Mike Shatzkin tells us in his recent post at The Idea Logical Company, about supply chain planning at Barnes & Noble, that “When B&N was building out its capabilities at the turn of this century, the number of possible titles was probably not even a million and many of their stores carried over 100,000. Now there well over 10 million titles available through Ingram’s print-on-demand database plus nearly a million more in warehouse stock (which includes most of what is new and sells the fastest), and the retail stores carry a third or less than they did back then.”
That’s a lot of books. No wonder Amazon’s doing the majority of book sales in the world: there are few bookstores which can afford to stock more than a tiny fraction of available books. But even Amazon are feeling the pressure of the over-supply of books, and are cutting quantities in their warehouses. It’s always hard to schedule truck deliveries in the Christmas season, and this one seems to be worse than others: so if they are out of stock of a book this month, it’ll probably take a bit longer to get it back to availability than in the past. What I wonder is whether they are having the same difficulty scheduling trucks which are loaded with higher-margin merchandise. I bet not.
In a typically dyspeptic take on Mike Shatzkin’s post The Passive Voice assures us that the days of the bookstore are numbered. He ends his comments by declaring “In past decades, PG [the Passive Guy, as the author of PV likes to refer to himself] would sometimes visit a bookstore to kill some time in a pleasant manner. The electronic devices in his pocket or on his desk provide a much better time-killing service than any bookstore he has ever visited.” I dare say his local bookstore isn’t too concerned by his desertion.
Our breaths are bated as we stand on the brink of change. Will the dauntless Mr Daunt save B & N? Will PG get his way and find there are no shops in which to kill his time? Or on the contrary will independent bookstores continue their modest renaissance? Will Amazon get out of books? Will the ABA bookstore “Bookshop” work? Will big publishers turn into small publishers? Stay tuned.
Passive Guy shares a trait with much of the self-publishing crowd of mistaking themselves as being representative of the book market as a whole. This all makes perfect sense if one accepts my take that the self-published novel is the modern equivalent of the old dime novels, or later on the Harlequin/Regency romances or sci-fi Ace doubles. These were never about bookstores. That’s not where you went to buy them. If, when you think of a book, this is what comes to mind, then bookstores are and always have been irrelevant. Yet bookstores existed, and continue to exist, almost as if the worlds of books and their readers were actually larger than imagined.
Hear, hear. In so far as they ever see beyond the dime novel trope, what they then see is only trade publishing. Some of the most profitable publishing is not something they’d ever think about: a favorite example of mine is “Manual for the Repair of Nuclear Power Plants” — no doubt intensely boring but (if it existed) worth every penny of its doubtless high price.
Perhaps he’s a little overboard, but you do have to admit that the bookstore *as we have known it* has a problem. Even counting out supermarket rack books, as Hersh does, at least half of their historical customers have decamped for either digital ordering or digital reading. If half your customers are gone, you have a cash flow problem, which most bookstores do.
Daunt’s problem is that he isn’t trying to steer a yacht (Daunt) or even the Queen Mary (Waterstones) – he’s trying to steer the Exon Valdez, and it will take a lot of effort to get it to turn at all.
You may well be right, and the Exxon Valdez will end up ploughing into the reef, but Mr Daunt does at least appear to have made a good start. Describing the “look” of B&N stores as “crucifyingly boring” shows a willingness to tread on toes. Maybe the rescue attempt won’t work, but B&N do still have a lot of real estate into which they may be able to attract customers of some kind. I suspect people don’t buy from Amazon because they positively want to; they do it because it makes sense. If buying somewhere else “made sense” in a different way, who knows?
We commentators tend to see trends and extrapolate on them —- but it isn’t altogether inevitable that all bricks and mortar retail is doomed. They ripped up the railway line through my home town fifty years ago, but recently had to build it back. Macys may keep on keeping on. It all boils down to what we, the public, end up wanting. And what adaptations retailers can come up with.
There are two questions here: the fate of the bookstore in general, and of the chain megabookstore in particular.
The chain megabookstore only arose in the 1990s. I remember the first time I set foot in a Border’s. It flattened me. I had been in large bookstores before, but they were indies, on the Powell’s model. Chain were B. Dalton and the like, found in malls, not very large, and not very good even within the constraints of their size.
It may be that the run of the chain megabookstore is reaching its end. RIP Border’s and B&N. Does this tell us anything about the fate of the smallish local indie? This is not at all obvious to me. The business model is different.
I do agree. The chains filled the hole which has now been comprehensively plugged by Amazon — offering a wider selection than any independent bookstore could. That rationale has gone, as indeed have Borders, B. Dalton etc. I think that what Mr Daunt’s aim is is to make the B&N stores more like independent bookstores than they are now — more like Waterstones in UK, surprise, surprise. No reason it shouldn’t work: no guarantee that it will.