And this, ladies and gentlemen, is the answer to the OP’s question. American chess players may not be a very large percentage of the population, but they like to read chess books.
Chess players, as a chess-fiend friend of mine once noted, will step over a naked woman and a fifth of single-malt Scotch to get to the latest hot new book on opening gambits. Barnes and Noble is more than happy to feed their addiction.
I would also think a person that plays chess is more likely to be of a higher income set. I can’t back this up so I could be wrong, but generally the people I see into playing chess have income levels that are, let say higher than normal.
The higher the income the greater the likelihood is they will buy books, as opposed to waiting till the library gets them and then checking them out.
I think chess is a game that doesn’t adapt well to a computer either. Oh for certain you can play it on a computer and there are excellent teaching programs, but there must be something about setting up the physical men and using a board. I quite often see people in the parks in Chicago, playing chess.
So perhaps these people who play a physical game are less likely to be computer oriented and buy online. Again just a thought.
Look at all the chess nuts boasting in an open foyer.
The Bith Shuffle writes (speaking about Barnes and Noble):
> I actually didn’t know this. I thought they were quick book-movers.
Compared to what? How old are you? When Borders and Barnes and Noble began opening bookstores around the U.S. in a big way twenty or so years ago, they were clearly larger than their competitors, which were independent bookstores or parts of small chains. It was rather surprising to those of us around then that a chain bookstore could manage to have such a large stock, since of course meant that some of the books would be rather slow sellers. Those two chains put a lot of their competitors out of business. Now you mostly don’t have those smaller stores around to compare them to, so you don’t think of Borders and Barnes and Noble as being huge as we did when they first opened.
Wow, where’s that things that make you feel old thread? Think about it for a moment. “A big way twenty or so years ago.” He’s running a chess club in college, born into a world where mega bookstores are as common as every mall. Pretty cool.
One thing you’re forgetting is that the average Puzzles & Games section (where the chess books are stored) isn’t a very big part of the store. Having visited a bunch of B&Ns in my day, I’d say the chess books often take up less room than the crossword books in the same section and considerably less room than the sports books (which are usually in the same general area).
Compare to a section like Cookbooks or even Graphic Novels (which are a huge seller for B&N) and you’ll see that chess books are much more niche than you initially realize.
It’s not like Barnes and Noble has actually risked any money to stock the chess books. They get full credit for returned books, so they can stock as many as they want and, if they don’t sell, they just ship them back.
Evidently, the chess books sell well enough to justify the shelf space. It’s not a big area of the store, either.
I’ll take sex over chess any day, too.
Believe it or not, keeping chess books in stock is a good investment. Chess may not be an enormously popular hobby, but its popularity is consistent; it never stops being fashionable in its quiet way. Unlike lunch meat, haute couture, or fad bestsellers of the Twilight variety, chess books will never become out-of-date, unsalable stock. The the world of chess is old enough, and evolves slowly enough, that particular titles don’t date very rapidly either; some very fine chess books date from the 1950s.
brandishes a herring
Do I have to do this or do you want to do it yourself?
Very true. There are certain books that are considered ‘canon’ for any chess player. One of my favorites, written in the 40s or 50s is Art of Attack in Chess by Vladimir Vukovic. I’m told that every master reads that.
I’ll send what he said. I was the club president in college too. I used to joke that “I became the chess club president because chicks dig power.” But I wasn’t near being the highest rated player. I was only about 1600 while we had a lot of 1900s in the club. Why was I the president, then? Because I’d show up for meetings. I’d organize teams. I’d get the gear out and put it away. I’d promote the club, answer questions…you get the idea. Essentially, they were better at chess while I was better at leading. And most importantly, unlike anyone else, I WANTED the job.
Books I (*=especially) recommend:
Art of Attack - Vladimir Vukovic
*Silman’s Complete Endgame Course - Jeremy Silman
Starting Out: 1. d4! - Cox? Everyman Chess
Chess Openings for Black, Explained - Lev Alburt, Pereshtyn (sp?), GM Dzindzaschvili (no way I spelled that right)
*How to Reassess Your Chess - Jeremy Silman
The Amateur’s Mind - Jeremy Silman
*How to Think Like A Grandmaster - some Russian Guy
If you get the two Silman books, you’ll be occupied for months. They’re so rich in detail (and funny!) that you’ll have no problem committing all those topics to memory. The last one, How to Think…, can be found as an e-Book on eBay for less than $3. It’ll teach you disciplline and proper thinking technique so that you’ll be able to calculate with a clear mind.
PM me if you have any more questions about learning chess. I dedicated a username to it, so you know I mean it 
Could it also be related to B&N’s roots in New York City, where chess is much more popular than the rest of the country?
This gets into the “Long Tail” theory that says that since it doesn’t cost proportionally more for an online business to have larger inventories, then everything should be kept available in the hopes that someone sometime will buy it.
Turns out that a) this doesn’t work that well after a point and b) big box stores already knew this and exploited it up to that point long before the internet.
The 80-20 rule of thumb applies generally for retailing about as well as it does for anywhere, except that it’s probably closer to 90/10. 90% of your sales come from 10% of your stock. The big box bookstores realized early that if you can draw more of the people who are really just buying the big bestsellers but don’t want to admit that’s all they’re interested in, you can increase sales. For all the talk of the independent neighborhood bookstore being the heaven on earth that book people make it out to be, a large percentage of ordinary book bestseller buyers were made to feel uncomfortable shopping there. A big friendly supermarket of books that placed no intellectual pretensions on what you bought turned out to be sales magic to draw them in. And maybe they would buy another book or two while they were there.
The important part of a B&N or Borders are the display tables and shelves for the bestsellers and titles that publishers are pushing (by buying space in the display tables and shelves: you don’t think those book are picked because of their quality, do you?). Everything else is gravy. That means that everything else is carefully studied for the industry benchmark, sales per square foot. It may look as if a big box store has everything but those are carefully thought out and culled tiny slices of what’s available. And the shelf footage given to any section waxes and wanes as interest in that subject goes up or down. They move sections around a lot as well so that you can’t easily compare how big they used to be to what they are now. (This got very noticeable when they gutted their CD sections.)
Chess books are an incredibly tiny fraction of the store, but they have a singleminded audience who can’t easily get the book in other stores and who probably like to look through the books before buying, making them not a prime internet buy. They may be worth keeping.
Or may not. For bestsellers, places like Costco or Wal-Mart outsell bookstores. They’re even less intellectually intimidating than a bookstore and people go to them for other things and pick up the books as gravy. They more than the internet are the reason that Waldenbooks and B. Dalton were driven out of malls. Those stores lived on a small slice of bestsellers and when that business went away had nothing to fall back on.
It’s questionable how long big box booksellers will last because of this. Leonard Riggio of B&N has stated that by 2011 only 500 of them will be left. There are 1100 today. He’s probably saying that Borders, which is near bankruptcy, will fail, but even so a chunk of his stores would also have to disappear. No matter what people say about books, their actions are to buy more blockbusters and fewer ordinary books. Book sellers will have no choice but to swing with that pendulum.
I want to expand a little on what I said here. There are two kinds of books that are reliable moneymakers for booksellers. To borrow a term from evolutionary bio, you might call them r-sellers and k-sellers.
The R’s are your classic bestsellers; they move very very fast for a limited period of time, and then the fad moves on and they drop off the radar, usually pretty quickly. (The big big moneymakers these days might be called “serial R’s” – as in the cases of the Twilight and Harry Potter series, the author works her arse off to churn out a next installment in the franchise before the fad dies, and as long as she can keep it going each new installment sells in its own right and reinforces sales of the previous installments.) These make a lot of money for the bookseller, but he then has to worry about being stuck with stock when the fad dies.
The K’s are different; they sell at a much lower rate, but they have a very long tail. These are moneymakers because, stocked in reasonable numbers, they are essentially guaranteed sales, and also because they tend to be produced in smaller printings than the R’s, they tend to be more expensive. Godel, Escher, Bach is a great example, or just about anything by J.R.R. Tolkien.
Chess books are k-sellers, and this is why they’re worth stocking for any bookstore. If it is a B&N thing, I suspect that it’s a B&N thing because it’s perceived as being a B&N thing; if people interested in chess have come to expect that B&N has their chess books, they go there, and the process becomes self-reinforcing.
Both Barnes and Nobel’s I’ve lived near in the last few years also hosted Chess-clubs in the cafe. Not sure if that’s coincidence, or if a lot of other B&N’s do the same thing, but if its the latter it might explain they’re propensity for stocking a lot of chess books, since after the club lets out, the members probably browse through the store.
I’m always puzzled by the relatively large number of fairly technical math books stocked by Borders. Not the pop-sci ones or “idiots guide to calculus” type ones, but texts on Complex Analysis or Mathematical physics. B&N usually has a few, but Borders tends to have a shelf or more worth. I have trouble picturing who buys them.
I don’t think anyone’s asked this yet, but are many of the chess books being sold by B&N past their copyright? Similarly, were many of them so old that their copyrights might have been sold to B&N for a song?
I ask because in both cases it would mean that aside from recouping the printing costs (which are not much relatively speaking), any book sold would be almost pure profit for them. Do the “font” and typeset of these books look really old?
We used to have a chain in Canada called Coles (or maybe they still exist, it doesn’t matter) that had many, many obscure older books, mostly on chess, science and math related topics. But all of them seemed to have in common a typeset that was clearly ancient, like from the 1920’s or earlier. The bottom line is what Coles had done was to simply put a new, glossy and colorful cover on the original pages, with the latter reproduced 100% faithfully from the original source.
And I had always figured that the primary profit came from the attached coffeeshops, not the book-selling itself.
This is actually a huge deal. If you can’t look through the book, you need to either 1) know something about the author and series, or 2) know what’s inside it from word of mouth or something. If you don’t do that, you’ll burn a lot of cash (trust me, I know) buying books that are WAAAY below or above your skill level. On that note, anyone want a copy of Pandolfini’s Opening Traps and Zaps?
Indeed it does. Whenever I go to B&N, I make a bee line for the chess books. I like seeing what they’ve got in stock at that specific store. Some chess buddies of mine do the same thing. It’s like our special section of the store.
I doubt that’s the case. Most of those books are picked up by a specific chess publisher, like Fireside or Everyman. Keep in mind that the rights would have to work internationally, because that’s where most of the books get published. Now, I’m not a copyright lawyer, but wouldn’t selling to B&N hinder international sales?
And the font and typeset keeps getting redone. Classic books are like classic epics or the Bible. They keep getting redone and reworded so that they can be republished “new”. The ‘cultural’ shift to algebraic notation from descriptive notationalso necessitated this do-over. I mean, reading a book in descriptive notation, to me, is like reading Shakespeare in pig latin. Sure, I could do it, but I probably wouldn’t spend money for the priviledge. Anyone over the age of 45 probably writes and reads in descriptive, while anyone under the age of 30 definitely uses algebraic. Chess publishers responded by rewriting all older books to use algebraic notation. So it’s unlikely that any are past copyright.
That’s almost, but not quite, accurate. Even assuming they purchase all of the small single-copy titles direct from publishers (distributors do have return penalties), they’re still out the cost of processing the return and shipping the books back. I figure it costs me a couple of bucks every time I have to return a hardback book, which is why there are sometimes books sitting on my discount table priced lower than my cost.
The other financial risk is that they’ve tied up cash. Every dollar invested in a book that doesn’t move for a year is a dollar that’s not spent on inventory which actually turns (there’s a fascinating discussion of this in the monograph, The Mathematics of Bookselling, by Leonard Shatzkin).
When the decision to stock a slow-seller is made consciously, it is usually based on how they book might generate sales of related products, or on the use of that book basically as decoration. As an example, I stock basically every book in print that has to do with the Indian tribes located near here. Some of those books may go a year or two between sales. But people will drive 100 miles to check over the shelves, knowing that I have stuff even Amazon and B&N don’t. Once they’re here, they’ll typically pick up a few other books, too.
[QUOTE=Exapno Mapcase]
Chess books are an incredibly tiny fraction of the store, but they have a singleminded audience who can’t easily get the book in other stores and who probably like to look through the books before buying, making them not a prime internet buy. They may be worth keeping.
[/QUOTE]
This.
Not to mention, a lot of the chess books you’ll see at B & N are published by Sterling. Barnes & Noble owns Sterling so the cost factor is decidedly different than would be from a regular publisher.
[quote=“Gary “Wombat” Robson, post:39, topic:527493”]
That’s almost, but not quite, accurate. Even assuming they purchase all of the small single-copy titles direct from publishers (distributors do have return penalties), they’re still out the cost of processing the return and shipping the books back. I figure it costs me a couple of bucks every time I have to return a hardback book, which is why there are sometimes books sitting on my discount table priced lower than my cost.
[/QUOTE]
I really think this method of processing returns (and then sending them out again) is one of the reasons publishing/bookstores are dying.