Does the health of the big box bookstore have anything to do with the health of the printed book?

Cafe Society
1

With the closer of Borders a few years ago, and the trouble Barnes and Noble finds itself in right now, I thought I’d ask this.

On one hand, everyone seems to blame the e-book for the latter’s difficulties (the former, it seems, is more blamed on bad management), and in many out of the way places, the big box bookstore is the ONLY place to get books besides the library (and sometimes not even that). And without the small bookstore (killed, admittedly, by said big box stores), what’s left in those places?

OTOH, of course, it could be argued that without the big box stores, the smaller bookstore will rise again.

OTOOH, that doesn’t do a lot of good if e-books really ARE the reason.

Personally, I think e-books replacing the printed page is a horrible thing for many reasons, but I recently realized that the failures of B&N and Borders may not have any connection to the printed book in general. So I thought I’d ask here. Whaddya all think?

2

Man, you’ve got a lot of hands.

I don’t have the numbers to back it up, but I’m under the impression that ebooks are still a tiny fraction of the market.

3

Elections?

Off to Great Debates.

4

This one’s easy. The answer is yes, no, and maybe.

Print publishing has a list of problems probably too long for the Internet to contain. I’d say the problem started long ago when the industry went to a blockbuster mentality. Today 100 books outsell the other 250,000 combined. An industry based on hitting the lottery is not a stable business. The fallout is that young authors are not supported as they try to build a career, authors get dumped quickly if their sales don’t constantly rise, and the boos other than the top 100 don’t sell as well as comparable books used to.

No matter what business you’re in, the mass market wants wider selection and lower prices. That’s why the big box stores drove the independents under. But the long tail takes you only so far. If half your sales are coming from 100 books, then you’re screwed if somebody undercuts your prices. Wal-mart and Costco started discounting bestsellers like crazy. Amazon discounted bestsellers and had a longer tail as well. There were other issues, certainly - Borders had ruinous real estate leases and no captive markets to fall back on, while B&N owned most of its buildings and is the dominant force in college bookstores. The #2 in a shrinking market has to be much better than #1 to survive - ask Circuit City.

So print publishing already had huge problems. Having thousands of outlets is better for your product than having hundreds. Having a wide base of desirable product is better than a narrow base. And so on. Then came epublishing.

I’ve been saying for 5-10 years that ebooks would need 5-10 years to penetrate the marketplace. That time is about here. They are no longer a few percent, but something like a quarter of the total market and even higher than that on Amazon. That’s bound to hurt print sales.

Even so, the direction of the market is uncertain. Few people think that B&N will survive more than a couple of years. Print will last as long as the boomer generation does; we were brought up to love books and reading electronically isn’t the same. (We obviously use ebooks, just not to the extent that younger generations do.) There’s some evidence that dedicated ebook readers have hit a peak and will be replaced by multi-function tablets. Self-published books account for up to 200,000 of those 250,000 books published, although they’re facing the same blockbuster issue that print books are.

5

Bookstores have never been hot centers of profit and new ones have been failing for a long time.
To the extent that a failure to capture (the still tiny) e-readership market helped cause Borders to fail, it simply demonstrates how small things can affect the survival of such stores.

More than e-books, skyrocketing fuel costs have probably had more to do with more recent failures than e-books. Books–rather heavy objects to begin with–have to be shipped into the stores, then they have to be shipped back to the publishers when they fail to sell. Then, if they are remaindered, they have to be shipped back to the stores, again, then, if they still fail to sell, they have to be shipped out, again.

In addition, the Recession probably had a pretty harsh impact on most industries that rely on disposable income, further threatening outfits such as bookstores.

6

How depressing.

Can’t wait until reading is the domain of those who can afford e-readers, and publishers can mess with content and ownership rights at will, not to mention the death of the used book market.

7

I doubt that’s going to happen.

E-readers are extremely cheap even now, and they’re just gonna get cheaper as more people jump on the bandwagon. Add in being able to read on any phone/tablet/etc, and you’ve got even wider of an audience.

The used book market will probably be hit, but the flip side of that is that the new book market is changing as well. Amazon always has at least 100 books for sale under $4, as well as “Kindle Daily Deals” that are quite good. I buy at least a couple books on a whim for $2-$3/each per month. I’ve found some REALLY great reads that way.

It’s also a lot easier to self-publish these days, and smaller presses can compete better with the Big Guys. Now, I’m not a huge fan of self-publishing - there’s a lot of crap that should never see the day out there - but there are some great examples of self-published books as well, things publishers passed on.

As far as publishers messing with content and ownership rights, not sure what you mean by that. You’re not talking about the one time Amazon (not a publisher) removed and refunded a book that was being sold by someone who did not have rights to sell it, are you? It happened once, it was clearly someone selling something they had no right to sell, and everyone got their money back. And Amazon got so much flack that they’re probably never going to do such a thing ever again.

Anyway, as far as the OP’s question, my opinion is not so much that e-Books killed the big bookstores, but that books turned out to be an extremely good fit for Internet marketing. A lot of people - including me - find it a much superior way to purchase books. I can read multiple reviews before buying from Amazon, I can download and read the first chapter if I want, and I don’t really have to worry about whether or not Amazon has a copy in stock - their inventory is larger than any brick-and-mortar store ever could have. The only real drawback is time & cost for shipping, and if you have an e-reader, that goes away.

Personally, I don’t miss “real” bookstores at all. Online purchasing is better, hands-down, at least for me, and I suspect their success is due to me not being in the minority in that opinion.

8

The one thing online purchasing can’t replicate is the experience of browsing through a bookstore. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve noticed a book I never heard of, started flipping through the pages, and ended up buying it. Yes, Amazon gives you recommendations, and it can show you the inside of some books, but neither can help you with utterly unexpected discoveries.

I used to go to big-box bookstores to browse a few times a month. But now they’ve all closed around here, so it’s more like a few times a year. I really miss it, and frankly I buy a lot fewer books. I do buy e-books, but only if I already know I want to read them.

9

The issue isn’t the health of books, it is the economics of brick and mortar vs online. Blockbuster Video is defunct (or nearly so), but Hollywood is still cranking out movies by the ton.

10

And because the experience suranyi mentioned isn’t quantifiable (perhaps not valued too), it’ll be a poorer world for it, IMO.

11

The point I was trying to make was, for me, Amazon and other online retailers have not only replicated but improved the book-buying experience.

That experience of browsing through a book at a bookstore you mention? It doesn’t do anything for me anymore. I’ve been burned by it too often. I don’t want JUST that. I do find books online by browsing around online, and THOSE books, I can read reviews of. I can download and read the first chapter, which gives me a much better impression of whether or not I’ll like it than browsing through it in a bookstore. I can find other books by the same author or subject easily and quickly. If the book’s subject is interesting to me, but that particular book gets bad reviews, I can go see what book is out there that is supposed to be better.

You can keep your brick-and-mortars; whether I’m looking for a particular book or just stumbling around shopping, I’ll take online any day.

12

The closing of Borders, though caused a big hit in ebook sales. Most people figure out what books to buy from a bookstore, even if they order them online. And it’s still a better way to find a new book, since you can read more of it, and see more books at a time. Amazon will show you nine books on a subject; a store bookshelf will have twenty or more at a glance.

13

+1.

I love paper books. I always have. Before this blockbuster marketing took hold, I could rely on being able to go into a bookstore and buy as many books as I could afford. I read a variety of genres, I read mainstream fiction, I read non-fiction…in fact, it’s easier to list the genres that I generally don’t read, and even then I might make an exception. In the past decade or so, though, I’ve been going into bookstores and browsing, but I can’t find anything interesting to buy other than magazines. Oh sure, they have a coffee shop, and toys, but I can’t find any BOOKS that I want to buy. When I mention that I’m interested in this author, or that genre, I’m told that the store can order it for me. The thing is, I can order this stuff MYSELF, and have it delivered to my house. The bookstore is not offering me any service that I can’t get at home. If I go into a bookstore, it’s because I want to come out with at least one book in my hot little hands, ready to start reading it when I get home. Or I might read it in the parking lot.

If I go online to order dead tree books, I can do it far more comfortably than ordering in a bookstore. And I’m likely to be able to check reviews and such online, too. I can order books in the middle of the night, whereas I have to get to the bookstore during business hours, and since I’m a night owl, this is a benefit to me.

I like my ereader, and I can find some amazing bargains, but I really don’t want to be restricted to reading ebooks. I don’t like flipping back and forth between footnotes and maps on an ereader, for one thing, and illustrations are less than satisfying. However, carrying one ereader is much more convenient than carrying two to four paperback books in my purse, which is what I used to do. Nowadays, I carry my ereader and one paperback book…just in case the nook runs out of juice, or (horrors!) goes tits up.

14

I know I’m supposed to prefer small Mom and Pop bookstores to Barnes & Noble, but you know what? I never have. I always found that the big box bookstores were FAR more likely to have what I wanted than indie stores, and were far less likely to blow customers attitude about what they purchased.

Interesting (to me, at least) hijack: in the movie You’ve Got Mail, Nora Ephron made plucky indie bookstore owner Meg Ryan a heroine for standing up to the chain bookstore owned by Tom Hanks. But she named Greg Kinnear’s charater “Navasky” after Victor Navasky of The Nation, who’d once written a piece about how much he LOATHED the smug jerks who operated indie bookstores!

15

And my point is that pretty soon, you might not have that option at all, anywhere, and I think that’s a huge tragedy for books and literacy in general.

16

Ultimately, whether a book is printed, narrated on CD, in Amazon Kindle format, Nook format, PDF, or what have you, it’s still the same information, and that’s the key, I think.

The issue is that the printed book is in many ways, less convenient than the alternative ways to access and consume that information. By that, I mean that e-readers like Nooks and Kindles, and the tablet software that duplicate most of their features are vastly more convenient- they remember the last place you read, you can search, you can instantly look up words in a dictionary, you can annotate easily, etc… and most importantly, in the physical space of one electronic device, you can literally have an entire bookshelf worth of books. Another reason is that the electronic information on its own doesn’t deteriorate. A PDF file from 1998 is just as readable today as it was back then, but some books from 1998 are already yellowing and showing other signs of deterioration.

I think the printed book is on the way out for much the same reasons that photographic film and DVD rentals croaked- technology has offered a drastically better format for the recording and consumption of their respective physical formats.

The big box bookstores are also following the same trajectory more or less as Kodak and Blockbuster for the same reasons- they’re sticking to their “core competency” while not realizing that it’s 99% obsolete.

17

Yeah, well, as far as film goes, I still don’t like the idea that a lot of our “civilian-level” visual record won’t be readable (or perhaps even existent) a hundred years from now because it’s all digital. It doesn’t sit right; it’s like we’re tech-ing our way out of existence as far as history is concerned.

Nor am I convinced that the e-book format is “drastically better” in a lot of ways that, admittedly, most people don’t think about. Like I said before, I don’t like publishers being able to edit or take away books after they’re sold on a whim, nor that you can’t lend e-books, nor that the dependency on technology locks out so many people out of something as basic as reading. (And that’s not even getting into the more personal preferences.)

18

In some ways, I agree with you. However, I still have problems with certain features. I just got done reading the eversion of I Shall Wear Midnight, which has plenty of footnotes and a glossary (as well as Feegles throughout). I don’t really like having to wake up the tool that lets me go to the footnote, I very much prefer to just flick my vision to the bottom of the page and then back up.

I have some old, old files from when I was writing articles on my Commodore 64. In order to read those files, I have to have access to a working C64, C128, or an emulator of a C64, and I have to have a 5.25" disk drive that works and is compatible with that computer or emulator. With a dead tree book, yes, it will physically deteriorate, especially if it’s not made of archival materials…but as long as the book is in decent physical shape, I can read it, without requiring specific hardware. On the other hand, some of those old floppies HAVE deteriorated, to the point where they can no longer be read, even if I’ve got the hardware to do it.

For that matter, every time I upgrade my computer, I usually find that some or most of my older programs no longer work with the new version. Sometimes I can find ways to make them work, sometimes I can’t.

There’s absolutely no question that the ereader can hold many, many more books in a tiny volume, though. I have the collected stories of Sherlock Holmes on my nook, for instance, which I bought for just a few bucks. If I’d bought the books in a dead tree version, I’d have had to clear off at least half a book shelf, possibly more.

I like having both options available to me. And there’s nothing like giving a friend a new dead tree book as a gift.

19

I absolutely agree with this. I can’t tell you how many times I bought books on a whim at a brick and mortar store only to give up on it, because it actually turned out to be crap. Of course there were many successful purchases that way too. But Amazon recommendations I feel do work well, I especially like the “people who bought this book also bought”. More importantly it gives me a better variety to choose from when I am looking for a particular subject, the inventory at Amazon is much larger than any store.

20

Of course everyone has their own opinion.

I’ve spent hundreds of hours in bookstores. I used to plan vacations around them, and it wasn’t too horribly long ago that a nice night out might end at that bookstore that was open until 11pm.

That said, I don’t see it as a tragedy at all. It’s been supplanted by something superior, and I’m fine with that. Do I look back fondly at some of my favorite bookstores that are gone? Sure I do, and I’ll be bummed when the local independent bookstore in my town that I used to fantasize about someday owning disappears, as it inevitably will. Would I give up the ability I now have to buy any book I want at midnight, during a snowstorm, when I have a cold and need a book because I’m up coughing and hacking and can’t sleep? Hell no, never. As far as I’m concerned, Amazon is like having the giantess hugest bestest bookstore/library in the world at my fingertips.