Comfy chairs was the main reason I started going to Barnes almost 20 years ago. In my town there was a something “Book Warehouse,” a huge book store with a few hard wood chairs and employees that would discourage browsing and I think quite literally tell customers “this isn’t a library.” A Barnes opened 1/2 a mile away, complete with a cafe, many tables, and many big comfy chairs. Yes, I did a lot of browsing and reading, but also a lot of buying. The warehouse place had some good deals, but maybe they (and grocery stores who had employees yell at you when you browsed the magazine racks, despite spending $100-200 a week or whatever in their store) should have realized maybe they could have made more sales by making paying customers comfortable.
Not if most people still greatly prefer paper, despite the higher cost.
I noticed how many gray heads were in the photos in the article from the OP. (That, and that at least two of the customers were in at least two of the photos–the place wasn’t even as very lightly busy as it looked.)
Here is an aging but still good essay on ebooks by Charlie S:
https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2010/05/cmap-9-ebooks.html
What I saw seems to support the first part of that sentence but not the second.
Without knowing what kinds of things you read, I hesitate to speculate why that is. My impression is that the number of books that are being published in electronic format has been growing steadily, and that nowadays it is extremely common for books to be available in both print and electronic formats.
This may be part of the problem. You can “pass on” a printed copy of a book you own, by reselling it, giving it away, trading it, or throwing it in the trash. There is no market for secondhand e-books, which changes the economics of buying and selling them.
I like books and bookstores better than most people. I still spend significant money at bookstores. But allowing the crew to rearrange the deck chairs won’t right a sinking ship.
I live in a highly educated city with many good used bookstores and a Canadian chain of decent new ones. Despite associating with a big coffee company, they still lose money, in part apparently due to hackers. Though still popular, they just don’t always have the books I want, even if popular, publicly well-reviewed, award-winning and from 2023. Online competition is fierce and they do their best. It seems it is more profitable to sell schmaltzy knick-knacks that might appeal to a literati-but-not-so-much crowd, and this takes up progressively more space. Fluffy blankets, massagers, cheap appliances and dollar store stuff upgraded with cute messaging.
Having nice chairs is great but might not help sales. Most people don’t read much.
I think the target customer for a brick-and-mortar bookstore in this day and age wouldn’t be the person who already knows exactly what book they want, but the person who wants to browse and is open to buying something they didn’t know they wanted when they walked in.
Surely bookstores cannot afford to cater only to one specific type of desired customer. Since they cannot have everything in stock, they need a secure and efficient online store (which exists here). They need what is new and what is popular or trendy. Sure, they gotta appeal to browsers. This is where the quirky preferences of bookworm employees come in. In Canada, these bookworms recommend books they like, as does the owner, but they don’t significantly change the store design. This might work when the best authors are local, which probably is not true for most places. The problems are obvious enough:
- Many folks don’t read
- There are many entertainment alternatives
- Those who read can go to free libraries
- Those who read may prefer kindle versions
- Bookstores can only carry so much
- Online bookstores carry far more
- Online versions might be cheaper
- Costs of a physical store, in good location, substantial in terms of rent, staff, utilities, etc.
Ebooks have three distinct disadvantages to me: they can be censored or taken away at a whim by the provider (which can be prevented, but most won’t bother), they can’t be traded or easily borrowed from individuals, and they run the risk of becoming inaccessible in the future if their tech becomes too outdated.
Not sure if readers in general, educated fans of ebooks, think about or care about any of this, but I do.
Me, my ebooks are mainly ones I wasn’t certain at the time of purchase that they’d be good enough to warrant shelf space and long OOP ones it’d be a hassle to find physically (a distinct advantage they have, to be sure).
Alternate question: what type of store or location paired with a bookstore would offer the most synergy*? Cafés are ordinary. The ice cream store seems like a possible good idea. An airport seems obvious though most are mediocre.
(*It has been proposed this word be banned for corporate overuse.)
@Dr_Paprika: I suppose that’s really the core issue: Who buys what from B&N stores? I know I do not know.
My wife reads nothing but best sellers. Only gotten from the library. I cannot imagine a worse way to select a book than off a hype-manipulated list of what the benighted public is said to be reading. But there she is. B&N carries those titles, but she’s not going to buy them, and if she was, not from a physical store since she mostly “reads” audiobooks.
I read tiresome tomes written by PhDs often published by university presses, or by specialist outfits. Thrilling crowd-pleasing topics like economics, foreign affairs, geo-politics, military stuff. None of which a B&N would ever think to have.
And a smattering of public policy & science popularizer stuff, e.g. Jared Diamond, Pinker, Harari, Nassim Taleb, etc. But never during any title’s brief flash of mainstream interest. Some of which B&N would sometimes carry.
So we’re both avid readers (she’s reading next to me right now) and not B&N target customers. Who is?
I have tried to read e books on my kindle or phone for many years. I travel frequently and always download a few from my library but I can never relax enough to read them. On the other hand I am able read through my paperback books fairly easily. My current protocol is to download one or two e books and take one or two paperbacks.
I buy a few books each year from either used bookstores, book sales or through Amazon.
My main source of both types of books are from my local libraries.
I would happily forego all free lending libraries for the rest of my life if I could lease the universe of e-books and the properly e-ified library of all physical books for, e.g. $5 each, for e.g. 2 months then they disappear or I can digitally shred them sooner when I’m done with them.
To me a book is simply a long magazine. Something to be read once and pitched. Upload the meaning-bits from it to me and after that it’s useless.
If made of paper, it’s less ecologically wasteful to donate it to the used market than to trash it. If it’s just bits, shred it without a care. True reference works are different, but that’s what physical libraries are for. And wikis.
So, the non-shoplifting public?
I too am wondering about the “action steps” readers can take. I’ve been reading for 65 years and I think the biggest action I’ve ever taken was getting up to refill my drink.
Standard DRM-free e-books, e.g. in Epub format, which many publishers provide and IMO are the only kind worth getting, are just regular computer files that you can back up, transfer to a newer device, trade or give to others, and so on.
You seem to have described two things: thick academic reference tomes, which do not seem like a one-time-use document and therefore may be worth getting on paper (though many authors just put the electronic version for free download on their web site), and pulp-fiction bestsellers that you are never going to re-read and you are better off getting the electronic version to save money and trees.
The fall of the Soviet Union heralded the— legal there and with academic roots, as I understand it— Library Genesis which currently has 5.1 million non-fiction books, 8 million fiction books, and 87 million scientific articles, also 2.5 million comics and graphic novels, plus other stuff. This kind of project would never fly in the U.S., though, with all the different publishers and jurisdictions, e.g. look at all the legal problems the Internet Archive has to deal with. That said, the Internet Archive also has tens of millions of items, you just need to create a free account and click on “Borrow” for many of them. They have academic books, too, not just novels and comics. Also music, films, etc., all in electronic format.
Specifically, just a renamed zip with html/xml inside.
I tend to reread the books I really like, sometimes several times.
The B&N near me not only has a cafe, it has also branched out into toys (plenty of board games and Legos) and also vinyl LPs.
Many people do. It might be the majority of readers. I pretty much never do. The same goes for tv shows and movies. We need to choose our format for our use case. I am fine to rent something and have it go poof once I have viewed/read it.
Synergy is fine, as long as it’s also dynamic.