Although the press releases (and they were long and thorough) tried to spin it otherwise, the news today that Borders was exploring "all" possibilities to save itself was disturbing.
I was asked Thursday night if I had heard the news. Yup. You betcha! In fact, I received an industry alert early this morning, only to discover later that Barnes & Noble had told the press that they were not opposed to buying their major national competitor.
I told my staff that I didn't know whether to smile or throw up, and that was true. Borders was once one of the great independent bookstores, starting with its store in the Michigan college town of Ann Arbor, and then growing to become a major player in the books business. Many local people have ties to that original store and company, and even today many of your friends and neighbors say they are going to Hawley-Cooke when they mean Borders in Louisville.
One of the pieces of advice we received from the owners of Hawley-Cooke before we opened our own store was this: DO NOT OPEN A SECOND LOCATION.
That Louisville institution was strong enough to scare off other national players, like Borders, until their expansion became unmanageable. When the national chain decided they were going to join competitor Barnes & Noble in the Louisville market, they offered the owners of the two surviving local stores a buyout. The way we hear it, the owners of Hawley-Cooke understood that they could not maintain their size and scale if faced with two national chain competitors, so they sold the remaining stores.
For our colleagues at Carmichael's Bookstore, that was a small blessing. After almost 25 years as the "little brother" of the larger local store, they inherited an awful lot of loyal customers and a newly prominent position in the community.
The news from Wall Street today is merely recognition that a business model that relies on predatory pricing (or debilitating discounts) will not work. The scale and efficiencies of a national chain ought to allow them to build the best of bookstores. Instead, both the national chains decided to concentrate their investments in selling more copies of fewer books, and in my view, despite comfy chairs and gourmet coffee bars, they simply did not and do not cut it with true book lovers.
I sell books for a living, but before that I bought books for my own edification and pleasure. And I have to tell you that when I visited either of the national chains, I was always amazed that I couldn't find the books I was looking for. I very often had to settle for something less than I desired. And in all my years as a book consumer, I never once thought about asking a national chain store to order a book for me. Whether it was me or them, I never felt as if they were interested in selling me something they hadn't already decided to carry in case quantities.
Since we've opened in New Albany, I've discovered that the situation is worse. Instead of offering personal service, the chains treated their customers as pigeons, and they treated their employees even worse.
There's no schadenfreude here. It's a sad day for a proud chain, and it was not necessary.
The good news is that the number of independent bookstores continues to grow, if only slightly. Indies are gaining market share for the first time, and if you're reading this books blog, you know why.
We're growing slowly and we hope we're becoming an important asset to the community. We knew from the beginning that the first five years would be rough and we anticipated the recession we're all sharing in, even if we would have wished for a brighter 2008 economy.
Borders is unlikely to survive as a unique entity. But then, they weren't unique anymore. For a few years, consolidation will allow a single national chain to survive. Like their online competition, the remaining national chain will probably try to become all things to all people, while being run from (and by) Wall Street and concentrating on skimming only the cream from the books business Instead of specializing, they'll make the mistake of ignoring their core business to seek greater profits elsewhere. And then they'll grumble about how books are dragging them down. And then they'll fail.
Their business model is simply not sustainable. We believe ours is. Our customers' self interest will kick in and we believe they'll appreciate all the reasons a local independent bookstore is an asset to the community and not just a means for exporting dollars from the local economy.
But we'll see.
So long Borders. What might have been...
Showing posts with label Barnes and Noble. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Barnes and Noble. Show all posts
Thursday, March 20, 2008
Wednesday, March 7, 2007
Book Recommendations: Who Needs Them?
News Item: Sometime this spring, the Los Angeles Times is expected to announce that it is folding its highly esteemed Sunday book review into a new section that will combine books with opinion pieces...Jeffrey A. Trachtenberg in the Wall Street Journal.
Where does one go to get critical reviews of current books? Who decides which books get reviewed? Even I don't read the New York Times Book Review every Sunday. We have patrons who do, and others who read the New York Review of Books. We even have one patron who picks up the London Review of Books and the Times (of London) Literary Supplement.
But for most of us, we rely on the Courier-Journal's book articles, overseen by editorial page editor Keith Runyon...and most of those are syndicated wire service pieces. Do we really care to hear what others have to say about books, or would we rather stumble upon them and rely on the pretty cover and the dust jacket notes? Do we pick a few favorite writers and stick with them until they die?
Granted, if you're reading a daily books blog, you are faced with a gargantuan problem: there are simply too many good books out there to spend much time chasing down new books. We can't read every one we'd like to.
For example, I just finished reading Blood and Thunder by Hampton Sides...four months after it came out. I stared at the book for 17 weeks before starting it, even though I knew I wanted to read it. It's a story I knew little about, the tale of the American conquest of the Southwest and the indigenous Indian tribes, most notably the Navajo. It's a compelling history that begins in 1846 with the Mexican War (a rather bloodless thing in New Mexico, though the bloodiest war the U.S. ever fought on a casualties-per-troop basis) and extends through the Civil War to the "Long Walk" that finally subjugated the nomadic Navajo units. Kit Carson plays a central role, in flashbacks to his journeys along the Santa Fe Trail and his scouting for the Fremont expeditions along the Oregon Trail, to his service as an officer in the U.S. Army throughout the 1860s. I recommend it, but I digress.
The decline of full-fledged newspaper book review sections is attributed to "not enough ads." A recent Chicago Tribune weekend edition went out with zero publisher ads. Why?
In an era of targeted marketing, publishers say the best time to reach readers is when they are in the stores with money in their pockets looking to make an immediate purchase. But with a sea of titles in the stores...the only way for publishers to stand out is to pay for real estate in the front and pile those books up high.
"You want to see your books in prominent places," says Tom Perry, associate publisher of Bertelsmann AG's Random House Publishing Group. "Such co-op advertising is where marketing dollars are going that might otherwise have been spent on advertising."...One publisher says that chain bookstores can charge $1 or more per book to stack titles in desirable locations, such as on a table at the entrance or in a display featuring new nonfiction titles.
One last pull-quote from the WSJ article: "I don't understand why newspapers, when they want to cut space, they immediately think of depriving people who like to read." (Frank Wilson, book-review editor at Philadelphia's The Inquirer.
As an independent, I lament the slow disappearance of book reviews, but the article is right. Publishers won't pay. When you see a bookstore advertising a book, there might be a token fee kicked back to the store by a publisher, but it is nominal. The most generous one will pay us $50 for a significant advertisement, which won't even buy one ad in The Tribune, much less help us pay for a campaign.
I also take note of where the money is going - to the chains. Read Stacy Mitchell's The Big-Box Swindle to see what kind of leverage the chains have on the publishers. A few years ago, the American Booksellers Association filed suit to level out the playing field, but the muscular response of the chains has once again cowed the publishers. Barnes and Noble is bigger than the top ten publishers put together, after all.
Now imagine this world, one where Wal-Mart orders 100 copies of a book per store at a discount of 55%. They don't pay for them until they've sold, and if Wal-Mart has to mark them down, they simply pay the publisher 55% of whatever price they sell it for. Oh, and if it doesn't sell, Wal-Mart just sends it back for 100% credit against the still-unpaid bill. Imagine what kind of store we could have if we only paid for books after they sold, could mark them down whenever we wished, and still make the same profit margin!
Listen to this posting
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Where does one go to get critical reviews of current books? Who decides which books get reviewed? Even I don't read the New York Times Book Review every Sunday. We have patrons who do, and others who read the New York Review of Books. We even have one patron who picks up the London Review of Books and the Times (of London) Literary Supplement.
But for most of us, we rely on the Courier-Journal's book articles, overseen by editorial page editor Keith Runyon...and most of those are syndicated wire service pieces. Do we really care to hear what others have to say about books, or would we rather stumble upon them and rely on the pretty cover and the dust jacket notes? Do we pick a few favorite writers and stick with them until they die?
Granted, if you're reading a daily books blog, you are faced with a gargantuan problem: there are simply too many good books out there to spend much time chasing down new books. We can't read every one we'd like to.
For example, I just finished reading Blood and Thunder by Hampton Sides...four months after it came out. I stared at the book for 17 weeks before starting it, even though I knew I wanted to read it. It's a story I knew little about, the tale of the American conquest of the Southwest and the indigenous Indian tribes, most notably the Navajo. It's a compelling history that begins in 1846 with the Mexican War (a rather bloodless thing in New Mexico, though the bloodiest war the U.S. ever fought on a casualties-per-troop basis) and extends through the Civil War to the "Long Walk" that finally subjugated the nomadic Navajo units. Kit Carson plays a central role, in flashbacks to his journeys along the Santa Fe Trail and his scouting for the Fremont expeditions along the Oregon Trail, to his service as an officer in the U.S. Army throughout the 1860s. I recommend it, but I digress.
The decline of full-fledged newspaper book review sections is attributed to "not enough ads." A recent Chicago Tribune weekend edition went out with zero publisher ads. Why?
In an era of targeted marketing, publishers say the best time to reach readers is when they are in the stores with money in their pockets looking to make an immediate purchase. But with a sea of titles in the stores...the only way for publishers to stand out is to pay for real estate in the front and pile those books up high.
"You want to see your books in prominent places," says Tom Perry, associate publisher of Bertelsmann AG's Random House Publishing Group. "Such co-op advertising is where marketing dollars are going that might otherwise have been spent on advertising."...One publisher says that chain bookstores can charge $1 or more per book to stack titles in desirable locations, such as on a table at the entrance or in a display featuring new nonfiction titles.
One last pull-quote from the WSJ article: "I don't understand why newspapers, when they want to cut space, they immediately think of depriving people who like to read." (Frank Wilson, book-review editor at Philadelphia's The Inquirer.
As an independent, I lament the slow disappearance of book reviews, but the article is right. Publishers won't pay. When you see a bookstore advertising a book, there might be a token fee kicked back to the store by a publisher, but it is nominal. The most generous one will pay us $50 for a significant advertisement, which won't even buy one ad in The Tribune, much less help us pay for a campaign.
I also take note of where the money is going - to the chains. Read Stacy Mitchell's The Big-Box Swindle to see what kind of leverage the chains have on the publishers. A few years ago, the American Booksellers Association filed suit to level out the playing field, but the muscular response of the chains has once again cowed the publishers. Barnes and Noble is bigger than the top ten publishers put together, after all.
Now imagine this world, one where Wal-Mart orders 100 copies of a book per store at a discount of 55%. They don't pay for them until they've sold, and if Wal-Mart has to mark them down, they simply pay the publisher 55% of whatever price they sell it for. Oh, and if it doesn't sell, Wal-Mart just sends it back for 100% credit against the still-unpaid bill. Imagine what kind of store we could have if we only paid for books after they sold, could mark them down whenever we wished, and still make the same profit margin!
Listen to this posting
powered by ODEO
or download BookRecommendationsWhoNeedsThem.mp3
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