensured.

I understand what's you're saying, that any digital scarcity is by design and therefore artificial.

But damn I wish my Steam library had a resale value.

As more games become unavailable for purchase (e.g., the recent nonsense Epic pulled with old Unreal games), it will.

If they sell you the digital copy, you own it.

If it says "license" on the button rather than buy then find another store...

This is not legal advice and is my own personal opinion.

On a related note, there ought to be a law that forbids the use of "BUY", "GET", or "PURCHASE" for things you would not in fact own. Instead, they should say "SUBSCRIBE" or "LICENSE".

I would also accept “RENT” or Long Term Rental

Those should be for licenses with an end date. "Subscribe" and "license" don't really imply there being a definite end date to your access, but nevertheless informs you that your access is contingent upon the continued existence of the business in question, unlike things you "buy".

To what bodies have you proposed such a law? I'm in total agreement with you.

First, fuck those retailers for putting such conditions on things you bought to own. They're yours, so who cares.

Second, strip the DRM using Calibre, and store the books off any cloud-based platform and on your own drives, as you always should in any case given the proclivity of many content companies to just flagrantly bullshit their way into excusing themselves when they frequently steal back their customers access to stuff they ostensibly own.

Once a piece of digital content is actually yours, in your own device drives, it's only then really yours.

Keep the on-device cloud-based versions around if you like the user interface of your platform or reader, but your own digital copies elsewhere. The retailer doesn't even need to know (though I personally wouldn't give a tin shit if they did anyhow).

>"They're yours..."

Yes and no. There's an important distinction between _having_ something and _owning_ something. You can have possession of figures carved from contraband elephant ivory. But if anyone who was inclined to care about such things decided to take action, a court could compel you to destroy it. Same thing with any illegal item.

But these are all "ifs and buts." Hence why it's a matter of principle and not practice. At the end of the day, most people are fine with "buying" a book that they don't own as evidenced by the sales.

Now you're just engaging in silly semantics. Yes, in all practical sense, you absolutely do own the DRM-free books you've stripped of their rent-seeking garbage. You could even take that to court and quite heavily argue that because you bought them as claimed property, they're yours. You might not win, but a case could be made and in any case, you could move digital copies anywhere you want. The ones doing wrong here are the companies that try to impose DRM on things people are buying under a notion of ownership, That these also randomly erase or reclaim things they claim to have sold only makes the wrong worse.

>At the end of the day, most people are fine with "buying" a book that they don't own as evidenced by the sales.

most people are under the impression that they own the things they've paid for, and the inevitable rug pulls always take them by surprise.

rejecting the bullshit rules of rent-seeking parasites would be a more worthy principle to pursuit.

Nobody can compel you to destroy a DRM-free digital copy AND enforce this. It is impossible.

If it's not enforced or not enforceable, there is no "compel".

How do you know a book in a shop wasn't printed by a rogue party? Maybe the "bookshop" had a EULA saying you don't own the book?

Buying a DRM book and stripping the DRM doesn't deny the seller, nor author, anything they previously had. It just lets you do what you paid for.

Just send them your own EULA at "purchase" if you think that unilateral terms no one reads should be binding on the other party.

This is not legal advice and is my own personal opinion.

> Just send them your own EULA at "purchase" if you think that unilateral terms no one reads should be binding on the other party.

I've heard, explicitly from lawyers, that sending an automated process (like a website) amendments to their EULA won't hold up at all in court. It's clear that the EULA is take it or leave it, and throwing changes at something that you know will ignore them doesn't accomplish anything.

It'd be nice if we could do it, but it doesn't fit into the reality of law.

It is also clear that few people read EULAs, so the courts should declare them invalid and apply the basic copyright law.

The difference between that and sending your "modifications" back is that you have an explicit, intentional choice to make: accept the EULA or don't use the site.

I think that the walls of text do need to be reigned in in acceptance of the fact that it's absurd to hire a lawyer to review all of those contracts, but I also somewhat sympathize with courts' opinions of "So you think you could just use the product and the contract doesn't apply to you because you didn't want to... Read?"

Most of those EULAs are saying what should be common sense. The law should just give me those rights, but because copyright hasn't caught up to the digital age and software we need something that allows me to copy into computer memory.

Anything that isn't 'common sense' needs to be a contract that a lawyer reviews for me

EULAs aren't worth the pixels they are printed on. All EULAs can be ignored until there is an established precedent ruled on by courts.

Except that, once there is an established precedent, it's too late to decide that you'd better not ignore it.

It's extremely unlikely that there will be any suit based on the mere act of making your own copy. All prior cases deal with distribution.

There already has been. The relevant case law is LLC v ReDigi:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capitol_Records,_LLC_v._ReDigi....

> On March 30, 2013, Judge Richard J. Sullivan ruled in favor of Capitol Records, explaining that the transfer of digital data from one storage medium to another constituted a violation of copyright, because the copy was ultimately an unauthorized reproduction, and therefore outside of the protection of the first-sale doctrine

>claimed copyright infringement against ReDigi, a service that allows resale of digital music tracks originally purchased from the iTunes Store

AKA distribution. Without distribution, the owner cannot claim damages. So making your own copy for your own use does not fall under this.

Yeah. That’s the reason for DJs there is a license for “working copy” (bastard SIAE), especially if you’re downloading digitally and copying it to usb disk. If you are playing vinyl, they can suck my tonearm!

You need to proactively write your congressman (or local country equivalent) to make personal copies of media legal. Ideally make region locking illegal, and a dozen other things I can't remember off hand, but we have all been subject too at times.

Some have been found to be valid: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/End-user_license_agreement#Enf...

Yes, but the concern is not a legal one, it is a practical one.

"You have been found in violation of our EULA and we have therefore permanently deleted your account. Please check our support page at <404> for more information." - Any Service, to Any User.

Now what, for Any User? Hope you're famous enough to raise a stink on Twitter to get your account back? Pay $1B in legal costs to sue them?

And if they ask about it, you simply lie, but they'll never ask. I get your theoretical concern, but I don't understand what practical the concern is, because there doesn't seem to be one. They can't peer into your hard drive or running processes, and they aren't going to track down the accounts of random internet commenters.

I am not sure how they’d know what you do to a file once you copy it to your PC, which is allowed.

While many on HN use Linux most of the world doesn't.

And while iOS, MacOS, Windows, Android are not known to deliver exact details of everything you do it is known they send back some "telemetry".

Given the way the world is going, your comment - while true now - may not be valid in 10 or 20 years.

It would certainly be a departure from now if they started sharing that data with third parties.

There are tradeoffs to cowardice, yeah.

So just buy a Kobo device without any account whatsoever and upload DRM-free epubs to it.

And how, pray tell, are they going to find out that you stripped the DRM from the books if you don't distribute them, without violating multiple privacy laws and perhaps even more?

They can't.

This is very little effort to do and yet at some point I stopped bothering or caring.

With Calibre it's basically set it and forget it, as the DeDRM plugin (when installed) will strip DRM on import.

Yeah, it is, but I rarely find the time to plug my Kindle into the PC. Of the many things I need to get done it just doesn’t seem that important worrying about the remote chance that an ebook I’ve read might be removed from my account.

I do this as well - they should be unencumbered to begin with. Fortunately the most popular format is trivial to remove the DRM.

I don’t think Amazon’s KFX DRM has been fully broken yet. It’s at the cat-and-mouse stage. The DeDRM tools work for some books some days, and then Amazon tweaks something and it’s broken again. To me, it feels like the beginning of the end of easily cracked DRM.

There are KFX workarounds, like getting Amazon to provide the book in the older format, but then you lose all the features only present in the KFX format.

Or were you talking about epub? I used to buy epubs from the Google store but I only bought titles that weren’t DRMed. Are epubs from Google or Apple or Kobo easily cracked?

Epubs from most suppliers use Adobe’s solution. Which has been cracked for years.

I had to look it up. It looks like Google uses Adobe’s DRM, but Apple does not. They use their own DRM called FairPlay and it has not been cracked.

where do you buy them?

I believe pretty much all epub DRM can be cracked nowadays.

This is absolutely one of those cases where (assuming you don't redistribute the drm-stripped epub) there is a complete ethical justification but a failed business justification, and yet...

... also, I think this is why Jobs didn't bother protecting music with DRM (except for identification of the purchasing account).

Great points.

Books or music as a service, when you think you've bought them, is terrible.

Sell or donate books, too! Just because you bought something that lasts for ages, doesn’t mean that’s where you get the value.

I organize by age (using a ring buffer method) and have an honest “am I going to read this again?” review of my oldest shelf every few months or so.

For me it's not only "Am I going to read this again", but rather "Do I want to have this available for my children to read"? That makes the pool of books significantly larger.

I use "Will I consume (again) or recommend?" and apply it to most media I have.

https://github.com/noDRM/DeDRM_tools

The city I live in’s library has a pretty extensive ebook selection that way you don’t have to buy an ebook you can just borrow it from your local library for free. And then there is always the internet archive/open library route too

>I really wish I could have an e-reader, but again, I don't want to spend money on things that will lock me into a single vendor indefinitely and might just arbitrarily go away.

https://github.com/joeycastillo/The-Open-Book

This may be up your alley.

For a more realistic option, buy a Kobo ereader and install KOReader on it, never connecting it to internet or registering an account.

I've had Kobos since abandoning the Kindle many years ago. I run two accounts with them.

One is on the device, has never purchased any books, and is a placeholder for easy software updates etc (I quite like their UI).

The other has all my purchases, but is never put on the reader. Instead I download, then use Calibre to create an open copy (for personal use only) and move it to the reader via USB sync.

It usually takes about 30 seconds to do for a book, and the result is a legally-obtained curated collection. And every book is tagged with where it came from (its legal provenance) for my own peace of mind.

My main motivation however is actually the metadata. Publishers/authors haven't got a clue when it comes to title, author, series, genre, covers etc., so all my books are now standardised and categorised and each has a cover of exactly the same size and aspect ratio. Maybe I'm an obsessive, but if you do it as and when you buy a book then it really does take a minute or two at the most. And the result is quite satisfying and, more importantly, as future-proofed as I can reasonably get whilst also being a very easy library to navigate.

> legally-obtained curated collection

In the US and many other Western countries (mostly forced by the US), circumventing or otherwise removing DRM is illegal in and of itself, even for personal use.

I like Kobo's devices for the most part, but I've only ever used KOReader on them. Kobo software seems to contain telemetry. As a side note, you can circumvent the registration requirement after wiping the reader by inserting an entry to a sqlite3 db, thus allowing your reader to be unaccounted for by Kobo or Google Analytics.

It does contain telemetry, as you say. But with a throwaway account on the device, and no payment method or other details on it, I don't really care. Plus unless I'm doing an update check (about once a year) it's always offline. I recognise it's probably still gathered info and is sending it in a bulk catch-up, but again I don't really care.

For the registration requirement you're right, but as I'm not replacing their software then by the simple expedient of a dummy account I don't need to do anything to the device, even the DB entry, and personally I'd rather not bother. Nice to know, though, thanks.

that looks like a lot of fun, i love tinkering around with electronics. i might actually try to put one of those together.

Are you really going to read your books more than once?

My wife and I are ruthless about not collecting stuff

To each their own, but many people read their books many times over in a life. It can be extremely enjoyable, comforting in bad moments, and bring forth new, fresh views on one's own thoughts and the text they're reading.

If you have a good library system, it can be pretty easy to have limitless access without amassing a collection. Obviously there are some books that won’t be available, but my wife and son read hundreds of novels a year (combined) they almost universally come from the library.

Plus, increasing library circulation often increases funding, making it a virtuous cycle.

It also sponsors the development of ever more restrictive DRM schemes, which you might want to consider. Your money is always voting for a future, and I'd rather not help create a world encumbered by DRM.

So do you think the money is segmented when you buy physical book from B&N?

I'm like you. But boy would the world be boring if everyone was like us.

I have reread my top 200 books I like more than once. I owned well into the 2000s of books. Most bought second hand. Most gone, but not the 200. As life ebbed and flowed books got boxed and unboxed. Glee ensues when a favorite shows up again.

I have a relatively good memory so I remember many details of a story. In spite of that, the flow of rereading a good story is a pleasure.

We listen to music over and over why not reread.

I pretty much re-read at least two or three books a year. I do sell books if I don't like them or feel neutral about them, but nowhere near ruthless. I still have a decently-sized collection.

A big reason to keep a book is to lend it to someone else.

Depends on what type of book. I don't usually re-read novels and you're probably right that there's no point in worrying about jeff bezos taking them away, but most of my books are either textbooks which I keep around as a reference, or comics which don't take nearly as much time to re-read as a novel would.

I tend to like authors whose books are worth re-reading. There aren't that many either.

You should also look into using an Ereader with your library. Many libraries can lend out ebooks. No idea how it actually works (I assume there's DRM on the lent books, but who cares, there's no pretension that you're the owner anyway) but it's definitely an option to consider.

The issue with this is you are still running vendor controlled spyware on a device you own to access the DRM'd books. They have a direct interest to spy on you to ensure the terms of service are not being violated. It is better to simply download already DRM-free books from libgen or something, or if that's not an option use the library to borrow physical books.

The EBooks systems most libraries use is run by Overdrive, which manages the library’s digital collection, the loan periods, the accounts, etc. they do a pretty good job, and their phone apps (Libby) is quite good.

My only real complaint about Overdrive is the premise that a copy of a book can be lent out x times. It’s a concept pushed by the publisher trying to create scarcity where none exists. Overdrive can’t do anything but capitulate. I suppose I’m also bothered by the “x copies available” concept.

> My apartment is running out of space for all these books, and maybe the solution to this

is obviously to get a bigger apartment.

im saving up to hopefully own a house someday, but buying a bigger apartment isn't as easy as it might have been 20 years ago. Boomers have rigged the real-estate market to protect their "investment" by severely constricting housing supply, and this has created pressure across the entire housing market, even for renters. This is the biggest apartment I can afford.

As someone who owns a house (after a long time of having much less space), I can state that you'll never get enough space.. not if you wish to stay married, at least. I just don't have the space for all my books, in this relatively large house. Other things constantly compete for the space. I've had to throw away a lot of books. They're hard to even give for free to used book shops, they get so many books from people like me.

In other words - I wish for unlimited storage. A house, unfortunately, isn't even close. There was a book I read, once, which had a house much larger on the inside than on the outside..

I use a Kindle for a lot of books, one reason is that it's so much easier when traveling. Another reason is that my vision isn't as good as it used to, years before I got the Kindle I changed from paperbacks to the larger variants simply to get the larger font. The Kindle lets me adjust the font to something I can read comfortably in every condition. A physical book is still better in many respects though. It looks much better, it's easier to skip forth and back, and if the book contains maps or drawings (fantasy or tech books), a physical book is tons better.

> There was a book I read, once, which had a house much larger on the inside than on the outside..

House of Leaves was such an experience to read. I really liked how they had a unique take on the medium and act of reading.

Many libraries accept book donations. That way your book will be reused, possibly also providing the library with a little bit of extra funding.

To my surprise my local library doesn't accept book donations. They have to get them through their own buying program. Which is unfortunate, my wife wanted to donate Japanese books because they have so few of them, she even bought extras for that purpose, but they can't take them.

It's worth considering just sneaking them onto their shelves.

Sometimes they get 'adopted', and if they don't then often whoever tries to check them out (which is presumably someone who wants to read them) is allowed to just take them as they are non-stock. And at the worst, the librarians will find another home for them (they are not usually destroyed; sometimes they join the book sale which benefits the library anyway).

In the past, there were used bookstores everywhere that you could sell your books to. I don’t know of any used bookstores any more except one that is really far from where I live

I think used bookstores failed because they didn’t curate their selections enough. You can’t go into one expecting to find a specific book — you go there to discover new books. When the shelves are packed with books nobody wants, it removes the reason to go there

I'm not sure how sustainable they are, but there are a couple of used bookstores near me. I think they engage in heavy curation, though -- they'll pay for your books (or even do consignment for rare/expensive ones), but only if they think they're likely to sell.

There’s still at least Half Price Books which seems to be doing fine. They usually have a impressive selection at least in old sci-fi that I sometimes go hunting for

I used to practically live at the Half-Price Books stores in my area, but for the last couple of years I've been a member at Barnes & Noble too. The thing that made the membership an easy decision for me was the manga section, but I've bought other books there, too, and did a good chunk of my Christmas shopping there this month.

"I also can't get over the incident from the early 10s when Amazon deleted 1984 off of their customers' kindles." - what an ironic book for this to happen to

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=710506

The story is that publishing on a Kindle has the publisher give Amazon the right to sub-license copies that are "indefinitely" licensed to the purchaser; this is in contrast to iTunes where it really feels like they're giving you a "forever" license to something, since I haven't been able to find a story about movies outright disappearing from libraries (besides via changing countries which is an iTunes quirk).

I know it's not quite the same thing, but the Bruce Willis vs Apple disagreement over whether he has the rights to pass his music collection down to his heirs makes it clear that whilst the licence 'feels' more permanent with iTunes than with Amazon, the lifetime/ownership of the rights is about the same.

I'm with you regarding the DRM. So what I do instead is download the e book from z lib and also buy the book if I like it to support the author. So a win-win for the author as well as for me.

Have you considered trading books with other avid readers? That freezes the need to buy new books and opens up a whole new catalog for yourself.

I just give the books away once the shelves are getting filled. No point using them as dust collectors.

I have a handful of books that have moved with me but 99% I read once and never touch again. I also just donate most away when I run out of space

Buy an e-reader which doesn't require an account, like some Kobo devices (I'm most familiar with the Kobo Aura ONE which is an older device but there must be others). Then buy some books in epub format and strip their DRM, or if that's impossible, buy a copy and then pirate an epub. Then just upload those sweet DRM-free epubs to the device and enjoy your ownership.

My policy is to pay a premium for non-DRM ebooks -- supply some incentive for publishers to offer that. (Rampant piracy is what got us into the DRM nightmare in the first place.)

I recently got a new ereader (Pocketbook InkPad Lite) that's working well for this: https://www.neilvandyke.org/ebooks/

ebooks.com looks great, I didn't know about this! I would gladly pay a premium for non-DRM versions of all books I buy and I'll be using this as a source in the future.

However, I'm very militant against DRM, so in situations where I'm unable to acquire a DRM-free book, I will de-DRM or pirate it.

Is epub DRM standardized? Can I buy books from Apple or Google and read them on a Kobo?

I love books but reading a paper book is a no go nowadays. So what I do if I can't get a book I want in digital format that use one of those paper cutter guillotine like tools to get rid of the book's spine (yeah I know it's sacrilege) or press down the pages with a tool so it's almost flat. Then photo each page with a cheap dslr on a stand, ocr them, and voilá I have my own ebook in whatever format I want. I can make highlights, take notes etc. The process can be accelerated with two dslrs and aligning the pages in a diy wood stand.

Also there are book scanners out there, but don't know the price on these.

If you're actually paying for the books, de-DRM them. But pay for them.

I personally read on a Barnes & Noble Nook, my fourth e-ink reader. I absolutely love it, I would go so far as to say that the current generation has a _better_ reading experience than dead trees. But I use Calibre and remove the DRM, for the same reasons that you state. I view the books not as entertainment but rather as culture. Culture worth preserving.

Since I was moving between cities and countries, i started to give away books that i’ve read as a present to my friends. Only fictions though, that I usually never read them again. It’s also nice way to have someone to discuss and talk about them.

Donate books to the library. How many of them do you read more than once? Just send them on to someone else.

I hope that this will be used in the future as an example of why MBAs don't always make good CEOs. You may be the best person in the world when it comes to managing a company, but if you're not knowledgeable and passionate about the product you're making and/or selling then you're going to not do very well. Off the top of my head I can think of 2 more examples: Apple before and after Steve Jobs returned and AMD before and after Lisa Su was appointed CEO.

I see it all the time in computer science. People become programmers because the pay is good. But without a love for the craft, they end up either hating life or being mediocre or both. It really does help to love what you do.

Not love, but have natural inclination towards it. That drives a sense of wonder to learn more.

Love comes and goes. Wonder is forever.

Some of that liking what you do can also be attributed to chance in the career path one stumbles upon. I’ve had programming gigs that I loved and gigs that turned out, after slowly boiling like a frog in a pan, were disfunctional and skill eroding.

I saw this at uni (2002), a lot of people studying there said it was for the job/salary and they didn't know much about it before starting.

I started being a hobbyist programmer in 1986. By the time I graduated college in 1996, I had programmed in four different assembly languages.

The last line of code I wrote “for fun” was in 1996. The number of things I’ve done as hobbies since then is a mile long.

Our field rewards mediocrity though, so it's fine. A mediocre programmer at an enterprise company can make a comfortable middle class salary.

That's a good thing though, right?

It's good until that mediocre dude makes a bunch of mediocre JavaScript-based crap. And then I have to either import 9000 libraries or rewrite everything from scratch every time I do anything

Yes. More professions should be like that.

But it is rare enough that it is worth pointing.

I once interviewed at a company for a job that was pretty much a dream job - very niche passion. Everyone there was very into that niche.

Except for the CEO, who prided himself on not knowing anything about the field. He saw not knowing the niche as a perk; he'd focus on the "business side" only, leaving the rest to everyone else.

Got the offer, turned it down because of that.

Idk, I can see that as being healthy (in the abstract; you were there in person so I'll bet you had a much higher signal than I do as an internet commenter.) I've definitely seen non-profits be sunk in by groupthink when being too close to a problem. Sometimes an outside perspective is what you need to reframe your approach, as long as it's tempered by lots of insider expertise.

It sounds like this particular individual was not just an outsider, but also did their best to remain completely ignorant. That’s not promising.

I can see that as a good thing too. CEO is not a know-it-all, not a micro-manager, see's his job as an enabler instead of dictator, values the people lower on the ladder.

May be. Or they just look at every initiatives from a pure bottom line perspective and have no way of taking guts decision based on what they think might bring the industry forward.

I think such a CEO can be excellent.

The problem with the GP’s description is that the CEO took pride in not knowing the business. A good enabler type CEO who is an outsider to the business would certainly make an effort to build expertise and even passion about the business.

Well, yes. But it depends. I worked for a company which had to go through a re-organization, and in that period we got a new CEO who didn't know anything about the tech, unlike everybody else. But he was great at turning companies around to become profitable, he had done that many times before. So what he did was leaving all technical, marketing, and product decisions to the next level while he worked on getting external funding for as much as possible of our product research and development. He even took on himself to take care of necessary work in people's gardens if that meant they could do some particularly important work on a Saturday, if something critical came up. And finally, his salary was quite a bit less than mine - he said "You're the people doing the work. I don't need that much." When the ship was turned around to get profitable he left for the next company and did something similar.

He sounds like a pretty cool person! Any chance he exists on social media somewhere, or has a blog? I'm sure he has a ton of fascinating stories...

It was a long time ago by now, so he passed some years ago. All of us from the old company came to his funeral, he wasn't easily forgotten.

> passionate about the product you're making and/or selling then you're going to not do very well

100% agreed. Not that it isn't possible, but I'd like to start with a product person because a product person will fight for what matters to the customer and I'd prefer to be in that camp.

Satya Nadella after Balmer would be another example. Balmer did great things for MSFT stock ticker, but so much of the 90's love was lost. Satya has a massive uphill battle but with Github, VSCode and other efforts - I do believe he sincerely cares.

I did a little looking up about Ballmer after reading a book that disparaged his tenure as CEO in examples. He was at MS from 1980. I don't believe for a moment that he didn't care about the company. It was a changing time for Microsoft, mistakes were surely made, but he also laid some seeds for future growth areas like Azure.

This is like the political narrative, economy was doing badly under party X, starts doing well under Y so Y must be better. No, there were cycles and much of what happens under Y was started by X, and/or both had a lot less control than people think.

We've all seen videos of Ballmer, he was obviously a very passionate leader. Gates, Ballmer, Nadella, they're all business people and probably as evil as the other, just so happens that it is now more of a business imperative for Nadella to be seen as a good player in tech.

Reading Nadella's book is something I think everybody in this industry should do. You understand the impact his son Zain had on him and consequentially the reason why Microsoft is pushing in some of the areas it has been since he took over - accessibility being first and foremost.

> Microsoft is pushing in some of the areas it has been since he took over - accessibility being first and foremost

That's interesting to hear.

My eyes are getting older and I find the accessibility facilities in Windows 11 (and Mint as it happens) far more helpful than those on my M1 Air (little things like the ability to scale far more of the textual aspects of the OS in Windows).

Balmer cared but he didn't care about the end user in the way that we how Jobs and Nadella do as we're talking.

Balmer made office the massive cash cow it is today through amazing licensing - again great stuff for $msft, but there was no product through his tenure that people were like yea, Microsoft! The iphone was dismissed and the windows phone was too late and couldn't play catch up.

Today people are starting to care about Microsoft again. Definitely not 90s love but man I love VSCode. I really do.

Microsoft has gutted quality and support so bad.

Whatever Ballmer's faults, lack of passion wasn't one of them, and he was a founding member of MSFT (probably the first founder after Gates, going back to their salad days as roommates at Harvard), not a parachuted-in hedge-fund MBA. And who can forget "Developers, developers, developers!"?

Both Barnes and Noble and Waterstones are owned by the same hedge fund (Elliot Management).

Looks like the hedge fund installed the new ceo when they purchased Barnes and Noble.

That hedge fund is probably filled with MBAs.

https://www.elliottmgmt.com/who-we-are/

There's one MBA on their management committee. Heavily outnumbered by JDs.

Appreciate the fact check, although I also doubt JD's have a better reputation than MBA's when it comes to running an aspirational business :)

It's almost as if people that take a study program aren't all the same.

The person who founded Elliott Management (Paul Eliott Singer) is far from a saint, but he has been astonishingly accurate during his career. According to Wikipedia (I did a big deep dive into this hedge fund and person after reading the submitted article), he warned about CDOs in 2006. The hedge fund also exited its holdings in Twitter in June 2022, right before the Musk-pocalypse.

I'm kind of astounded the article didn't talk about Paul Singer at all. It seems like a massive oversight to not dig into the money behind Barnes and Noble.

Then you have Peloton... passion project of John Foley (who was president of e-commerce at Barnes and Nobles) that was practically driven into the ground by the same exact mentality.

Foley was passionate to the moon and back about the product, but didn't have the business chops to follow.

Had Peloton been driven by MBAs when they went public, they never in a million years would they have taken on the types of inane liabilities that Foley and co did because they were more product driven than business driven.

Things like their massive factory build outs/buy outs and slow burn perfectionist approaches to product development would likely have been thrown out the door in exchange for slapping their label on existing hardware and shoving as many experiences down as many channels as possible.

And sure that'd leave them being called sell-outs by their original fans, but ironically that's where they're now being forced to exist since those fans were a great Kickstarter target market, but a completely inadequate target market at that scale.

Couldn't they simply try to be profitable without scaling (and its issues) to the masses? Or it's VC pressure? (Honest question, I don't know much about peloton in general)

The original kickstarter wasn't near enough for their initial goals without VC money (they raised 300k, which was only about 1,000 a backer)

And yes, in such a capital heavy field like fitness hardware, there would have been massive VC pressure.

The only way to drive that would have been to essentially show "they scale like software, not hardware". So sell investors on rapidly increasing revenue while sweeping the massive (even by tech standards) burn rate under the rug as temporary.

I hope in a few years we'll be able to add Pat Gelsinger and Intel to that list.

Interesting insight and speculation from the comment section of the article:

>Jane Friedman

>Speaking as a publishing industry reporter & observer, I couldn't agree more with your assessment of James Daunt's leadership and business strategy. Unfortunately, the picture isn't quite as bright for B&N as those numbers would have you believe. B&N stores were once quite large (e.g., 25,000 square feet); the new stores opening are less than half that in some cases. And they're largely re-opening stores that closed during the pandemic.

>It's also concerning that during a record two years for book sales (the pandemic was great for book sales of all kinds), Barnes & Noble didn't see the same percentage increase, indicating they've lost market share. Some industry insiders believe the current private equity owner is trying to position the company favorably for sale.

So what if the stores are smaller? In retail it's sales per sq. foot that counts.

A Barnes & Noble near my parents moved from their original space at one end of the mall to the other end. This new space is smaller than their original space by about half or two thirds. While they have fewer materials on the shelves (and fewer shelves), it seems more lively than the original spot did, probably because there's fewer space for the number of people who go there. I bet that the company would see that as a fair tradeoff.

Yeah probably most books sold are the best sellers not the extensive sections for less well selling stuff. Paring down is not a bad idea, and if you need references a library is a good place

No financials in the article. None available of course because it’s private. My guess is it’s loss making and debt just got a whole lot more expensive. If I was the owner I’d be looking to unload B&N fast and focus on my investments with strong cash flow and solid business models.

Moving to smaller stores in the pandemic hardly counts as a bad thing. Restructuring your leases to reduce your rent is a great idea. It gives you room to stop chasing short term revenue such as publisher deals.

Also, a loss of market share in a growing economy is also not a bad thing as long as it’s accompanied by increased profitability. What this means is that B&N has basically maintained their revenues, while significantly reducing their costs, which as the clear market leader in the space sets them up very well to pursue a more considered growth strategy based on the current environment as opposed to the pre-Amazon environment, which is what their original stores were based on.

Also, those larger stores didn’t mean much in terms of B&N as a bookseller because they were largely filled with their coffee shops and selling toys and Knick knacks.

No idea about the market share, but downsizing shops seems like a wise move.

Rent and/or property taxes and maintenance are massive overheads. Considering that bookshops are no longer trying to have every possible book someone could want in direct inventory, big shops aren't needed for any but the flagship stores.

There's a new Barnes and Noble nearby me (just opened last year) and it is like no other B&N I've seen. It's honestly a direct carbon copy of Amazon's physical book store. All of the shelves have books with the covers out (just like Amazon's store pioneered), not tightly packed spine to spine. This means the selection is much, much, much smaller. It's more like an airport book store and just has a handful of the best sellers (despite being a huge physical footprint of a store). Games, toys, and a huge coffee shop take up most of the space. You would never go here with a specific book in mind to find, unless it was a massive bestseller. It's interesting and I'm curious to see how it does, but it's definitely not a general bookstore anymore.

Usually stores with constrained inventory by design are a sign that the company is on the upswing because they are aggressively controlling inventory.

When you see a store bulk up with crap stuffed everywhere, it’s often tied to loading up on debt and sometimes bankruptcy risk.

IMO, Barnes and Noble sees an opportunity with the struggles of Amazon in retail and the decline of Starbucks. Starbucks used to pride itself as a “third place”… now the drive through is the priority, the seating has been reduced, and the management seems more interested in fighting labor than having happy hospitality employees.

People who read tend to have money. It seems like a winning combination to have people with money hanging out in your retail establishment. Plus they can riff off of Target’s super successful pickup model that is every mom’s favorite thing ever.

> All of the shelves have books with the covers out (just like Amazon's store pioneered)

This makes me think you did not enter a bookstore before you checked out Amazon's version. Many do exactly this for the big, recognizable hits they expect to sell more of.

Also it is a symptom of JIT logistics and inventory minimization, not really a UX concern.

> This makes me think you did not enter a bookstore before you checked out Amazon's version. Many do exactly this for the big, recognizable hits they expect to sell more of.

Yeah, I worked at a chain bookstore years before Amazon ever opened a physical store and the entire bestsellers display was done covers out, as were all the endcaps. Within the aisles, we organized books so that some of the books on every shelf would be cover out, which sometimes optimizes for space, and makes for a more aesthetically pleasing shelf layout and allows for the more prominent display of popular titles and eye-catching covers.

Setting up shelves this way was part of the training and a constant practice, adjusting the display of stock throughout the day as items are purchased, removed, and returned. The entire store got a once over every night at closing.

I really enjoyed how this article was written.

I'm going to classify this as a "just do a good job." We people like to understand the world with stories. Plot points. Twists. Heroes, antiheroes, antagonists... That's a bias.

All of the failed B&N strategies were snappy headlines... good stories: Online sales, digital sales & ereader, bookstore cafes, restaurant business...

These are all strategies you can put on a slide and sell to a board or executive team. An investment blogger can summarize them in a tweet. People can easily form opinions about them. You either think it's a good idea, or a bad one... and expect success or failure to follow smoothly from the goodness of the decision.

IRL though, execution matters. Almost every war ever fought was determined in battlefields, not palaces. That's true for Russia in Ukraine, the US in Afghanistan... and we'll shortly forget this lesson about both. From the outside, it's always easier to credit political-level decisions and forget about execution. I think this is a major recurring fallacy. Real outcomes are not deterministic. They're usually determined by execution.

Ted Gioia does a great job of creating a narrative frame here. But, it sounds like successes actually came from sub-narrative decisions. How purchasing is managed. Pricing & promotion policies. Responsibility splits between HQ & stores. These are all mundane, "housekeeping" issues... execution details.

Strategic decisions obviously matter. They're also interesting, especially to low engagement outsiders... including shareholders. They do not matter nearly as much as tactics. Tactics > Strategy, in life as in chess. This is the kind of thing that gets lost in 2nd hand accounts.

So, as someone who regularly visits B&N stores, this…creates a false narrative around the turnaround. Obviously, it has turned around, and is great. But it pretends that a sacrifice of floor space to non-book uses was part of the decline and the turnaround has involved recentering on books and particularly on a focus on intellectual stimulation, and the first is pretty clearly not true, and the second seems likely to be only in a very particular sense that diverges from what I think the average person reading the article would think.

On the first point, floor space devoted to books compared to the past at the same stores has continued to decline, with, in one case, the entire space formerly devoted to non-book items now devoted just to games and toys, and spaces that were, before the pandemic, devoted to books now devoted DVDs, vinyl records, and other legacy media.

On the second, the two sections of books that have not lost space seem to be (1) the bargain book section (which is also largely merchandised to show the whole fronts of books rather than spines like the rest of the store, so it is the least titles per unit of shelf space) and the self-help section; the rest of the sections have been compressed as the non-book areas have spread. If we define “intellectual stimulation” in terms of engaging a recurring customer base, I suppose that meets the description; but I don’t think it’s what people would normally read the description as implying.

I do think that the article, amidst the noise, identifies the key factor: giving stores control over stocking books that appeal to their customer base rather than relying on a mix of promotional agreements with publishers and HQ buyer selections. This leads to a selection more tailored to the local market, and more conservatively chosen – not in the political sense, but in the sense of what will sell vs. what publishers hope to make sell by placement.

> This leads to a selection more tailored to the local market, and more conservatively chosen – not in the political sense, but in the sense of what will sell vs. what publishers hope to make sell by placement.

I know what you’re trying to say here - that local booksellers will play it more safe than publishers who might support a new author for example - but I think this is a mistaken perspective.

First of all we are likely to see lots of small scale experiments where local booksellers will try different books based on their own instincts. That’s controlled risk taking and is likely to be less conservative than a global publisher.

Then they will be closer to their actual readers and so will have a better understanding of what new books / authors will work for their actual customers.

Finally this favours quality over other factors. If a local bookseller recommends a book they are putting their own credibility - and financial performance - on the line. They want readers to come back to their store rather than just sell that book.

I wish there was a book store with a great and relatively up to date technical book section. I would spend a lot of time there.

I’m not even talking up to date with the latest ChatGPT hotness, but any serious programming books written in the last 7 years - especially timeless classics that matter regardless of the technology. Rather that the same Sam’s Learn C++ book that’s been gathering dust for 20 years.

I suspect there actually is a market there, but the problem is you need a very particular book store manager that can curate this well. I guess it would have to be a labor of love, as financially the people who would do this well are busy making much more money as developers.

B&N used to have this. It was also one of the most shoplifted sections people would steal from. The books were expensive and certain ones could always be easily flipped online.

I had no idea technical books were the target to shoplifters. I imagine it wasn’t techies stealing these but other opportunists.

I never minded buying IT books even when I wasn’t in the best financial situation. 40-50 bucks for a good book could bring almost limitless rewards. One thing though, I needed to browse and skim through the book to decide whether it was a purchase or not. Most books I bought like that were thoroughly studied. I can’t say the same thing about books I bought online though.

This has been highly dependent on the particular B&N, in my experience. One in Raleigh (may have technically been Cary, NC, this was 15 years or so ago) had Knuth's TAOCP on the shelves, never seen that anywhere else. Certainly not in towns with less technical inclination (a town I lived in in GA for a decade, for instance, had a miserable technical section) where the technical book section was dominated by Windows and MS Office how-tos.

University bookstores have (or had?) plenty of this. Like UW's bookstore or the engineering bookstore for Stanford. Haven't been to one of those for a long time, however.

By "the engineering bookstore for Stanford," do you mean their visitor bookstore, the one that has a cafe and sells branded campus gear like hoodies, mugs, and pennants? Yeah, it has a TAoCP box set on the shelf, but their tech shelf is otherwise pretty small, and far smaller than their entrepreneurship and business shelves, or even the "psychology and self-help" shelf.

No. The one that used to be next to DEC SRC near the Caltrain station…but that was 1999 or so. It was just a bookstore for the engineering school, so no hoodies or stuff, or books unrelated to engineering.

Given that the only parts of the Stanford campus that are near Caltrain today are some patient facilities and the arboretum, I suspect that this is something that has not existed in decades.

> The books were expensive and certain ones could always be easily flipped online.

This finished the destruction of the technical books sections of Half Price Books.

The first half of the destruction was online shopping. No longer could you find an entire technical library hitting the store because someone just died and their family dumped everything to Half Price. The most valuable books got skimmed off immediately and never made it to the shelves anymore.

However, for a while the "standard" kind of technical books still hit the shelves so you could snag them at decent prices. However, shoplifting became sufficiently rampant that Half Price seems to have even removed those. Now, you can only get those books online, and the only books remaining on the shelves have the quality that results from them having effectively have no resale value at all.

There was a whole chain of them: Computer Literacy. Killed by the Web, I guess.

Removing these books was what Daunt did at Waterstones.

“Daunt also removed legal textbooks, technical guides, reference books from the shelves. In return, he stocked more books that customers were delighted to discover which led to an increase in sales.” [0]

If there is “a market there”, it’s probably as a specialised store.

[0] https://startupmarketer.co/how-a-physical-bookseller-turned-...

A micro library at a maker space might be a better option.

I'm working on opening a book store: online only, print books only (no eBooks), highly opinionated and curated inventory, mostly books published before 1980 (with exceptions), no current bestsellers, doubling down on store design (mostly text with cover images hidden by default), speed and ease of use, how recommendations (not reviews) are displayed, etc.

The catalog is still coming together, but "serious programming books" is a key offering.

That sounds pretty cool. Not sure it sounds very profitable, but I hope it is because it sounds well suited to my tastes. Have you considered curating for physical book quality? The emergence of the e-book has caused me to pay more attention to the book as an actual object. If I'm going to have an actual book in my house, it should be durable and pleasant to handle. A nicely bound book with good print quality affords a pleasure beyond just the content.

Yeah, but I'm going to start small, see where it goes. And yes, very much focused on the quality of the book—typesetting, binding, overall feel. Oftentimes I'll order a paperback from Barnes & Noble and (to me) it's not readable due to poor printing or just an insanely small font size. Over the years I've collected a lot of unique letterpress editions of short stories, poems, works of nonfiction, etc. and would like to add some of these prints to the catalog, as long as they're still available from the press.

Where at?

> online only

oh dang.

Pour one out for Powell's technical bookstore in Portland. I was sad when it closed in 2010.

Thats where I got my copy of Code published by Microsoft

A new edition came out recently, in case you haven't seen it.

Oh man, this is what I first thought of when the question was raised. I was lucky to get there in 2008, I guess.

Sad is an understatement. I found such obscure titles there that even my university library didn't have a copy. It was like going to a major research library where you could buy the books. I never went there without a few hundred in my wallet just in case.

More like 2014, I must have been there right before it closed

Seattle has one https://www.adasbooks.com/content/store

Ada’s is small but magical. It’s nowhere near Powell’s technical books at its prime, but walking into the backroom at Ada’s really brings me back to browsing technical books 20 years ago.

I’ve never failed to go back there and find something fascinating I have never heard of before. Though most of the people studying/working in that room will always wonder what kind of person sincerely gets excited about this stuff.

B&N is pretty up to date in the computer section actually. For example, I normally see No Starch Press "The Rust Programming Language (2nd edition)" and "Rust for Rustaceans" and lots of their python books and some that I was also interested in like "The Art of 64-bit Assembly" and "Understanding the Machine." They also have a lot of security books proportion-wise. But the section is smaller than I like and leans toward the mainstream of course.

What I find however, is nothing like it used to be, at least in certain locations. I'm sure it varies by location but I miss the one closest to Redmond (Microsoft) which (at least when I went there around 2000) had multiple full rows of computer books including highly technical ones that you don't see anymore in person.

Uh, where are you seeing "Rust for Rustaceans" and "The Art of 64-Bit Assembly" at a Barnes & Noble? I just wandered into a B&N store in Cupertino after shopping at a Guitar Center, and their technology section was basically a shelf of Excel guides and XYZ for Dummies.

I'm actually surprired there's a narrative of "B&N is coming back." Their stores, what few times I've had the misfortune of wandering inside in recent years, are still excruciatingly beige, useless, and (in the words of the TLA) "crucifyingly boring."

This is the flip side of the current CEO's focus on letting local stores make their own decisions. When the decisions align with your interests (like my store's excellent manga focus), it's great! When they don't, like your example of the Cupertino store, it's pretty terrible.

Where is your store located?

Stonebriar Mall in Frisco, Texas.

Both major B&N stores in Austin have had both of those titles within the last month. They all tend to be relatively overstocked on No Starch Press stuff (not to say they don't produce good books), but understocked on basically anything else.

The best I've encountered is Foyles in London, though even that had cut back substantially prior to the pandemic when I was last there.

Yeah Foyles was excellent. Spent many an hour there, can’t say I have been in the last 15 years though.

Foyles is also part of James Daunt's Waterstones these days, having been sold in 2018.

You'll find a lot of that in sufficiently large college towns. Berkeley, for example, is fantastic for bookstores: bleeding-edge technical sections (trying to compete with the campus bookstore for required reading), several overtly leftist bookstores for when you're really looking for a niche translation of some niche 19th century philosopher's magnum opus, and all that.

Mine literally has a book on programming iOS 5. I think I read parts of that copy when iOS 5 came out 11 years ago.

Borders was always so much better for technical books :(

In San Jose, there used to be a bookstore named Computer Literacy. If it had to do with computers, technology, start-ups, and other related topics, this place had the books. It was truly a wonderland for book-loving geeks and nerds. I was in there a couple of times per month. Unfortunately, they charged list prices on everything, and they finally got eaten by Amazon, but while they were around, it was glorious.

CL opened a satellite store in Tyson's Corner VA outside DC which lasted a couple years. Between CL and Reiter's (which still exists in DC), I must have spent several thousands on full price trade, textbook, and reference books. This made sense because I could look closely at each book before buying to see if it merited the investment. I've found that buying online works only if the book is discounted significantly. Too often now I find the online blurb and user opinions lead me to buy a book that I wouldn't have if I'd held it in my hands before parting with $50 or more.

There was also a Computer Literacy in Sunnyvale, with a Togo’s right by it, and a Fry’s across the street and WeirdStuff Warehouse near that. That little cluster made a great destination for a lunch and geek stuff run.

I went there once or twice but it was a fraction of the size of the San Jose store on 1st Street. At least the Togo's was nearby ;)

In the early oughts in the Boston area, I loved going to SoftPro Books. It was also a way to socialize with techie friends. Unfortunately, the chain shut down in a few years.

I believe it was owned by an ex-Lotus employee named Rick Treitman. If someone knows him, he might have some insights into the business.

Good piece but it omits some relevant points.

- James Daunt is now CEO of both B&N and Waterstones in the UK. Waterstones is a sizeable business in its own right with over 300 stores and totally dominates high street bookselling in the UK.

- Both B&N and Waterstones are owned by Elliot Management who bought B&N after acquiring Waterstones.

- Daunt only got his chance to run Waterstones after being installed by (now sanctioned) Russian Oligarch Alexander Mamut who bought the chain for $66m. I think it's fair to say this was a significant piece of risk taking as Waterstones was, at best, weeks away from insolvency and probably would have ceased to exist in anything like its present form. Of course, at that point Daunt's model was unproven (except in his own handful of London bookstores).

Here is James Daunt in his own words (from pre B&N):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sjs2_iAomnc

I'm from Spain and there is no B&N here, but I have been surprised by the success of the bookstore sector in general.

In the 2010s, just when ebooks became popular, a lot of bookstores opened in my city and others I know, both of the large chain and small independent variety. My thought was "are they crazy or what? Physical books are obviously a declining business, most people will just read ebooks. Most of these stores are doomed to close, as bookstores will become something very niche". Boy, was I wrong... the reality, while I don't have sales figures and just speak as a layman, is that they didn't close, but rather the opposite: even more of then opened during the rest of the decade and they generally seem rather lively. Have ebooks not caught on after all, or are people reading much more so that there is market for both? I don't know.

By the way, on a more personal note, ebooks made me almost stop reading for a long time. I was an avid reader until ebook readers appeared. Then I started to read in ebook form, because physical books take a lot of space, and they already occupied a lot of room at home (and the space is not just for me, I lived with my wife, and now also my son!). With this, I dropped from reading a lot to like 4 or 5 books a year, then 2, then 1 or even 0. I made myself believe that this was due to lack of time (work, not being single anymore, etc.) which was only a half truth. The other half of the truth, as shallow as it is, is that ebooks don't get me hooked as physical books do, even if the content is the same. I'm not proud of it, it's silly because the real value of a book should be in what it says, not in the physical materials, but it's how I work. I tried to change it for some years but I failed. So I came to accept it. Now I buy physical books again and even though I don't read as much as when I was younger (work+parenting takes a huge amount of time), reading is again one of the main things I do with the free time I do have, and I at least read 1-2 books a month.

> I was an avid reader until ebook readers appeared

Same here, though possibly not for the same reasons. I go through phases of reading a couple of ebooks a week, but if I'm not careful I get reading deserts where when I look back I've spent weeks curating/buying more ebooks and never actually getting around to reading them.

I love reading, but it's a constant battle to be a reader and not just a collector of books, something I never have an issue with when it comes to my physical collection (which is large but also largely untouched due to tired, aging eyes).

I have both prime and B&N membership. Here are some of my thoughts:

1. Amazon is a terrible place to discover surprising reads. There is one day I was navigating the bookself in Technology sector, and found one book on the story of how Android is created. I didn't know this book exist, but now my interests can't be contained, and I want it NOW. The sense of discovery is awesome, and I am willing to pay for it.

2. B&N membership gives you basically a 10% discount StarBucks (unofficially, but pretty much the same), which is a sweet deal.

3. Amazon sometimes screwed up book versions. For example, I bought book 1&2 of the same series from Amazon, and book 1 arrived in UK format, while book 2 in US. This is an intolerable mistake for me as a collector. So I have to repurchase book 1 later from B&N in US format as I can no longer trust Amazon for it.

Overall, B&N now, is more of a socializing place for me than a retailer. I still use Amazon for books I can't find, but I don't mind pay a few more bucks to buy from B&N. Sometimes it is not all about money.

I whiled away so many afternoons at Barnes & Noble. We'd drive 30 minutes from our small town to the nearest big city and go sit and enjoy an afternoon reading. I would say maybe 1 out of every 3 visits would result in someone buying a book, but we never felt compelled to buy anything. For where we were in the country, the magazine selection felt incredibly cosmopolitan, and a window into the broader world.

To me, a Barnes and Noble still symbolizes the joy and worldliness of reading. Whenever I'm with family and shopping, if I'm not out to buy anything I still opt to spend some time reading in a B&N. I'm glad this chain is back on its feet and growing again. For lots of places, and lots of people, B&N is a lifeline.

I think the key insight is that a CEO with a background in the field, and who loves the field - such as James Daunt who became B&N's CEO but has a background as a bookstore owner - can do better than your average MBA.

This is perhaps the passage from the article that resonated the most with me:

> If you want to sell music, you must love those songs. If you want to succeed in journalism, you must love those newspapers. If you want to succeed in movies, you must love the cinema.

> But this kind of love is rare nowadays. I often see record labels promote new artists for all sorts of gimmicky reasons—even labels I once trusted such as Deutsche Grammophon or Concord. I’ve come to doubt whether the people in charge really love the music.

This seems like a basic thing. Something I've noticed is that people working at car dealerships mostly don't care about cars at all.

I've said this over and over (not on HN, though)... Blockbuster would have survived if they leaned into the recommendations business. People want to go somewhere to look at whatever it is they're looking at, and find something novel and interesting.

It is so much more pleasant to go somewhere, and feel like you're being served a good selection of recommendations, new and old. Even better if you can talk to someone at the store and get their feedback and ideas. But in Blockbusters' end days, all they hired were teenagers not even old enough to rent from their Mature section.

There was no way they were going to compete with digital streaming services on sheer volume. But at the time of its collapse, every time I would step inside a Blockbuster - all I would see is non-movie related stuff being peddled at me. Posters, plush, popcorn, toys, etc.

The "new releases" movies were in the back, the best quality films hard to find, jumbled in with all the rest. The rest of the store just seemed to be wasted space. I always thought if they dedicated less space to the new releases and spent more time curating valuable films from all eras, they'd make a return to form.. especially with their name.

Movie and gaming deals ruined Blockbuster. And at the end, their $15/month ala carte plan just put them in the hole. They had such a good price before.. it was something like $3/night to rent. Then they raised the price to $7/2 night. It seems about the same price but no one really wants to rent it for 2 nights and the $7 priced most of the movie-goers out of the market. Then they tried the ala carte "Silver" or "Platinum" plan or whatever it was (it was probably a regional thing).

It's the same principle here with B&N.

Recommendations is just one of the aspects. We love books as a tangible medium of knowledge, for collection, for signaling and so on.

Movies in disks, comes with friction which isn’t worth IMO.

Yes, and Blockbuster can still lean into that. Pair recommendations with books. Movies as a tangible collectible item for many people still a thing. It's still a medium of knowledge, still a collectible item, and still good for signaling.

Blockbuster was always such an unpleasant experience every time I went. They had basically zero brand loyalty to lean on.

What an excellent article.

I have lived bookshops since I was young, I always felt like I might find something amazing and secret in them. They held a kind of mystic for me (1990s).

This changed in the 2000s. I do miss the massive borders books we had. I do have to say the all the Waterstones I've been into in the last 15 years have all those toys, calenders, etc the OP doesn't like; and the bigger stores all have Costas.

I don't buy books now, I just go to the library.

I LOVE entering a Barnes and Noble and being able to walk around looking for my next book. I love the atmosphere. I love moving from one section to the next. I love seeing other people there. It's just fun to me. I'm so glad it's beating the dier expectations. Digital books are convenient but the reading experience is horrible.

Barnes and Noble locations, at least the ones near me, still sell a lot toys and games. But the curation is excellent. I got quite a few things for my kids in there this year, when I stopped by to pick up one book. I’m not surprised they are doing well.

That said, their technology could still be better. Ordering something online for local pickup works, but there’s a surprisingly long delay (sometimes days!) between placing an order and it being ready for pickup. Target is a lot faster, for example, despite having much larger stores.

They just ran a 50% off sale on boardgames (and hardcovers). The boardgame signs said something like "once it's gone, it's gone", making me wonder if they're cutting way back on boardgames.

I wouldn’t be surprised if they cut back on the shelf space for toys and games once the holiday season is over. It would fit with the idea in the article of giving the stores more flexibility in how they merchandise.

Something I took away from this is they don't discount books, they don't compete on price.

And that makes sense, anyone looking for a good price is going online, if you are in the store you are not price sensitive. And of course this means B&N is much more profitable than they would be otherwise.

Lowes is doing this too - their prices for plumbing products are insane - $12 for something that goes for $2 online, but they are betting that anyone buying in the store needs it NOW and will pay anything.

They discount selectively. Monday and Tuesday this week all hardbacks were 50% off. There are regular displays with "buy one get one 50% off". Some new books get marked down as well: I got Andrew Koppelman's "Burning Down the House" a week ago and it had a $5 off sticker. Occasionally, there are coupons for "15% off your order". And of course, members get 10% off (nearly) everything. When I've checked books on their web site, the books seem to be discounted more often than not, but usually not as much as Amazon or Walmart. But you're right that there isn't an across-the-board discount for everything in the store.

NOW and not fake too

The description of the new Barnes & Nobles doesn't match the store near me. Half of it is still a cafe which looks like the last place I'd like to enjoy a cup of coffee or glass of wine. When I walk by the cafe is always 3/4 empty. The article talks about local staff now deciding what books to select to feature prominently. When I went inside my local store 2 months ago the prominently featured books consisted of those required by our local high school curriculum. The store had very few actual books overall especially in relation to the number of puzzles, toys and tchotchkes being offered. In other words it was the complete opposite of what is described in the article. This store is located in a prominent position in the premier retail center in my immediate local area. The type of location you would think B&N would prioritize on making a showcase of their new concept.

I'm left wondering if B&N has turned itself around or is simply riding a wave of post pandemic reading which will crest leaving B&N once again over built and in trouble

Part of the challenge of this approach is that not every store will either be well run or meet aspirations of those who go to bookstores for a particular experience.

Some will do very badly! Others will be successful but unattractive. But on average the result will be better and if that ensures the survival of the chain the that's probably a good thing.

The particular store in question occupies a prime location within a prime retail destination in an affluent area. It should be a showcase location for the new strategy but isn't. If they can't get this store course corrected then it signals to me and likely others that nothing has changed with B&N overall. Enough locations like that and you doom the chain even if other locations have changed.

So you’re saying that someone at the centre should judge that this is a great store and then make sure that it is run in a certain way?

Can you see how this completely contradicts the approach - leaving aside the fact it’s a sample size of one and that none of us have access to financials etc.

The retail complex in question draws a lot of traffic from outside the area and the chain stores do in fact tend to run their locations there as model examples because they know it can drive traffic at people's home locations. B&N seems to be the exception.

In a world where everything is now digital, physical goods have a lot more appeal. That's really what it comes down to, and they leaned into that hard.

It's the same reason why vinyl is continuing to grow. People want something they can actually own. Books are not immune to this and there is something inherently more satisfying about having a bookshelf with the books you've read versus a library of ebooks.

In line with this, the owner of a book store in the Boston area told me that older folks lean towards digital books and younger folks prefer physical books. This seemed a bit counter-intuitive, given that one might have expected older people to prefer the paper books that they are used to -- as an example, an older relative of mine, an avid reader, has a Kindle but rarely uses it.

I don't recall how he explained this, but it might've been that older folks don't want to accumulate more stuff while younger people have room to grow a collection as well as the point you make about wanting to acquire non-digital goods (and, relatedly, perhaps to have experiences that take them away from their screens).

I am so hopeful to see stories like this.

Combine stores like B&N and Half-Price with alternative online resources like AbeBooks, Discogs, e-bay, etc., and you really don't need inconsistent crap like Amazon in your life anymore.

I can't be the only one who is fed up with the bait & switch experiences. Being an asshole or otherwise indifferent to the customer is eventually going to add up over time.

Also important to take into account for why this method is successful is that people write posts like this which make you really want to go check it out. Customers who are passionate about how your business is run.

Honestly, if I was more skeptical + motivated, I'd be looking into if this post was actually a paid ad because my reaction is "where is the closest Barnes and Noble?"

Ted Gioia is not a shill for B&N. He's actually more of a music writer. And other things.

Little of what is discussed here or in the article applies to my local B&N. Yes, the Nook has been de-emphasized. Yes, the shelves have spacers for cover forward presentation. The technical sections have shrunk to the point of uselessness. That includes math and science as well as computers, electronics, etc. The number of romance novels has exploded. Books are now shelved by publishing category, e.g. mass market, trade paper, hardcover, etc. Hence, an author can be scattered all over the building. Inventory tends to be more sparse than the local independent bookseller. Consequently, for finding a new author or exploring, I go to the independent. I still visit B&N regularly as I have for years. The manager, whom I’ve known for a while, assures me that things will change because sales are down, but right now they are following the corporate direction. B&N is certainly not what Borders once was. But, we’re unlikely to see that again.

I've seen the same trend at the B&Ns I frequent (Montgomeryville PA outside Philly and Northville MI outside Detroit) — in the past year or so the tech shelves have thinned out by 50%, same for the science and math, toys and games have grown by 100%, no more music, big reduction in movies, magazine offerings are fading and all the seating near them has disappeared.

I frequent B&N because I badly want a seller of new books ro survive, but I so seldom buy anything there anymore, I find I'm visiting less and less.

I went to a B&N for the first time in probably at least 5 years a few weeks ago.

The music section was outstanding; it was clearly curated by multiple music lovers and I saw stuff that I would never have guessed would be available on vinyl in a chain store.

Probably around 40% of the bookshelves were dedicated to stuff teenagers or younger would like, and they had a ton of sci-fi and fantasy (both adult and children), including a bunch of copies of a fantasy book my daughter wanted that the B&N website said was available online only.

I was impressed.

Anecdote: B&N was by far the best place to buy x-mas gifts this year, especially for kids.

I wish Amazon brought back their 4-Star physical retail stores, it was a great place to buy gifts in person. The concept was simple: everything in the store was an item that was rated at least 4.0 stars online and there was an electronic price tag that kept its price in sync with the online version.

It's hard to trust Amazon with quality anything these days. I wouldn't shop there as for I think the employees would be less than helpful or happy to be there and Id be constantly worried about counterfeits or returns.

I spent time at the Walnut Creek one -- it was a good execution of a kind of obvious idea. It was weird that they shut them down. That said -- smaller versions of the same format in airports/commute-centers would be great.

Amazon is mostly an online company, they're not great at managing storefronts. They also really over-expanded their warehouses and physical presences which hemorrhaged cash (mostly led by Dave Clark who later stepped down as retail CEO) which was quickly shut down by Jassy who is more focused on AWS/cloud than retail presence.

I asked a clerk at the Pleasant Hill store about that closure; it was due to rent increases. Figures, considering the location in downtown Walnut Creek. Sure was a lovely store, though. Fairfield and Reno still have big stores if you're ever in the area.

My upper comment was about the Amazon store they had in WC… but: B&N re-opened in Walnut Creek just below Ruth’s Chris. More like the Concord format.

Serious question: how many products on Amazon aren’t rated at least 4.0. Even the crappiest Chinese alphabet brand products are typically rated like 4.3-4.5.

I went to a Four Star store just once, to trade in a dying Kindle. The customer service was incredible, and the trade-in was actually better than promised online. I was sad to see them close.

I think that meant more when the reviews were not egregiously astroturfed like that are now.

It seemed like 90+ or more of the traffic I ever saw at the Amazon store near me was returns, including me every time I visited.

I doubt Amazon saw those as profitable, and they either didn't track well how much my purchases (and I'm assuming others) declined when it was no longer easy to deal with a person, or decided the impending labor/unionization battles would be best avoided.

Might well be profitable if it’s cheaper to ship a truck load once every couple week than dozens of individual packages every day.

If this isn't by design, it's by very happy accidental engagement with the fact that when it comes to media and related things, the time physical copies of it matter most are gifting-times. It just feels more genuinely gift-y to hand someone physical media than message them with it.

And B&N has become a media-heavy giftshop.

Ugh, while true, now I'm worried that after killing a generation of local bookstores they're gunning for my local game/hobby store.

Anecdote: B&N was by far the best place to buy x-mas gifts this year

It was also by far the best place to buy board games this year, since they had a 50% off sale Dec. 26 and 27 on all their games and many of their stores have a fair selection of titles. (Some sample prices on some hot titles: Ark Nova for $37, Ruins of Arnak and Everdell for $30/each).

From what I was told by a B&N worker, this was an extension of the 2-day post-xmas 50%-off-all-hardcovers sale that they'd started doing recently.

I spent a ton of money there yesterday exactly because of the 50% off hardcovers and board games.

I haven't shopped in one in a while but after seeing how much stuff they have that I'm interested I'll be back. They even had lego sets that were sold out elsewhere.

We’ve done almost all our Christmas shopping there for years (younger kids). Still were able to do a lot of it there this year (tween to young teen age groups).

The toys there are some of our favorites (Lego and Calico Critters) and they have a lot of fun toys you’ve never heard of but are fun for the kids to try.

Our local B&N has had a remarkable turnaround this past year or two. It was in deep decline for many years. A third of the store was given to toys, another third to movies/music, and what was left of books saw little traffic. Now, they have just finished a major remodeling and it's back to all books. The parking lot is nearly full and I have to negotiate around many browsers in the aisles.

It's been many years since I've seen a bookstore so full of books and customers (outside of Powell's in Portland). I noted two major differences from how B&N was many years ago. First, the proportion given over to fiction is much greater. Second, there is an enormous youth section, maybe a third of the store.

I vaguely recall thinking that B&N was doing better a few years before the pandemic, in the sense that despite their financials, it was feeling more appealing to shop there than it had been in like ... 2012?... and was tending to have more people in it. Maybe I'm misremembering the timeline? But I'm pretty sure it was pre-pandemic.

Regardless, can't agree more that a CEO whose interest is in something besides money-grabbing at the expense of the health of the business is actually how you make a store successful. Somewhat more cynical about the long-term health because it seems like once stores become appealing, they'll cash in on that by going back to money-grabbing, but we'll see...

I think the Barnes and Noble turn around story is interesting and deserves our attention. What annoys me is placing this against the backdrop of the pullback in share price seen by high growth tech platforms in recent months. No stock price goes only up forever. Tech stocks like Amazon have had an extremely good past 5 years. The current pullback is not indicative of some kind of "downfall". It's just market dynamics. A firm that is doing well may generate irrational exuberance and after this irrational exuberance will come a hangover. That doesn't mean the firm is no longer doing well, it was just overpriced in the short term recently.

I’m always skeptical of turnaround stories that claim to be all about the love of the product or whatever. I’m sure that works sometimes - Apple in the aughts obviously - but realistically running a public company is a more hard nosed endeavor.

You can be hard nosed as well as passionate about your product.

Waterstones in Britain are incredible. The one next to UCL campus is a gem, it doesn’t even feel like a bookstore, it feels like a library where you can buy books.

I’m not surprised that the guy who turned around Waterstones in the UK can do BN in the US.

Even the one in Blackpool is rather pleasant, which is somewhat unusual for the city as you’re probably aware. :)

Also... I really dig on Ted Gioia. Didn't know who he was 'til he was on a youtube video podcast w/ Rick Beato. His analysis is always well reasoned. I worked in the music biz for a while (yes, yes, plastic money trench, etc.) and I think he discounts the big player's motivation to avoid change in industry structure. He talks a lot about how tech will change the music biz and I think he's right, though the timeline is going to be slower than he implies (until it isn't, and then it will happen quickly.)

Ted Gioia produces some great essays. It’s hard to pinpoint the theme of his blog (something something music and media) but he routinely grabs me, even on topics I didn’t think I was interested in.

This is sooo awesome. I stopped going to BN specifically because I’d chat with employees and ask about various authors not on their shelves.

The answer was, “corporate controls everything.”

The employees did get one single end point for “staff recommendations,” but that’s it.

Everything else in BN was turning into Spencer’s Gifts. I was half expecting sex toys and supermodel posters to appear.

To hear they put the stores back into local control and that it’s been successful is one of the most hopeful signs for our collective future.

I live nearby to Arundel books in Seattle. It is my favourite store now. You go in and it's staffed by people who know and love books. I mentioned in passing I was surprised not to see any Houseman on the shelf (plenty of Auden, a decent selection Brautigan, Sexton and Plath.) I had just overlooked it. Every time I go in I see a book I want to buy (Calvino, Eco, Burroughs, etc.)

Staffed and stocked by people who like good books for people who like good books.

Leigh's Books in Sunnyvale (if you're a Bay Area person) is like this too. They were still there before the pandemic. Hope they're still there. It's staffed and stocked by people who know books. Bad Animal in Santa Cruz has an eclectic collection that stocks decent texts, but maybe not as wide a selection as Leigh's and Arundel. But if you're in Santa Cruz they're worth checking out. Go for the books, stay for the veggie foie gras.

Towards the end of Borders in both Santa Cruz and Palo Alto, it seemed there were a LOT of self-help, travel and outdated tech books. Seemed to be all stuff that people used the web to read, but the chain was going to waste shelf-space on it until someone bought it. The coffee shop in my local Borders in Santa Cruz back in the day was as good as you would find in corporate coffee. A decent cuppa joe for me and an extremely nice hot chocolate for the kiddo. But we never went there for the books. We went to Logos down the street (now sadly closed) and wandered up to Borders (also closed) for a very decent hot chocolate.

Good to see //someone// worked out a business model that worked.

Also. How did I forget to mention Santa Cruz Books. Probably don't have to mention it to Santa Cruz residents. I think they were the first place I saw where A LOT of the books on the shelf had review cards and staff recommendations. It's clear it is... say it with me... staffed and stocked by people who like good books.

Book Shop Santa Cruz is one of my favorite book stores. It has such a fun layout and feel for browsing, is usually buzzing with people, and in the rainy-months is a great place to sit and read for a few. The staff are always really kind as well!

I love this story for many reasons but the big one is the lesson about "selling out your mission." It seems naive and quaint to say "The job of a bookstore is to sell books that people want." except that is really true. We used to have a bookstore called "A Clean Well Lighted Place for Books" that had the vibe described here.

Here's the thing though, profit and loss people get made decision makers. And it is a super simple decision process "Do I take $10M from this publisher to push their book or do I try to find books people are willing to buy?" well the easy answer is take the money. But as this story points out, it is the wrong answer. Once you're taking money like this your interests are no longer aligned with your customer, they are aligned with the publishers you buy from.

That said, the store I've been to most doesn't seem to have changed its layout from selling games/puzzles + coffee bar + bookstore. (something mentioned in the article as being phased out) but perhaps that will change as they get around to it.

Now if someone would do this transformation for a grocery chain I would love to have one of those near me!

Years ago, half the floorspace was just to sell their Ereader; this Christmas, I was excited to see the whole store full of books, and also people buying books.

Im genuinely surprised they didn't lean harder into the hobby shop/coffeeshop/beer-wine angle every indepdent bookstore didnt lean into as community space. The B&N stores typically have so much space they could stock some model kits, some DND manuals and a more robust coffee shop and knock out the average understaffed and under equipped hoppy shop or independent wine bar that has books for sale.

When I was in high school (06-10) you wouldn't believe how many kids could hang out at B&N for hours and hours and just drink some coffees and look at weird books or hang out with friends. I had several friends who would go for the annual Crterion Collection 50% Sale.

> The B&N stores typically have so much space they could stock some model kits, some DND manuals and a more robust coffee

This is exactly what my local B&N does. Not yours?

I've bought five magazines at Barnes and Noble in the past two months, after not buying any magazine for probably 15 years. I don't know why but I go in, something catches my eye, and I buy it. I have no desire to subscribe, three of the magazines are focused on things I've never considered but maybe now do.

So there's that.

> he refused to discount his books, despite intense price competition in the market. If you asked him why, he had a simple answer: “I don’t think books are overpriced.”

I wonder if this was the true reason, or if he simply wanted to stop discounting, and this was the reason that was scored highest by his PR team.

One additional thing that I am now aware of because of a recent personal experience, is counterfeits. I recently received an O'Reilly book from Amazon that I am nearly certain is a fake (and sending back). If I didn't have another O'Reilly book to compare it to, it wouldn't have been so obvious.

Apparently, Amazon is doing a terrible job at counterfeit technical books across the board. eg: https://twitter.com/fchollet/status/1550932671022239745?s=20

I will now try to buy any books direct from the publisher or from a store like Barnes & Noble rather than Amazon.

This article is a good answer to "how can CEOs be worth all that money they get paid?"

It seems to provide the answer of "Clearly, not all of them are."

Nobody said "all".

You did technically use the word in your statement ("...all that money,") but you also implied that the example of James Daunt said more than "James Daunt is a good hire if you run a bookstore company," which might or might not be true.

> You did technically use the word in your statement ("...all that money,")

You know better. "money" is not "them", if you need more elucidation.

Okay, that's twice you've taken the easy response and ignored the actual meat of critique. I think that's indicator enough that you're unserious.

Your addition of "all" was the meat of your critique. It's a rhetorical device, meant to be argumentative, not substantive.

"which might or might not be true" is yet another variation of the same rhetorical argumentative trick.

If some of them are, then maybe all of them are. But whoever was in that role prior was not, or else Daunt would not have been an improvement.

So... not all CEOs are worth paying outrageous amounts for, and the world track record on making that decision is not very encouraging.

Again, nobody said "all".

What did the CEO do? He gave control to the workers. They got to choose what books go where and on what shelves. Most businesses can learn from this. Give control to the people who care. This is how most co-ops work and why they are special. Gaming world has Valve following a similar model.

The reason why CEOs have so much impact is because they are at the top of a tree and make all the important decisions. this isn't a consequence of the amazing (or terrible) nature of CEOs, it's just the outcome of the corporate structure.

With a little imagination, we can imagine other corporate structures...

It's easy to imagine other structures. Whether they'll work better or worse is something else entirely.

Business has evolved into the current structure, and since in a free market it's survival of the fittest, it appears to be optimal. After all, businesses exist to make money for their owners, not CEOs.

But what if we don't have a free market, never have, and never will have. Also most misunderstand 'survival of the fittest' which Darwin never said.

Evolution is about creatures fitting to their environment. If you have a complex environment, you have complex animals. If you have a simple environment, you have simple animals. It has nothing to do with 'robustness' or 'strength' or any notion of 'good'.

Similarly, if free markets are an optimizing system, they are a deeply flawed one. The constraint of spot trades and singular prices. And of course externalities, make them poor at optimization where it matters. So if we had free markets (we don't), what 'optimal' is very constrained and simple relative to what people need.

Barnes and Noble used to have cozy seating options, they got rid of them, probably for various reasons, probably because people were perusing books then putting them back on shelves. But they do that now in the cafe, I would often take a stack of books. I've been going to them more and more, especially since our independent non-profit bookstore has been doing some crazy things involving children and burlesque inspired traditions that aren't child appropriate but are otherwise fine in an adult context.

I've started wondering recently if we're starting to see a slow, gradual rejection of online shopping and going back to physical stores. I was in my local chain record store recently and physical albums seem to be back, especially vinyl. Even my daughter who was raised completely in the streaming-era remarked that looking through the record store was "way more fun".

Perhaps it's too late for many stores but I'd love it if we were actually on some kind of partial "rebalancing" of retail.

I'm curious, as an author as well as reader: has anyone ever done the "print on demand" thing in a bookstore? There are machines that supposedly do that. I've never seen one.

FYI, Harvard Book Store, in Cambridge, MA (not affiliated with the university), had a machine they called "Paige M. Gutenborg" towards the back for doing this, which I was going to suggest checking out if ever in the area -- it was on display -- but I just saw on their website that, after 12 years, they stopped doing print-on-demand in April 2022.

For reference, this page[0] about Paige on their website states that it was able to create "a library-quality, perfect bound, acid-free 300-page paperback book in roughly four minutes. These books are indistinguishable from paperbacks produced by major publishing houses."

[0] https://www.harvard.com/shelves/in_store_book_printing/about...

P.S. I actually just called them up to find out what happened -- I was told that a part needed to be replaced which wasn't available any more. Given that they are across the street from Harvard (though not a part of it) and down the street from MIT, one would imagine that perhaps 3D printing could've taken care of it, but for whatever reason that wasn't done.

I was told that the machine is still there, though, if one wanted to at least see it.

Man do I want to believe the lessons here. I just wonder if B&N success is also maybe due to the pandemic murdering poorly capitalized independent bookstores and they see an opportunity.

i thought independents have been successful since a rough 2020?

_If_ they survived 2020. Pandemic responses murdered small businesses.

It's very interesting that the prior B&N CEOs just didn't focus on Business 101. I mean, what were they thinking with B&N Restaurant investments? Business 101 says to focus on your Core Competencies and that's basically what the current CEO has done. When you think of a CEO you assume they know what they're doing. It's a fallacy mostly but well done to B&N for getting it right this time.

I've been a huge fan of B&N since I stepped foot in the US and was one of the first people to rush to buy the nook color. Admittedly I haven't been visiting the stores since there's none that's close by to where I live but this post was refreshing to read. And I did learn about James Daunt in the process too.

Definitely earmarking to visit a store before the end of the year to grab a couple of good books.

I've gone to Barnes & Noble 2 - 3 times a week for 10 - 15 years. I sit in the cafe with my cafe mocha and do some work, then browse books for a while. I never get tired of it. I read about their financial problems through the 20-teens and was sadly expecting that they'd go under.

When James Daunt was named CEO, the changes were immediate. The spacer boxes appeared on the shelves; as someone else mentioned, they allow books to be placed cover forward, which is better for visual appeal. The front cover is what book designers design for. It also reduces the number of books on the shelves, which helps keep inventory lean.

They rearranged the shelves on the store floor so you had fewer rows of parallel shelves like an old-school library. In my store, shelves were arranged to create a little enclaves for mystery and detective fiction and for hardback fiction. The store layout is more varied and interesting.

On several occasions, I've seen guys who were, from their conversations, some kind of "store layout consultants" talking to the managers and discussing moving stuff around and changing displays.

The folks who worked at the store were very encouraged. Many had been through the big layoff in 2018 (when a lot of full-timers were abruptly let go - see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16389342). They liked the new changes - it was clear that the company was finally being run by someone who understood books. (I read somewhere - can't find the link - that Daunt even thinks about the angle of the shelves, because he thinks a certain angle is best for visibility.)

The company seemed to be more realistic about what wasn't working. Most significantly, the Nook section near the door disappeared. Other smaller things that weren't selling (like Lamy fountain pens) also disappeared. Inventory in general is more controlled: They started turning over the magazines much faster, to the point where if I was interested in a magazine I found I couldn't wait too long.

The technical book section isn't what it used to be, but they do carry a lot of No Starch books. I'm not a programmer, but I have a few No Starch books and e-books. I like the publisher (and given the problems with their books being counterfeited on Amazon, I'd rather buy a paper version in store if I want one).

Some stuff they've done in my store doesn't make sense to me - for instance, separating fiction into hardback and paperback. The classics section has been partially separated by publisher. I don't think that's how people look for books: They ask for "Crime and Punishment", not the paperback edition of "Crime and Punishment", or the Penguin edition. People want to see all the editions of "Crime and Punishment" together so they can compare and choose. Right or wrong, at least these are changes which reflect someone thinking about books.

The pandemic closure was a setback, and a lot of people who used to work at my store didn't return to work. But the store has come back pretty well. There's nothing else like Barnes & Noble, so I hope these changes work out.

> Some stuff they've done in my store doesn't make sense to me - for instance, separating fiction into hardback and paperback.

Eh, that makes sense to me: I really don't like hardback and will never voluntarily buy one, because manipulating the covers separate from the pages distracts from reading and makes me feel like I need 3-4 hands to manage it.

> I really don't like hardback and will never voluntarily buy one

Same, though for me it's all about the space they take up. Followed closely by the cost mark-up. I'm buying the words not the form, so I want it in the most convenient (physical in this case) form possible.

I really wish there was a breakdown of how the "pay to shelf" calculation didn't pencil out. It seems almost counter intuitive that fewer books on the shelf would produce better revenues, but apparently books that are selected by the employees sell better. I wish there was a way to see that volume doesn't pay off, which seems to be Amazon's entire model. This is a great read.

> Do people really go toy shopping at a bookstore? Toys R Us also filed for bankruptcy in 2018, and if they couldn’t compete with Amazon, how could B&N hope to do any better?

Have to disagree here. Yes, I looked at the toys in the book store, precisely because Toys R' Us was gone, along with the local toy store. I ended up buying Pokémon plush toys at a video game store in the mall.

Toys r Us was going down for years before then. B&N had some bad years, but they were never as bad as Toys R Us was in 2008, and they still lasted another decade.

Love the story, can’t help but feel it is a little too early to judge a success.

I believe it though and because it is hard, it is unlikely to repeat in other industries. I love my job, but the amount of time for me personally to provide discovery is hard. Need total buy in from an organization and it seems like something on the verge of bankruptcy is the best place to see it happen.

Seems like a similar story to the Best Buy turnaround. Although I've increased my purchases from Best Buy...everytime I want a book it's not near by, there's no free shipping and it's more expensive. Whenever I want a book I always check Barnes and Noble first to keep competition alive...I guess i must not be the target audience.

Tbh this is guy must be quite an exception. He is literally doing the wrong thing, the market (really...just suppliers) have decided hype is the thing, basically sign on to promoters and publishers (in the tech space, the equivalent are advertizers) and shoe-horn feeding other suppliers every dollar you can in hope you can make it back. It's no longer actually just "sell a product," you have to join this system of apps that you can fit ads in every tiny gap on the screen you can fine, because this is profitable.

Except it really wasn't, as this story says, at least for books. People apparently just want to buy books, and if you sell them books, may be they'll buy them.

I don't know, I wish other types of companies (ahem, game companies) figure this out, you can make money without trying to be genshin impact. I'm really convinced the current tiktok/influencer/advertizer mindset that tries to ring people's brains dry really isn't that profitable in situations other than exceptions, it's essentially just groupthink and bandwagoning where people are chasing one off successes, whereas being boring (just selling a product) can be pretty profitable.

Is it possible that the pandemic made people fall back in love with non digital assets as they were already exhausted by the excess screen use? Has that possibility been ruled out clearly?

I recently visited B&N and the feeling of moving around and sitting with books after spending all week in front of screen was quite refreshing.

>He asked employees in the outlets to take every book off the shelf, and re-evaluate whether it should stay.

This reminded me of what Marie Kondo says about keeping your own personal books.

-Put every single one of your books in a pile on the floor.

-Take each book in your hand and see if it sparks joy.

-Remove the ones that don't spark joy from your home.

-Find ways to store your remaining books.

Interesting. I've never seen that spelling for tchotchke before.

Okay, I thought of B&N as a defunct random junk store. I think I'll go take a look. I wonder if these B&Ns have local identities or if somehow they have a common book load. From this article it would appear the former.

Tangential wondering: how do married people in tech industry with school-going kids, who also find the time to read non-tech books, manage to do so between raising kids, dealing with the daily grind and constant upgrading of knowledge demanded by the industry?

daily habits.

With difficulty. Can cause a great deal of stress unless you manage it.

Also getting a firm grounding in the fundamentals let’s you quickly take in new learning as mostly the new stuff is a rehash/reimplementation/pivot on old ideas.

Library's and brick and mortar mom and pop bookstores are some of the coolest places to explore. So much has yet to be digitized or summarized or even catalogued in some parts of the world.

I remember working at a Border's bookstore a long time ago, when management saw the coffee bar as a cost center that was a distraction from their real jobs.

I wrote a bunch of LOB software for B&N's CS and B2B departments early in my career. I loved working there and I'm very happy to see an article like this.

Good news. B&N is the place I first saw a copy of Ubuntu.

The B&N in Flagstaff is being turned into a Goodwill.

Getting the Riggio brothers out of the business was the big change. Those guys were pure poison. Constantly drunk in the middle of the day.

That is good to hear. I worked in their ecommerce group for a year and it was interesting. Nice people. Surviving Amazon is amazing.

Arise Virtual Solutions Bastion of slave labour practices. At Barnes and Noble near you. I'll not be giving them my money. Ever.

Can you elaborate?

My local Barnes and Noble has an absolutely massive record section. Really made it worth while to visit!

I don’t often buy books at Barnes & Noble, but it is where I buy most of my Criterions.

It's refreshing to let the product guy in charge instead of the bean counters.

i always enjoy the in person experience at B&N

they need to get a better distro -> store pipeline

and they need amazon-like lockers in their store to order online and pickup in store 24/7

i'd never use amazon again!!

Full disclosure: I'm a boomer. I was raised reading books, learned how to do research using real books, and I still vastly prefer real books to their alternatives. And not just books but magazines, as well. I'm at my local library every Saturday, returning items and browsing the stacks for new reading material (new as in I haven't read it). I usually visit B&N once a month to pick up the magazines my library doesn't have but also to browse. There are only a couple used book stores left but I will still visit them every 3 or 4 months. Before Borders blew up, I'd visit them instead of B&N because they were closer. Because my library is so awesome, I don't typically buy new books because I can get them there. Yeah, there may be a wait for popular items but they can be reserved and there are plenty more available immediately.

That's me. You do you.

my neighborhood store in the SF Bay area has a 50% hardcover sale.

the store is full of people.

people standing and reading magazines (i could hardly elbow to my aviation mag).

kids are playing.

folks sipping starbucks.

my hands hurted after checkout.

What was once old is now new.

Mechanical keyboards, anyone?

I found it interesting that one of the things he did differently was to empower the local Barnes & Noble stores to make placement/marketing/merchandising decisions themselves.

The way typical retail stores are run these days is a lot like the Fast Food model -- consistency above all else -- where the food has the same (lousy) taste no matter where it's made. Having spent a lot of time buying last minute gifts, retail, this year ... short of some stores being a mirror of others, each brand has the same products in the same places.

This works well at Walmart, Target, and other general retailers (the kind of commodity "super-store" arrangement I stopped visiting a long time ago). Those retailers have recognized I don't even want to walk into the store -- even my grocery store will bag my things and pop them in my car for me.

Barnes & Noble seems to have figured out that it's really easy to buy a book. The previous management[0] thought they employed only cashiers, re-stockers and "where can I find"ers (the latter of which were impossible to find). When financial struggles hit, the few employees who were there "because they loved books" left because their jobs were slowly turning into "warehouse fulfillment for internet orders." Our local location shut down shortly thereafter. Further proof that this new strategy works is that the huge location was replaced by a combination book, record and other media store which is run "like a record shop" and feels like a mom-and-pop despite the square footage.

This strategy works everywhere. Because I have a Microcenter location within 30 minutes of me, I buy 80% of my computer equipment retail. I wanted to physically touch the laptop I was buying so I stopped in on a Saturday. I don't ask for or want help, usually, because ... I'm a developer and I come in pretty ridiculously researched ... but that didn't stop no less than four people from asking to assist -- all while I stayed in the same section of the store. Overhearing them serve other clients, I was impressed at how well they knew their products. And if you haven't been into one of these places ... the one over here took over a six screen cinemaplex. It's massive. They have multiple models of 3D printers/filaments/accessories, multiple models of soldering irons and bench power supplies, IC components (loose LEDs/resistors/capacitors/basic motor drivers/timers), Ardinos/Pis (well...sometimes) and piles of accessories for it. Some of these things are really hard to buy confidently online or are really convenient if they can be returned/replaced with the correct part in an hour. They carry high-end, low-end and everything in-between[1]. I used to say that "I shop there first because I don't want to support their business" but that's granting myself credit I don't deserve. Frankly, the one gripe I've ever had about that place -- slow checkout[2] was remedied by common feeder and online pickup.

People tend to complain everywhere about lack of floor staff, but waiting behind three people for the "one person in the whole computer department" at Best Buy was typical of all electronics retailers 15 years ago. I worked at CompUSA (I left a couple of years after the Windows 95 launch -- before they became a general electronics retailer) for 5 years -- we were half the size. Average floor staffing was two in hardware (three, sometimes, since there'd always be a guy or two who only sold Macs), two in software/accessories, one handling both depending on customers. Microcenter had at least 4 people just in the laptop/desktop section, three in the upgrades/parts, one in mac, one in the Maker area and several in the 10-or-so-floor-to-ceiling aisles (that most electronics retailers ditched to control shrink).

Contrast that with my trip to Best Buy where three kids stood around talking to one another while I drooled over a Lenovo laptop. Had any one of them walked up to me I would have been easy to persuade into buying that day. I ended up picking it up from Microcenter (and it ended up being the best deal, too).

The takeaway, I think, is that the one thing Amazon can't give me is the intelligence/personal interaction with another human being who knows what they are selling[3] and can give me confidence that the choice I'm making is the right one. This has to be done carefully, of course. One of the advantages of buying online is the lack of pressure applied by a sales-person. The places I seek out for retail shopping are ones where the staff is knowledgeable, consultative, friendly and not pushing me to buy something right now.

[0] I've never worked for them or a competitor and it's been decades since I've touched retail, but a friend's adult child worked there just before our location shut down.

[1] My children act like we're going to the dentist when I tell them I need to make a quick stop there. There's no such thing.

[2] They still need work here. A little while back I ended up there with only one of my credit cards. The chip failed. I handed them my ID, figuring they'd run it via magnetic strip having positive proof that I'm the cardholder. A manager was brought up, and I even discovered I had my passport in my jacket pocket. It was a hard no for a sub-$100 purchase ... that kind of pissed me off ... if I hadn't had so many great past experiences, I probably would have sworn them off for good (as it was, I didn't return for several months).

[3] Hell, Amazon can't seem to give me results for what I specifically ask for. Can we please stop filling search results with answers "just because they are sort of like the thing you searched for"? It doesn't work when "OLED Laptop" returns 400 results and the first page has two which have anything OLED related in them, let alone an OLED screen. Even when you're given a filter for AMOLED or OLED, most of the OLED results are then missing. It happens with nearly every thing I search for using just Amazon's search. I find Google Image Search with `site:amazon.com` is the only way I can find things sometimes.

Sick

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