Is It Time to Say Goodbye to Barnes & Noble?

The long and short of the article is that everyone's scared of Amazon, because Amazon is actually selling what consumers want, and are leveraging their consumer power to cut out the publishers completely. This has the appearance of a big win for consumers and for writers, but the publishers worry that they can't "mold talent" any more, and have finally realized that the middleman loses when he forgets to provide what people want. It's a complete play-by-play of the Kill Hollywood models we've been talking about recently.

NYT paints the publishers as a poor industry who are getting swirlies from the school bully, so they really hope that Barnes & Noble will save them. As always with the cartels, they want to hold on to the past and their print books (even when they that put the ridiculous, onerous DRM on their e-books and people are still buying them). What they won't do is acknowledge that Amazon has changed the game on them, and fight Amazon toe-to-toe: ie. actually merge with Barnes and Noble. They want a proxy battle, and if B&N eats it, then they don't lose anything.

Personal prediction: without a merger with one or two publishing companies, B&N as we know it dies within 5 years. Renting that floor space and paying those employees is just too much overhead. The last play will be to shutter their big stores, and cut themselves right down to small boutique stores on highly foot-trafficked areas, that focus entirely on pushing Nooks and eBooks.

Of course that might hasten the demise of their brick and mortar stores or turn them into something like an Apple genius bar.

I received a BN gift card for Christmas which I used online. Now I am receiving 2-3 emails a week from BN trying to interest me in buying other books. Unlike the ones from Amazon what they're offering me is almost laughably irrelevant.

I used the same credit card with which I have bought hundreds of books from BN and either they can't match it to the email I gave them to get a hint of my interests or they don't care. So unless I receive another gift card they're not going to receive any future business from me.

In my opinion publishers both of old media such as books and modern media such as tv and films need to disappear.

Then we can get a global distribution network going that no longer tells me "this content is not available in your area".

This concept of nationalised distribution rights is of no benefit to me as a consumer.

If the publishers valued the service offered by Barnes & Noble, the obvious solution is to grant lower prices to brick-and-mortar bookstores.

According to the article, the whole industry benefits from and depends upon customers being able to physically browse shelves of real books. Perhaps the whole industry should start subsidizing physical bookstores.