I had not been in Barnes & Noble since… hmm… a really damn long time. Probably not in the last 10 years. But I found a gift card with $30.00 on it, and I knew there was one in Evansville (seems like a weird place for this chain to survive, but okay…).
It was weird going in there, since it looks exactly as it did in the 1990s. The exact same pictures of Kurt Vonnegut, Alice Walker, and other writers on the wall, the exact same furnishings. Everything. How can a business not change its look at all in 25 years or more?!
But what really flummoxed me was the huge fucking wall of magazines at the back of the store. Again, just like the 1990s. Who buys this shit these days?! I thought magazines weren’t supposed to be doing well!
I mean, are these publications as “real” as they were in the 1990s? I get what’s happened in supermarkets. You see the tabloids and fake magazines like “Jesus: An Illustrated History” (something I actually just saw). But a whole huge fucking wall of magazines?!
I don’t have any knowledge here or a strong opinion other than Barnes & Noble strikes me as really odd (the lack of change, the viability thereof?!), and the wall of magazines kinda just blows my mind. My hope is that some people here can give me the straight dope on what’s going on–thanks!
One data point: I worked for a Hearst newspaper during the time when the bottom was dropping out of newspapers. It was a paper for which they had paid top dollar, and as soon as they signed the deal it started losing money. It was the profit from the Hearst magazines that kept that paper from being sold for scrap, and to which I owe a large part of my pension. Now, this was 20 years ago and more, so the situation might have changed. But magazines seem to be a different value proposition for advertisers than newspapers – many of them are kept longer and read more thoroughly. At least that’s my surmise.
The B&N in San Bruno, California doesn’t have a wall of magazines, it has four long double-sided racks in one very prominent corner. The one in Ala Moana Center near Waikiki has a similar arrangement. The range of magazines is huge – sports, bridal, hobbies, prestigious fiction (Utne Reader, anyone?), cheap fiction (mysteries and science fiction), food, home decor, woodworking and tools, gardening, puzzles, just anything you can think of. I’m not expert in the economics of all this, but every time I go there, there are at least several people browsing the racks.
I haven’t been to a physical bookstore in years and it’s a wonder that they still survive. They used to be one of my favourite places to browse on a lazy afternoon and I imagine there are still some folks who find that enjoyable.
But with regard to magazines, if you look closely you’ll find that they’re pretty much all in specific specialty niches, often associated with hobbies like photography, boats, and cars. General-purpose magazines like LIFE disappeared a long time ago. Even apparently general magazines like the New Yorker have actually defined a niche market for themselves, in that case one that caters to excellence in writing and top-tier journalists, though there are signs that even the New Yorker is struggling – they recently dropped the Andy Borowitz column because they couldn’t afford him any more.
Yes. I was in my 20s in the 1990s, and it seemed like this great new world in which you could go to these huge stores like B&N and Best Buy and get this huge selection of everything you might want.
I’m a bit nostalgic for that feeling. I’m also glad that physical books have survived (in part, I would guess, because the value prop of Kindle and Nook has been so dogshit).
I do see that. And I can see how that can lead to survival (this is the magazine/information source for this niche) but also how it can lead to the opposite (not that many people want to buy a magazine to acquire information about this niche!).
Another wrinkle is this: if this is how information survives for various niches in 2024, what does that say about, you know, the frickin’ internet?! Whoops, we universally failed to monetize that shit, so I guess you’ll be reading about cigars and crocheting on dead tree!
Well, I agree. The Internet is just so danged full of misinformation and looalike important websites. Jammed full of stealth adds and tiny, almost invisible click buttons. Touch or click one and you’re in a rabbit hole.
If you want to go deep into a subject you’ll be staring at a blue screen for hours. And possibly come away with a headache.
I’m not in the business of needing info for anything important.
If I want to look up something about movie really quickly then Google is handy. If I wanna read a biography about the stars in that movie I want that in a book.
I love old magazines. I find them fun and interesting to read.
The amount of new mags at a book store is wishful thinking on the publishers part. IMO
ETA, the last magazine I bought was a gaming mag got the grandkids. Good grief, it was $16-17. Ridiculous.
I can confirm the B&N locations in Little Rock and North Little Rock both have those magazines in the back. One thing about those magazines, some of them are really, really niche magazines. Over the last few years I went into the B&N looking for a Warhammer 40k magazine they carried that came with some Necron miniatures. I know what you’re thinking and the answer is yes. I’m pretty cool.
I had read that B&N was falling on hard times but they’ve been able to turn things around the last few years. Their CEO put more power into the hands of local managers to decide what books to carry according to what sold in that market and it appears to be working.
I don’t understand this. If you follow this logic you also have to ask why the rest of the store sells physical books. Shouldn’t ebooks have totally taken over?
That argument doesn’t work. First, there’s no reason why more than one type of media shouldn’t attract users. Second, there’s no reason why advertisers shouldn’t use more than one type of media. Third, the persistence of books shows that a huge segment of the audience actually prefers print media for some of their reading.
And as, apparently, many B&N buyers, I like magazines. Nothing on the internet is a suitable replacement. We exist.
The internet has killed - or is in the process of killing - a lot of things by stealing their advertising money. Why does that mean that every piece of old media should be already dead?
I haven’t been to an American bookstore in some time, but Canadian chains seem similar.
The Canadian version makes more money selling random housewares than books. But they still have a decent book selection and most new releases. Their magazine section has not changed in decades. They sell all the popular ones still going, many niche things and quite a few one-off “theme” magazines on celebrities, trendy topics and health issues.
Because the Canadian version has Starbucks loungers, some magazines have remained reasonably popular despite PressReader and the Internet, though far from the heyday. Subscription prices are almost always cheaper, and magazine publishers tell me their money is due to advertisements so really want to inflate subscription numbers any way they can. So in some cases yearly subscriptions might only be the price of two or three magazines.
It used to be lots of places had a large selection of magazines. Now, the bookstore chains are the only place that does.
I’m gonna riff, albeit without any expertise or strong opinions:
There was the thought that they would, but I think the Kindle and Nook never really fulfilled their promise, and, moreover, people see books as 1) things they can own instead of files they borrow and 2) a break from staring at a screen.
I’ve never owned an e-reader (that name, lol) except my laptop on which I can, like anyone else, read a pdf or an online text, and I typically buy physical books (when I actually buy a book), since I might as well own something instead of nothing.
I think that’s fine. But think about what was probably going through the minds of magazine publishers in the early 2000s:
We can put all of our content online, save trees, and people will love it!
Think of the global reach–think of the advertising possibilities!
We’ll have an interactive community to whom we can advertise and market and… the sky’s the limit!
All of that turned out to be pie in the sky so that probably most of these magazines have no online presence or a very limited one; otherwise, as we all know now, people would just read online and not buy the magazine. Wah wahhh…
I’m glad stuff survives. It’s too bad that the mags couldn’t actually be part of some “wonderful online ecosystem,” but such is our world.
I looked at the magazine racks at my local supermarkets today. I don’t see hardly any monthly magazines there anymore. They are mostly full full of special edition and one off one topic issues—at least three different Taylor Swift ones, two Star Trek ones, other celebrity and musician ones.
I am surprised how fast after a celebrity’s death they will have a tribute issue out–I suspect some publishers have issues already prepared for certain celebrities.
On the other hand the check out area still has tabloids ready to sell(except more favorite --The Weekly World News which stopped publishing in 2007.)
I remember seeing one of those single-topic magazines for the Dungeons & Dragons movie and thinking “Man, I don’t know what the overlap is between people interested in a D&D movie and people who buy magazines in the supermarket checkout line but it’s gotta be razor thin…”
Good point about the decor of B&N not changing. 25 years ago there was one quite close to my house where I went all the time for a critique group, and when I drive to one today it looks exactly the same.
A lot of the magazines there (and there are fewer, but still a lot) have large illustrations that look terrible in E-readers. Ever try to look at a complex diagram in one? Total pain.
I could go on about how books are superior, but I’m old and I have a lot of books, so I won’t.
