On Sat, Jul 23, 2011 at 12:11 PM, PGage <[email protected]> wrote: > > The article argues that the difference between Borders and B&N is that, at > the same time Borders was doubling down on bricks and morter operations and > outsourcing online and ebook operations, B&N was investing seriously in > ebooks and online operations. > > Of course a big part of me takes some glee in the thought of both gigantic > booksellers going belly-up, given the devastation they have caused to so > many independent bookstores. It would be satisfying if online and ebooks > rendered mega-bookstores obsolete, while still leaving a sustainable niche > for the small local shops that not so long ago seemed on the verge of > extinction. But the article does point out that there are lots of places in > the US that don't have, and can not sustain, a good independent book shop, > and B&N or Borders may have been their only physical access to a good > selection of classic and best selling books. It reminded me of years ago > when I wrote a post to another list I once belonged to bashing McDonalds > (for all the obvious reasons) only to get a response from a list member in a > small, poor country saying that McDonalds was one of the few places where he > lived where his family could get an affordable meal confident that it was > prepared in anything like basic hygenic conditions.
It's interesting that articles like this don't implicate publishers in the fall of independent, then chain bookstores. The chains got big discounts from publishers which allowed them to undercut independent bookstores to the point of driving the independents out of business. Now with online discounts, especially from used book aggregators, the full price new book market is disappearing. Book publishers have a horrible business model where they oversell new books and take back the unsold ones and wholesale them out as remainders to discount merchants. I'd like to see the return of independent bookstores as targeted niche businesses. The reason it's not going to happen is that anybody looking to open up such a store will find that publishers don't care about making small stores sustainable and a new store owner will find herself in competition with online based and used book businesses, both of which sell books for less than she will be charged by publishers. There is not an even spread of book buying behavior. There is a small number of power readers who buy many books each year, a fair sized number who buy a few books, and the vast majority who buy at most one or two. Power readers drive the market and they are a target market for ereaders. They're the ones with the practical incentive to buy them (others may buy them to keep up to date with technology), but it's the power readers who save money by downloading their books. -- TV or Not TV .... The Smartest (TV) People! You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "TV or Not TV" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/tvornottv?hl=en
