Barnes & Noble (gift link to WSJ item) wants to renovate its brick and mortar locations in an Indie Bookstore motif in an effort to revive its business. The most significant changes include allowing employees to determine where books should be displayed and how, along with shifting cash registers from the front of the store to the back and other little moves.
I miss bookstores. A lot. Going to the bookstore, new and used, was a fun way to spend an afternoon or evening. But now there aren’t any book sellers within 20 miles of where I live. And I, like so many others, have adapted to reading magazines & newspapers online and books on my Kindle.
If Barnes & Noble is successful I expect that other book shops will open. I hope that happens. But I don’t know that I have optimism that the changes that Barnes & Noble is making will be attractive enough for consumers to support and sustain a bookstore revival. I think there’s a demand for it from a certain type of consumer who is, maybe, 40+ years old, but the dead-tree people are aging out. What do you think?
Maybe it could use a couple of nooks with comfy chairs? Some bookstores also occasionally host readings by popular authors. Certainly it seems wise to leave many decisions to the employees who work at that particular branch.
As for e-books, whether or not anyone is “aging out”, they should offer electronic versions of most or all of the books at a discount; why not?
“I stopped shopping at physical bookstores, but now that they have moved the cash registers to a different part of the store and allow the employees to arrange the books however they want, I’m back in!”
–Nobody, ever.
This is a dead-end corporation in a dead-end line of business doing one last rearranging of the deck chairs before slipping 'neath the waves.
The public, including the reading public, has minimal interest in dead tree books. No amount of retail outlet design can re-create that long-gone demand.
If they want to try to recreate a library cum Starbucks experience they may well get some people to sit there looking like customers sipping their coffees. But there won’t be any revenue in that. And to the degree those non-customers “borrow” a book from the shelves, read a couple hours, then put it back without buying, they’ll be contributing to large amounts of unsaleable semi-damaged merchandise. This has “lose-lose” written all over it.
Registers in back is code for “more shoplifting in front.” Not sure how they intend to square that except with more employees. In an era when labor costs are a back-breaker for most of retail, and the quality of worker available for low-wage jobs is at an all-time low.
I used to accumulate dead-tree books far faster than I could read them. Now I accumulate ebooks far faster than I can read them. But instead of covering walls and flat surfaces, the hoard fits on basically a small thick postage stamp.
I do not specifically give a fuck about the future of Barnes & Noble (though I have bought hardcover books from them because I liked the discount), but I have discovered interesting books that I may not have otherwise encountered by browsing the shelves at bookstores (and public and non-public libraries), just saying.
There is also electronic browsing, to be sure, like computer-generated “suggestions” or straightforward lists of thousands of authors and titles.
The fantasy would be that said employees know and love books and would take the time to discuss them with you… maybe not a giant chain store thing.
Allowing book shelving at the whims of store employees doesn’t sound like a formula for success to me.
Catering to superior types who sneer at “dead tree books” and clog up tables using their Kindles doesn’t sound like a long-term recipe for success at Starbucks either.
Having the people who run and work at that individual store determine the store layout and shelving is how it already necessarily works at indie bookstores, so it’s not a bad idea, and it makes for a more interesting experience than if every B&N is laid out exactly like every other B&N. But I doubt if it’s enough to turn a failing store into a successful one.
I don’t want an “interesting experience” at a bookstore if it means wandering around to find out where employees have decided to shelve the book category I’m interested in. “Oh, this month employees voted to put the mystery books over there, next to cookbooks.”
I live in the outer radius of the Five Colleges aka Pioneer Valley area of western MA. Bookstores are not dead here. There’s a Borders or maybe B&N in the Big Box Strip town of South Hadley but otherwise, towns of 2-3000 people around here usually have at least one independent bookstore, and the big towns have ten to twelve – rare books, comic books, used books, new books … books. It’s true my own town doesn’t, but it’s under 2000 people and manages to run a magnificent library with a marble-pillared cupola. But, New England is really different than the rest of the US.
I knew I was getting out-of-touch, but I didn’t think I was that out of touch that eBooks have far and clearly surpassed dead tree books. (And looks like they haven’t, at least by the metric of purchases in the past year.) I’m on the younger side of Gen X and I generally just can’t get used to eBooks. I’ve read a number of them, and there’s some things I like about them (like looking up unfamiliar words with minimal hassle and break in storyline). But nobody in my peer group reads a majority of material as eBooks. My wife is a few years younger than me and in computer science, and I’ve never once seen her with an eBook. She’s constantly coming back from thrift stores with used paperbacks. I think we still have a good decade or two before eBooks absolutely take over.
One of my classmates is a bookstore manager. He’s said it’s hard to muster enthusiasm about books in general. My sister a seventh grade English teacher said it’s hard for authors to get to a point. She told me this one book took 126 pp before setting an action step the reader could take. That’s longer than The Old Man and the Sea, for Pete’s sake.