Sorry I’m late with this morning’s post. Put it down to being hijacked by a plot that has been trying to take over my life for the last couple of days coupled with WordPress changing its interface (which isn’t fair when I haven’t had enough coffee to try to figure it out).
In case you heard the gnashing of teeth last week and couldn’t figure out what was causing it, it was the announcement from Barnes & Noble. It seems the bookseller has decided that it will close as many as one-third of its stores over the next ten years or so. Amid all the corporate “happy speak” in the announcement is an explanation that it will not be difficult to do because many of their leases will be coming up for renewal during that time and, well, they just won’t renew them. In other words, they will close an average of 20 stores a year. To put this into perspective, they opened only two stores this fiscal year. Please note that B&N admits that some of the stores being closed are not unprofitable. Whether this will be enough to plug the leaks in the company books has yet to be seen. Personally, I don’t think it will be. B&N needs to make further adjustments to its business model and be better at adapting to the desires and needs of the buying public.
This past week I visited our local B&N and I couldn’t help but think how far the store — and this is a fairly new one, less than five years old — had fallen. Bargain bins cluttered the entry area before you stepped into the store proper. It gave the relatively small area a cluttered feeling, made worse when someone stopped to look in the bins. It would be like someone stopping in the middle of the elevator door and not moving as folks tried to enter and exit the elevator.
When I finally got inside, the first thing I saw was a display of gift items. No books. No magazines or papers. Gifts. Where were the books? To the right of the gift display was the large Nook display and sales area. Okay, I get that they need to push their e-reader. The problem: there was no one manning the kiosk to answer questions. The next problem: the kiosk wasn’t selling books.
Silly me, I guess. When I go to a bookstore, I want to see books first and foremost. The other stuff should not take pride of place at the front of the store.
Sigh.
This is, in my opinion, just one indicator of the problems infiltrating the B&N culture. I’m not alone in thinking this. Here is a wonderful open letter to Barnes & Noble, asking corporate leadership to think long and hard about what they are doing to “save” the company.
But this isn’t the only reason B&N has been in the news of late. There is word that they have cut back their orders of books from Simon & Schuster. This can have a serious impact on the sales of print books if this includes not only books published by S&S but also those publishers that use S&S for distribution (and I will admit here that I have not been able to confirm which). If you google the dispute, you’ll find entries ranging from those that vilify B&N for taking this “Bezos-like” approach to others approving of it since B&N says they are taking this tact because they don’t feel S&S is supportive of their business.
In other words, this is a contract negotiation ploy. Who is right and who is wrong is anyone’s guess. Mine, they both need to compromise.
Finally, after delays and several changes in leadership, Bookish has launched. Bookish is the baby of Simon & Schuster, Hatchette and Penguin and is billed as “a one-stop, comprehensive online destination designed to connect readers with books and authors.” Sounds good, doesn’t it? I’m all for a site that allows me to shop for a book or e-book that cuts out the middle man retailer. Add in author interviews and other promotional materials that might help me make a more informed decision and it is even better.
Oh, wait, that isn’t what Bookish is. Not really. Sure, you can find the books and read the interviews, etc. But you aren’t buying the books from the Bookish site. Say you are interested in buying Lisa Gardner’s novel Touch & Go. You click on it and it takes you to the product page. There is a description of the book and, to the right, a box with the price and a bright orange box for “online stores”. You click on the box and it drops down to list six online retailers: Amazon, B&N, iBookstore, Books-a-Million, Indie Bound and Kobo. That’s right. If you want to buy the book, you are then redirected to another site.
Worse, the price they have listed for the book on the Bookish site is the suggested list price. Not the price you’ll pay if you go to one of the other sites. Going back to Gardner’s novel, it is listed on Bookish at $26.95 since it is only available in hardcover. Below the main product price box is a second box listing the e-book price of $12.99 (and this has the same drop down type of box as the hard cover listing).
I don’t know about you, but there are very few books I pay full price for any longer. The main reason for this is because they have become so expensive. Another reason is because I can go to Walmart or Target or go online to Amazon and get them for less. Heck, I can get them for less if I pay for a membership at B&N. So why would I want to pay full price if I didn’t have to? (And, before someone says this is all Amazon’s fault, I would remind you that discounts began long before Amazon. BookStop is one of the first chains I remember that offered discounts on new books if you had one of their member cards.) So, seeing the full price listed on the Bookish site would make me hesitate to follow the link to another site to make the purchase.
But let’s be honest here. Why am I going to go to Bookish to find a book when I can do the same thing on Amazon or B&N, et. al.? The problem with this is the publishers think readers know who publishes a book. For the most part, they don’t. They know the author, maybe. But the publisher isn’t on their radar. So my feelings on Bookish aren’t warm and fuzzy. It doesn’t do anything to take out the middleman, which would have put more money into the hands of the publishers and authors. It doesn’t make it easier to find a book and it sure doesn’t make it quicker. At best, it’s a tipped foul. Time will tell if it can be tweaked enough to actually help.
Your thoughts?
Mad Genius Club 
8 responses to “Strikes one, two and possibly three”
Bookish sounds amazingly like Baen’s website, where you can look at all the books published by Baen and then they direct you to a different online store to actually buy the book (for hardcopy, they do sell their own ebooks). The main difference being that Baen is the on imprint that has actually imprinted on readers, and their website is actually a functioning promotional place, because readers actually visit it. All that said I still can’t recall buying a book through their website, although I have looked through it to see if I have missed any books by an author. It is just easier to go to Amazon or Abebooks and look up the author, also that way I know I’m not missing any books that the author might have written for another publisher, because they will be listed their also. Through the retailers I can see what is available, and what the prices are for different versions, hardback, paperback, ebook, new, used, etc.
Now a site that comparison shopped all the major retailers and gave you the prices from each retailer could provide some actual benefits, and would have a much better chance of taking off. New paperbacks tend to be pretty much the same price through most retailers (although there are exceptions) hardbacks and used books vary wildly however, and most people don’t have the time or inclination to look through a half a dozen different sites and compare prices, and shipping prices.
I have bought many e-books from the Baen websites. I find their policy of allowing the first quater of the book to be read for free several months before the publication date to be excellent as well as their policy of allowing those who have bought a book in advance of the publication date to read another quater of the book per month for the two months prior to publication.
As far as not selling hard copies of their books goes, they have little choice. While they perhaps could sell at the cover price, even that would undercut their distributors, selling at any discount at all would approach unethical behavior toward the distributors. Much better to send the purchaser to their pick of the distributors.
I’d love a site that did that sort of comparison shopping but can’t you just hear Apple screaming about it? Honestly, it wouldn’t be all that hard to make that sort of app. At least I don’t think it would be. I know there is now an app that browses different video sites for you so you don’t have to go to Hulu, NetFlix, iTunes, etc., looking for a certain video. I haven’t used it, so I don’t know if it also lists prices.
As for Bookish, it reminded me of a PR catalog or magazine. You still need to know author or title — just like you do with Amazon et al — or you browsed what they put up based on your preferences that you can fill out when you register your account. I wasn’t all that impressed because, like so many things legacy publishers are doing right now, it seems to be too little, too late.
The B&N store in my area still has books in front, although the first thing you see is the Nook display. Gifties are on the way to the coffee shop, or tucked behind the best seller shelves. I try to buy from them or our more local semi-chain when I can, although the prices make me wince (as compared to used online or bargain online). The manager of this branch is very much a book person and personally supports the local writers’ group and their activities, along with school reading programs, so that may be part of the difference.
I loved it when our B&N was like that. But now you have to go past the first third of the store to find the books, and there are fewer and fewer books each time I go in. Or at least it seems that way. I don’t resent the fact that they are selling more than books. I understand they have to do whatever they can to be profitable. What I don’t like is how so many of their stores are losing their identities because there is this shotgun approach to trying to be everything for everyone instead of just focusing on one or two things and doing them really well.
The past few years, I’ve been doing my gift shopping for my grandchildren at Barnes&Noble. When I head there, I have noticed both the discount tables and the Nook kiosk as being between me and the new releases. They do still have one of the best ‘educational’ toy sections I’ve found and the fact that I get my membership discount on toy purchases as well as on books is the main reason that I shop there instead of the specialized shops in the big malls. Since I have changed over to nearly all e-reading, I must admit that I haven’t spent as much on books from B&N as I used to. I find out about new books from places like here, According To Hoyt, and several authors websites that I have signed up with. There are more books available (as e-books) than I can keep up with, in regards to both time to read them, and money to buy them. The publishing and bookselling industries are still in flux, and no one knows how it will all shake out.
I agree that most readers aren’t really aware of publishers. I didn’t pay much attention to them until I started hanging out with my husband. As an unpublished author, he was very aware of the differences between the houses and I learned from him. He finally has a book up at Amazon, and has started getting another of his books ready to publish. The first one took him a lot longer than he thought it would/should. It’s a crime/action novel, and you can find it here:
I’ve been explaining to the folks that I work with, that he published under a pseudonym. I don’t think I have to explain that here. 🙂
I agree with bearcat that a comparison shopping site would be wonderful. I would love to have a program that would sift through the Internet and give me current prices and locations for any shopping that I need to do. But that’s a whole ‘nother project, lol.
It actually amazes me there isn’t one, you want to buy tires, a new computer, an exhaust fan for your kitchen range, practically anything and there is a comparison site ready and willing to help you; but not for books.
I have done some education toy shopping at bookstores, but I’ll be honest. I haven’t done so since Borders closed. The local Borders had a better selection, even if it was smaller, than B&N.