They closed the nearest B&N to me. Granted, that mall was dying anyway (and has been fully closed down since). And the next closest one got rid of its music section (granted, so has the nearest Borders). They had a good selection, too.
That said, I love bookstores. I go to bookstores when I want to browse, to Amazon when I know exactly what I want. Love bookstores. Love love love. Sadly, the only independents I know of anymore are downtown, where I have to a) find it and b) pay for parking too. Bummer.
Went to my first ever B&N earlier in the week. We don’t have them here in Canada, although I suppose Chapter’s is close enough for all intents and purposes. It’s a cute store.
I don’t read as much as I should. I use a combination of Project Gutenberg, World Cat, Abebooks.com and my school’s library and interlibrary loan system to get what I want to read. If there’s a brand new John Grisham novel I really really want to read (and that hasn’t been a concern for a while), I can pick it up at Costco for cheaper than the jacket price.
Book stores that survive are going to survive by being niche, IMO. There’s a little book store in town that sells only mystery stories. One that only sells feminist books. One that only sells sci-fi. Etc. Etc.
Also, paper books are like vinyl records for me; they may look and feel and smell great, but e-books are becoming infinitely more practical. As a musician I know people that insist on getting vinyl instead of an Itunes album. And now there are composers who sell vinyl records exclusively, with an inserted code for downloading the MP3s. You get the pretty physical copy and practical electronic copy combined!
I’ve almost always lived closer to a Books-A-Million than I have a B&N.
Even though the discount card is now a bit closer in price, BAM discount cards have always been cheaper and were good in their cafe as well as the bookstore. This was important when I lived within walking distance of a BAM and tended to socialize there.
Living where I currently do, the only bookstore in town is a small used one, which I patronize regularly. Our local indie has gone pretty much to hobby and gifts and has leased most of the store to other businesses. I have a BAM store within 15 minutes though, that I spend a bit of time and money at.
I don’t know if they are the same everywhere, but the ones near me had the shelves all laid out weird and it was hard to find anything.
There were chairs and couches all over the place, so people treated it like a library. When I found the books I wanted, there would only be one or two copies, and they had already been looked through and read enough that they no longer looked like a new book.
I got tired of all the people lounging around and sleeping instead of looking for and paying for books. It was a daycare/library.
If I know what book it is that I want I buy it online, usually from Amazon or ABE. If I just want to browse for a book I go to Joseph-Beth which is a heck of a lot closer than Barnes & Noble.
I reiterate that B&N isn’t shuttering – they’re selling. The big box bookstore industry generally is anemic, so who knows how long they might last, but this isn’t the announcement of their demise.
Borders (where I used to work part time before the kid was born) is a better place to shop for a lot of reasons. The stock is typically broader. They have the aforementioned self-serve kiosks. And it’s more thickly staffed, so if you need help you’re more likely to get it. (And from what colleagues have told me, it’s more fun to work there, which I think would mean you get more of the hobbyist staffer like me at Borders than at B&N – and those people are better at helping you when you don’t already have a book in mind.) And Borders also doesn’t charge for its membership program – there’s no general discount on every item, but you get a coupon every week (the last several months it’s almost always been 33% off).
These are all the same reasons why Borders is in worse shape financially than B&N, of course.
I buy some books at Amazon. But Amazon can never match the experience of browsing for a book. I discover a lot of new authors that way. I often spend a couple hours in Barnes & Noble looking at new books and authors.
Houston’s Alabama Theatre is a fine old Art Deco building, still standing although nearly all of Houston’s old movie houses are long gone. It was saved by becoming The Bookstop–several floors of books were built into the old place while the murals & the screen remained. It had a fine selection & was always fun to visit. Then Barnes & Noble bought it, but didn’t change anything.
I could see expanding the center; parking garages are better land use than endless parking lots. But the new part is Texas Tuscan–utterly disrespecting the rather elegant Art Deco original. Heck, they had already built a Deco-ish Kroger that fits in great! The River Oaks Theatre was also threatened, but the general economic slowdown has slowed down further pillaging & looting of the older parts of the center.
Meanwhile, the old Alabama Theatre/Bookstop building stands empty. Will a new tenant be found to respect its amazing beauty or will it be razed for a new monstrosity?
I’ve never been to the new Barnes & Noble. In fact, I’ve avoided that shopping center since it was uglified. I’m sure worldwide economic events have contributed to the demise of Barnes & Noble, but I will not shed a tear.
Before the new development, Lewis Black used the River Oaks center in a sketch: Two Starbucks faced each other, just across the street; they still do. This juxtaposition made him fear for the integrity of the space-time continuum. The new B&N was built right next door to one of the Starbucks. And, of course, it has a Starbucks inside! Little wonder that it did not thrive.
I cut back going to book stores since I know I already have so many books here that I haven’t read. I did the same thing with DVDs. A couple of years ago, I’d always be picking up bargain books and DVDs. I realized that I just don’t have the time to get through all of them.
I haven’t stopped going, and I won’t. We have a great 2-story B&N within 10 minutes of my house and I love going there and browsing the shelves. I don’t buy a hell of a lot there as I don’t read as much as I used to.
I do have a Kindle and have bought a few books on it that I might have otherwise purchased at B&N. The Nook had just come out when I bought it, and at the time the Kindle Store had more of the books I was planning on reading over the next year or two.
There isn’t one near me. I go to Borders maybe once a month, though their selection is pretty bad, but they e-mail me coupons and borders.com is really not a bad site and I’ve gotten some good deals there with their coupons. I got a CD there that I waited months for on Amazon and they finally told me they couldn’t get it.
Poor location (strip-mall hell), ugly building, pathetic music section (books about music), almost nonexistent architecture and design section, hardly any hardcover edition science-fiction or foreign authors, unhelpful staff, overall too much space given over to non-book gimmicks.
Oh, and I don’t like their “discount” pricing games. I don’t want to pay for or carry a membership card, I don’t want to get coupons by e-mail, I don’t want to make calculations about how much I buy and when.
I go to B&N all the time – it’s the closest bookstore to our house.
But:
1.) B&N isn’t “going out of business” – they’re looking for someone to buy them.
2.) Borders books was in such bad financial shape that last year they showed up on lists of “companies about to go bankrupt”. They’ve apparently pulled out of that somewhat, having paid off their big loan and becoming more profitable. But both Borders and B&N are apparently teetering out there.
This is a great shame – Here in Boston — Boston! The Athens of America! – almost all the bookstores have disappeared. Aside from college bookstores and a relative few independent bookstores (Trident Cafe on Newbury Street, Harvard Books in Cambridge, a few others farther out) and a couple of used book stores, the only bookstores around are Borders (Downtown Crossing, Boylston St., The Cambridgeside Galleria) and Barnes and Noble (Prudential Center). If B&N and Borders disappear we’re going to be in tough shape. This in a city that used to have dozens of new and used bookstores in the downtown area.
Away from the centers of large metropolitan areas, it’s worse. A handful of lucky towns have bookstores, but most places rely on the Big Box stores. When I was a kid, the nearest bookstores were miles away, but at least the department stores had book sections, some of them pretty large. If the Big Box stores go down, then all we’ll have are the measly pickings in the supermarket and the pharmacies. Wow.
I don’t use B&N much because they don’t separate out their fiction as well Borders does. I like being able to go to the Horror section, or the mystery section and finding what I want and not having to look through the entire fiction selection. They never seem to have the magazines I want either. I will go there, but not often.
There’s a Borders walking distance from my house, but I have to take the bus to the nearest B&N. Plus, as others have mentioned, I can’t see the point in paying for a membership card when I can get the same deal for free elsewhere.
Maybe without big-box competition, small towns could again each support their own small book shop. Typically each big box replaced several independent stores in the first place. Isn’t that what happened to yours in Boston as well?
If not, well, 98% of my book purchases are online now as it is. So in a sense it can’t get any worse.
I have a BAM store within 15 minutes though, that I spend a bit of time and money at.