Hacker News Reader

Comment by bruce511 | Hacker News Reader

Is it only me that finds it deeply ironic that the company credited with closing a gazillion independent booksellers and round-the-corner bookshops, is currently at the receiving end of exactly the same market forces that it espoused during their demise?

Perhaps the real question is not how to save Barnes and Noble, but rather why anyone wants to save them at all. I find it hard to see them cast as Meg Ryan opposite Amazonian Tom Hanks in the re-re-make of You've Got Mail.

B&N were once fans of market forces, and the public's insatiable hunger for lower prices at any cost. Unfortunately, their discovering that economies Of scale are only on your side until someone else comes along who does it better.

B&N are fundamentally Unsaveable. They contain neither the charm of the shop around the corner, nor the value of Amazon. I for one will shed no tears at the demise of this corporate monster.

View on HN

I agree with the sentiment, but since BN has crushed independent booksellers the problem now is that if BN closes, lots of more isolated places like suburbs and exurbs will have no good place to browse and buy books. I'm currently staying in a suburb of a major American city and BN is quite literally the only place to buy physical books for a 50 mile radius, if not more.

It's kind of a crappy situation, but it's one that we've put ourselves in. I'm not confident that we'd see a renaissance of indie booksellers should BN close.

Personally I think that with Nook, BN for various reasons bungled what could easily have been a very successful product. They might still have been able to turn it around by pressuring publishers to sell ebooks for cheaper, removing DRM, and focusing on a true ereading experience and owning a niche instead of competing with full-blown tablets.

Since they've thrown in the towel with Nook, their only hope seems to be dropping prices to give people a reason to walk in instead of going to Amazon, or to make money on ancillary physical experiences, like drinking coffee while browsing. But they already made a possibly fatal mistake in that strategy by renting out space to Starbucks instead of doing their own coffee thing.

BN closing would be a pretty big blow to books in general, regardless of Amazon's sales. While I can't pity the corporation for being affected by market forces, nor can I pity it considering what it's done to indie sellers, neither do I want to see books completely disappearing from the average American's sight.

> I'm not confident that we'd see a renaissance of indie booksellers should BN close.

Why not?

Here's a pretty standard progression:

1. there used to be a bakery a few blocks away--medium-scale, medium-convenience. Six or seven of them in your district.

2. Then a supermarket came. It was just a bit further away than the nearest bakery, but it included a bakery and a bunch of other things. The bakeries went out of business. One supermarket per district was all you needed.

3. But supermarkets aren't something you pop into for an "experience"--you don't visit one on a date. So, someone trimmed down the bakery idea to the most consumer-focused essentials, giving people only what they wanted and none of what they needed (the supermarket covers what they need, after all), and launched... a cupcake shop. Maybe just one to start. But then, suddenly, they're on every street corner.

I could see the "cupcake shop" equivalent to a bookstore: not a big pile of unsorted old tomes, but rather an exquisite presentation for a small, heavily-curated collection of books. A showroom for books, if you will. The clerk would have read everything on sale, and be able to talk at length about all of them. You'd be matched to a book in the same way an Apple Store employee guides you to a piece of consumer electronics. Etc.

This is how that "standard progression" actually happened in my town:

1. There was no bakery a few blocks away. Maybe there was in 1850, but not in my lifetime.

2. There were two grocery stores, both of which sucked. one sucked way worse than the other, though.

3. The crap grocery store went out of business.

4. Walmart opened up.

5. A coffee shop, bakery, fro-yo place, hockey arena, sports bar, hair salon, tire store, Dollar Tree, AT&T store, and J.P. Edwards mortgage lending place opened up in a cluster around the new Walmart.

You won't ever see the small bookshop version of this story because for the most part, nobody reads books.

The one thing you might see more of is Bookman's style used book shops next to the Walmart. In low reading zones they will sell other used stuff.

Not quite the same comparison. BN's (and Best Buy's, and other retailers') problem is Amazon; Amazon is a problem because those types of physical goods don't have an expiration date and they're the same regardless of which shop you buy them at, so if it's cheaper and more convenient to buy online, brick and mortar stores have zero advantage. They end up as showrooms. Even if you add "serendipitous discovery" into the mix, people will just write the name of the book down and buy it cheaper at Amazon when they get home.

A small, curated, general-purpose bookstore with a knowledgeable clerk will still be just a showroom if people can buy it cheaper on Amazon. Baked goods (and other sorts of things like that) on the other hand vary from store to store, have a built-in expiration date, and lend themselves poorly to shipping by mail.

Maybe a super-niche showroom or specialized bookstore (like antiques or first editions) might be able to turn a hair of a profit, but I suspect not enough to make it more than a labor of love for a retiree owner or some other kind of person not concerned with profit.

I think the important difference in customer experience is fresh edibles require a local real estate presence. I've already switched from the local bookstore, which was pure mass market and had no scifi or technical books, to B+N, to amazon, now if B+N closes why would I ever switch back from amazon prime to brick and mortar?

The other killer is amazon prime. I'm paying $70 or whatever it is, to get free shipping and no sales tax. Anytime I pay spend a penny at B+M even long after I saved my $70 from amazon, I'm still thinking... I fronted amazon $70 and I need to make it back on free shipping, and its cheaper online anyway, and I won't have time to read it until after two-day shipping anyway... so why go brick and mortar?

The other problem is, I'm pretty well read, interested in certain specialties, and 50% of salespeople are below the median anyway, so a local store is useless to me. I have special ordered books at local bookstores in the distant past; I believe they used USPS media mail and it took about three weeks plus two trips to the store. I already have amazon prime and it takes two days not three weeks. So I'll probably never buy a new book at a B+M book store again, at least not for myself. I don't know if they can survive off gift sales.

There are five interesting options going forward for bookstores:

1) Gift store that happens to sell books.

2) I donno what to call it, but the sales pitch would be "Don't pay for amazon shipping when we can get it next day air no extra charge". Of course the base price would be MSRP not amazon discount, to pay for the logistics.

3) "We print your book on demand in less than 15 minutes while you drink a complimentary coffee and its still hot when we put it in your hands"

4) "We only stock the (insert authority name)'s top 100 titles... but we know all about those 100 titles, and we never run out of copies". AKA the midnight harry potter store, more or less. Also hosts wild midnight release parties.

5) Dead street in a dead town with no customers but the rent is cheap and the owner sees it as a lifestyle business or bragging rights. Also a front for money laundering, seeing as its a cash business. Being a front and a laundry for regional weed distribution is how our local candle store kept in operation a couple years back.

How about the radio-station model?

6) "We don't sell books, or make money from customers. Instead, your eyeballs are the product, and we sell chain-wide coverage of recently-released titles (including a guarantee our clerks will read+familiarize themselves with your book) to publishing houses. We want people to come in and read the book for 30 minutes and be itching to buy it on Amazon by the time they leave; that's what the publisher is paying us for."

Sort of neatens up the incentive structure, doesn't it?

(This also means they don't have to have any storage; they only need two or three pristine copies of each book to put on display. And it can even work for books that are otherwise digital-only: the only physical copies are one-offs created solely for display purposes, printed by the author's marketing agency using a service like Lulu and delivered directly to each participating book-gallery. In other words, the "books" become part of the PR kit for a book launch, rather than the goods being sold.)

> Perhaps the real question is not how to save Barnes and Noble, but rather why anyone wants to save them at all.

I really enjoy stopping by once in a while and checking out what computer books are on the shelf. Sure, I can "see" them on Amazon, but with minimal effort I can flip through the pages and read bits and pieces. I am obviously guilty of going home and buying it on Amazon, because the markup is just too much to ignore. I'll miss them, but I agree that they're unsaveable in their current form.

BN is a great showroom. But agree, their assets are mainly the real estate. The inventory is just a commodity, and a depreciating one at that. On the other side of the Eq, B+N have had major impacts on the publishing side. The vaccuum that would be created there--in terms of losing the 800# gorilla on the buy side for trad. publishers-- is interesting to think about.

Perhaps it's not that the McBookstores (and K-Marts and WalMarts and Bust Buys and Circuit Cities) were the problem but symptoms of a larger problem.

Back in May, Marc Andreesen and Peter Thiel were hosted by The Economist in a panel on whether or not technology offers us a way out.

While I'm generally not predisposed to agree with Thiel (my view, substantiated by much recent research, is that Libertarianism is grossly flawed), he hit time and time again on points that I've been becoming aware of in recent months:

- That energy use and economic growth are very high correlated. And we're facing an impending shortage of cheap liquid fuels, and eventually of others (as well as environmental concerns over their continued use in any regard).

- That virtually every post-WWII recession was preceded by an oil price spike (the 2nd early 1980 recession seems to be the principle exception).

- That technology is underperforming and is delivering diminishing returns.

- That older technologies: indoor plumbing, cars, phones, trains -- were vastly more profound in their societal impacts.

- That government involvement is a mixed bag. Sometimes it detracts, but often it delivers (rural electrification & phones, highway system, Internet).

- That the tech industry's scale is much smaller than is commonly believed. As Thiel puts it: it wouldn't be able to bail out the US government or even a state, it might be able to bail out San Francisco.

- That we're developing a growing high-tech rust belt, companies such as Cisco, Intel, Oracle, IBM, and Microsoft. Possibly even Apple.

- That post-Google, there really hasn't been a major new player in the tech field (and no, Facebook doesn't count).

- That if you look at the Forbes list of wealthiest people, there are a handful in tech, but most are in highly price-inelastic sectors which do well when the economy is in decline.

- The only recent growth sectors of the economy (1990-2013) have been financial services and tech. And the financial sector looks to be hurting.

I'll toss in a phrase of Andreeson's here: software is eating everything. What finance and tech have in common is that both have been hollowing out other fields. Perhaps this has been providing for greater efficiencies in some cases, but it's also been resulting in weaker structures overall.

None of this changes the situation for B&N, but it does suggest that the company is less the author and more the player of its fate.

Did B&N really kill off a lot of bookstores? In my experience, there weren't any other bookstores in the areas where B&N opened up.

B&N was the shop around in the various suburbs I grew up in.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com