The Late Age of Print » Barnes & Noble

Bye Bye, Big-Box Bookstores

Ted Striphas — Wed, 08 Sep 2010 16:50:18 +0000

After more than a decade of dominance fueled by aggressive expansion, the leading big-box bookstore chains in the United States are hurting.

Borders is barely hanging on by a financial thread, with an almost $38 million loss near the end of 2009 sending the company into a tailspin. 2010 began with a round of layoffs, followed by restructuring and most recently the departure of its CFO, Mark Bierley. The cracks are beginning to show in its retail stores, too. Here in Bloomington, Indiana, where I live, the bookshelves at our local Borders are getting emptier by the month. It’s also now closed on Sunday, presumably as a way to cut operating costs.

Barnes & Noble seems to be faring better, but that’s a relative statement these days. For the better part of a year now it’s been fighting a takeover attempt led by billionaire corporate raider, Ron Burkle. But in some ways that’s not the worst of its worries. In an attempt to counter Burkle, Barnes & Noble CEO Leonard Riggio recently went looking for someone else — someone friendlier — to buy the company. He was met with this grim response by the financial press:

Before news of Barnes & Noble’s plan to explore alternatives, shares had declined about a third this year in the face of concerns that the growing digital-books market and competition from Amazon.com Inc. would squeeze out its 720 bricks-and-mortar stores while also leaving it with little market share in the digital world, where its Nook e-book reader followed in the footsteps of Amazon’s Kindle.

“It’s difficult to envision a buyer of this company given the structural issues it continues to face,” said Credit Suisse analyst Gary Balter.

Realistically, it’s probably an overstatement to say that nobody would want to buy Barnes & Noble. Someone with an interest in revamping the chain might well want to do so. Of course that would most likely mean, sayonara Barnes & Noble as we know it.

This isn’t a surprising development, and both Borders and Barnes & Noble should have seen it coming.

Remember Tower Records? Or all of those Virgin Mega-Stores? With the rise of digital music, most of the big-box music stores were forced to shut their doors. They just couldn’t compete with a business model premised on minimizing infrastructure and abandoning material goods. The same goes for Blockbuster and all of those other national video store chains, whose physical stores have been driven under by the double-whammy of Netflix and video on-demand.

E-books still have limited uptake, of course, which means that Borders and Barnes & Noble have yet to feel the digital squeeze to the degree that music and video stores have. Still, their lackluster forays into online bookselling have put both companies at a major disadvantage. Barnes & Noble used to have a fallback in the education market, with an exclusive lock on hundreds of college bookstores across the United States. Even that’s now being eroded by Amazon.com, however, which is actively courting students on its website.

There’s been some talk lately of how to retool the big-box bookstores to make them more competitive. Unfortunately, as a recent Publishers Weekly article noted, one plan would significantly involve “Taking the ‘Book’ Out of Bookstores.” In place of the physical volumes there would be an increase in what booksellers like to call “non-book product,” including journals, cards, fancy writing paper, reading lights, games, and that type of thing.

No doubt the profit margins on non-book product are attractive, and I suspect they help to create store traffic. But honestly, is this a viable long-term strategy for big-box bookstores? Does it make sense to save these bookstores by turning them into plus-sized stationery stores?

Here’s a different idea. Bowker, a leading book industry research and information firm, recently reported that women over the age of 40 comprise the largest segment of the US book buying market. Common sense would dictate that Borders and Barnes & Noble ought to pursue that aspect of the market even more actively than they do now, since that’s where the money is.

But it’s clear that now’s not the time for common sense; now’s the time for bold, unconventional thinking. What this means is that the bookstore chains ought to be courting those who aren’t your usual book buyers and working closely with publishers to develop titles that would appeal to them. That way they’d be broadening the market rather than simply reproducing it as it is.

I also wonder if now might be the right time to begin experimenting with smaller, shopping mall-based stores as well. Borders and Barnes & Noble closed most of their Waldenbooks and B. Dalton mall locations in the 1990s, in part to help finance the construction of their superstores. Nevertheless, people still love to shop at the mall, even in the internet age. The experience of being in pubic, hanging out, and poking around is something that online retailers can never hope to duplicate. And so here, again, is another untapped possibility. A suitable print-on-demand system could make mall stores even more attractive to book buyers, moreover, since then they wouldn’t have to wait for titles to be delivered from suppliers or sources online.

Maybe, in the end, it’s time to bid farewell to the big-box bookstore chains. Personally, though, I’d be sad to see them go, especially since they’ve been instrumental in making books available in places where, for the most part, they weren’t abundant — places like my hometown of Goshen, New York, for instance. I also think it’s important for printed books to remain a part of the experiential landscape of people’s everyday lives, both in the form of libraries and retail stores.

Indeed, what would it mean to live in a time when we couldn’t pluck a random volume off of a shelf and start reading, just for the sake of doing so? That’s the question we’re staring at now, not only because of the shakeout that’s been going on for the better part of 15 years in the retail sector, but also because of the cutbacks that are crippling US public libraries. But Instead of staring at this question, isn’t it about time folks started staring it down?

Getting Some Nook-ie

Ted Striphas — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 15:24:08 +0000

I’ve been meaning to weigh in here on Barnes & Noble’s recent announcement about its new e-reader, Nook. It seems to be getting talked about everywhere, including this NPR story that I heard a few days ago. My bottom line is that, while I have not yet tried the device (it won’t be released until the end of November, just in time for the holidays), I am more optimistic about it and its capabilities compared to the Amazon Kindle.

It would be easy enough to point to Nook’s feature-ladenness as the reason behind my optimism. If nothing else it’s got a color screen, which sets it apart from that of Kindle. I’ve described the latter’s inexplicably well-touted e-ink display as reminiscent of an Etch-a-Sketch, although I’m also taken with Nicholson Baker’s description of it in the New Yorker: “[T]he screen was gray. And it wasn’t just gray; it was a greenish, sickly gray. A postmortem gray.” Nook also has touch screen capabilities; Kindle does not. While I’m not a proponent of touch simply for its own sake, I recognize tactility as a key experiential dimension of the handling of printed books. The touch screen thus makes for some nice experiential “carry-over” from the one (analog) reading platform to the other (digital).

But it’s not all about the interface. More important to me are Nook’s sharing functions and its — bear with me on this one — lack of a backup feature. The sharing function is straightforward enough: the device lets your friends borrow your e-titles for up to two weeks. Here’s what the Barnes & Noble website says:

You can share Nook to Nook, but it doesn’t stop there. Using the new Barnes & Noble LendMe™ technology… you will be able to lend to and from any iPhone™, iPod touch, BlackBerry, PC, or Mac, with the free Barnes and Noble eReader software downloaded on it.

Now, what the site neglects to mention is that publishers can opt-out of making their Nook books circulable. Nevertheless, I appreciate that even a limited type of sharing is the default position for the device and its content. Too much DRM does not a happy customer base make.

My delight at the lack of a backup feature clearly requires some explaining. One of the chief selling points of the Amazon Kindle is its so-called “backup” feature. I say “so called” because its not only about user-friendly content protection. The backup occurs on the Amazon server cloud, where intimate details about what, where, how, and for how long you read get archived, presumably forever. That’s great if your Kindle gets stolen or crashes, but it does open up all sorts of privacy concerns that I’ve been addressing lately in lectures at the University of Illinois, the University of Iowa, and tomorrow at Georgetown University.

All that to say, it pleases me that Barnes & Noble isn’t following Amazon into the cloud. Indeed its decision not to go there, it seems to me, is indicative of the company’s sense of its own identity. However much Barnes & Noble may venture into other areas, such as printed book publishing and e-book readers, at the end of the day it still recognizes itself for what it’s always been: a bookseller. Amazon, on the other hand, presents itself as though it were a retailer, but in reality it is, in the words of CEO Jeff Bezos, “a technology company at its core.” (Advertising Age, June 1, 2005). The two company’s respective — indeed, quite divergent — approaches to client e-reader data reflect these differences in their core missions.

I may yet pre-order a Nook to go along with my Kindle. I’m still on the fence, but I’m leaning towards giving it a try. I’ll keep you posted, but until them I’d be interested in hearing how others are weighing in.

Late Age of Print — the Video

Ted Striphas — Wed, 08 Jul 2009 19:34:16 +0000

After a series of delays (I hear this is how things go in Hollywood), I’m pleased to debut The Late Age of Print video at long last. It’s no “Thriller,” admittedly, but hopefully you’ll get a kick out of it anyway.

Here’s a little back-story for those of you who may be interested. Last fall my editor at Columbia informed me that the Press had begun promoting some of its books using short videos. He then asked me if I’d be interested in shooting one for Late Age. Since I’m not someone who believes that electronic media are out to kill books — I’m quite confident in their ability to help books out, in fact — I decided I’d say yes.

I was a little daunted by the prospect of shooting the video, mostly because I’m a methodological writer who’s unaccustomed to speaking in sound bites. I reflected on this a bit last December over on my other blog, Differences & Repetitions. In hindsight, that should have been the least of my worries.

In chapter 2 of Late Age I touch on how the campus bookstore at Indiana University (where I teach) was designed by Ken White, the architect who went on to create the big-box bookstore template. What better location for the video shoot, I thought, than at ground-zero of the big-box bookstore phenomenon?

Unfortunately, IU decided in 2007 that it would be a good idea to outsource campus bookstore operations to Barnes & Noble — about whom I write rather approvingly in Late Age. The long and the short of it is that Barnes & Noble denied my requests to shoot the video there.

I still find it difficult to fathom how a private sector company would — or even could — refuse the use of public property for a purpose such as this. In any case, I’m sure I could have complained to the University, but by then so much time had elapsed that I just needed to get on with the shoot.

I settled on the IU Lilly Library, which houses rare books and manuscripts. It’s a truly lovely location, though I fear that it may inadvertantly up the “book fetishist” quotient that I try so hard to mitigate in Late Age. The videographer also had me harp on the “books aren’t going away anytime soon” theme, which, though appropriate, doesn’t quite get at the substance of the book, which focuses on e-books, book superstores, online bookselling, Amazon.com, and Harry Potter.

Anyway, despite all the drama I’m still pretty pleased with the result. I hope you like it, too. Please share it, rate it, and comment on it. I’d love to hear what you think!

Now that I’ve entered the video age, would it be asking too much for Colbert to call?