I can't tell if bookstores have gotten markedly worse or if I've simply become more discriminating in what I'm looking for. When Barnes and Noble, Borders, et al first swept through the US I thought it was wonderful. I've spent an inordinate amount of money and time in big-box bookstores.<p>I moved to Germany some 9 years ago. In my first trips back to the US a bookstore was one of the detours I was most excited about. I'd typically return to Germany with a couple hundred bucks worth of books stuffed into my bag. My family, noticing this, started a habit of buying me B&N gift certificates (a pattern that's continued to this day).<p>But now, 9 years and thousands of dollars of Amazon.de purchases later, I can't say that I'm terribly excited about visiting the big box stores. I struggled to spend my most recent gift certificate. <i>Struggled!</i> I went looking for books on Chinese history, and in a two story Barnes and Noble in an upscale Houston neighborhood there were <i>two</i> books on the history of the most populous country in the world. There were huge aisles of random throwaway junk, games and other silliness and <i>two books on Chinese history</i>. Nor did they have Bertrand Russel's <i>Principles of Mathematics</i> or Aldous Huxley's <i>Chrome Yellow</i>.<p>I love books. Paper books. I have around a thousand of them. But I won't cry for the passing of the big-box stores if they're bent on becoming the Wal-Mart of reading.
Borders is dead because the folks in charge of the corporation made bad decisions. They overextended themselves borrowing to expand. They failed to shutter money-losing stores quickly enough, not in small part because they signed off on long-term leases that made vacation a non-option in many cases. And of course their online presence was managed by Amazon from 2001-2008.<p>The failure of the chain isn't a commentary on the changing book market, it's a commentary what happens to businesses that abuse debt and make decisions for the short term than have negative long-term implications.
I have hundreds of books which fill multiple bookshelves (I've even read most of them) like some sort of trophy case for my intelligence. There are only a handful I have picked up more than once (except to move), and the only ones I pick up on a regular basis are cookbooks. Different books lend themselves to different formats and purchasing options. I buy tech books in electronic format, novels on my Kindle, and cookbooks I absolutely have to pick up and thumb through before buying a physical copy. It's time for the big bookcase to go, replaced with a small bookcase, a kindle, and a hard drive.
Most big box bookstores don't have as much variety or depth as we've come to expect from exposure to online book sellers. You have to go to a sizeable used bookstore to get that (famous examples being Powell's in Portland and The Strand in NYC).<p>The problem is that people have diverse interests (niches) and a typical brick and mortar retail operation simply can't afford to carry much depth in any particular niche. The result is a lot of niches shallowly represented, at most big box stores you can't even find all of the books written by a given author, even famous ones, unless they are insanely popular at the moment.<p>Ironically I think in the next few decades the pre-internet trend will reverse and independent used bookstores will stick around longer than the chains.
It's strange - when Borders came to our town (Corvallis, OR) I was excited. In the end, though, the number of full price books I bought I could probably count on my fingers. The CD listening stations are now no longer needed and the location wasn't convenient enough to stop in for a coffee.<p>Our independent bookstores are still alive, luckily.
Mark Evans, an executive at Borders until 2009, had a few insights into why Borders died.<p><a href="http://www.quora.com/Borders-Books/Why-is-Barnes-and-Noble-performing-well-as-a-business-while-Borders-has-filed-for-bankruptcy" rel="nofollow">http://www.quora.com/Borders-Books/Why-is-Barnes-and-Noble-p...</a>
definitely going to suck to have a world where you can't go chill out somewhere and check out some new books and magazines. Not to mention 10,000 more jobs gone
Here's Mitch Albom's epitath for Border's in the Detroit Free Press:<p><a href="http://www.freep.com/article/20110717/COL01/107170485/Mitch-Albom-As-Borders-fades-so-does-bookstore-magic?odyssey=mod|newswell|text|FRONTPAGE|p" rel="nofollow">http://www.freep.com/article/20110717/COL01/107170485/Mitch-...</a>
Though I had to drive over an hour to get there I still patronized Border's orignal store in Ann Arbor. After the crash they were the only store to still stock a fair inventory of tech books, though fewer with each passing year.
My father told me about a time when the big cities were plagued with cinemas, some of them really really spectacular. This time exist no more.<p>The cinemas of today... they are totally different like those circus with 20 elephants and tigers you just can't see it again.<p>Maybe it is time for people like google guys to enter and record with the street view tech what is like a bookstore of today because maybe it is obvious for us but our children will not know what is it.<p>I'm digitalizing all my books with the fantastic Fujitsu S1500 so I don't have to carry a metric ton of books around with me. Ebook tech will only improve, it is in its infancy today.
From my own perspective: my wife and I love going to the local big-box bookstore, grabbing a few books or magazines off the shelf, buying a few coffee/bakery items, and sitting for an hour or so. Judging from the crowd that accompanied us on most weekends, I don't think we're unique in that regard: the only money we're spending there is in the coffee shop, or through impulse purchases.<p>The fact is, we buy most of our books on Amazon or other online retailers; the bookstore is a form of cheap entertainment for us, not a serious place to shop. Their variety of inventory simply wasn't good enough to rely on (I paint Barnes and Noble with this brush as well, and the last time I was in a Chapters, it was similar), and overnight shipping is close enough to instant gratification for us.
Yea, I know that legacy MBAs and "shareholder value" based on stock price is horrible and certainly helped the demise. Ackman (a activist shareholder who specializes in takeovers) once proposed that Borders takeover B&N, which of course would have been horrible.
I've noticed that borders has made some moves at diversification (they have Legos on the shelf now, etc.) but I think it was pretty clearly too little too late. The history of the company is just one poor move after another once the original owners got out.
I wonder if barnes n noble would pick off the highest sales locations from the liquidators and convert them for markets where they weren't dominant yet.<p>Wonder what type of place could survive and be profitable at the size of the typical borders stores (20-30k sq feet)?
The local Borders store had a big going out of business sale here about a month ago. It was really sad walking inside and seeing all the shelves empty. It was even more depressing walking out having seen nothing that looked interesting to buy.
Wow. When Borders closed the store closest to my house, I understood why since the only people who ever seemed to go there were vagrants getting out of the heat and people using the wifi(I used the wifi). But there's a flagship store here that always hosts author signings and events located 5 minutes south of the Strip in Vegas. I hope Barnes and Noble buys the space since there's no existing stores near it, and the place is always packed with people. I'd hate to see my favorite hangout become another overly self important clothing store.
Kinda sad, but for my book-buying habits, used books on Amazon have killed my fiction buying, and NoStarch, Manning etc., have killed my bricks&mortar tech-book binges.
What is Barnes & Noble doing that's so significantly better to Border's strategy?<p>They've executed well on their eBook strategy (although they came to the party late too).<p>They have Starbucks in their stores.<p>Not to discount those things, but is that really the different between bankruptcy and success?
Does this mean they will stop spamming me now? I mean, it just goes to my spam folder now, but they went from occasionally sending me something useful to junk almost every day, no matter how many times I unsubscribed.
Same problem as Tower Records. If you can only physically stock 60,000 titles there is no way to compete with an online company that can simultaneously offer all of them.
I read a lot more now.
Before ereaders, I used to read a book a week.
I now read between 4 to 5 books a week.
In addition, the books I read are of higher quality ( less trash, more mathematics, medicine, philosophy, political analysis and finance ) now that I mainly read from a e-reader. Multi-volume books are so much easier to carry around in a ereader.