Considering that I did all of my in-store Christmas shopping at B&N (I did my online shopping at eBay and Amazon), I struggle with what, exactly, is wrong. They have a great selection of presents (full disclosure… I’m an early Nook Color owner), their stores are a nice environment for shopping, and you can get a cup of coffee and flip through that book on 1939 Soviet plans for invading Germany that you’d never actually buy. Losing Borders was a blow to US reading. Losing B&N would be a knock-out.

I’m also sad that they closed Fictionwise. A few years ago, FW was my biggest distributor, generating thousands of dollars. My last check from them was $51.80, so I understand their lack of enthusiasm for continuing the effort. Still, it did give them at least a bit of a world-wide presence… as well as ownership of two of the original eBookstores. I would have thought that they could brand a FW version of the Nook… which seemed to be their original idea in buying FW… remember the first Nooks supported eReader format, not ePub?

Anyway, they’ve got money from Microsoft. Time to spend some of it expanding worldwide… and doing a better job attracting people to their stores.

The Canadian Booksellers Association has repeatedly used the Investment Canada Act to try to get Ottawa to repel the barbarians. Companies like Amazon and Apple, whose mainline businesses aren’t running bookstores — or even the selling of books and other cultural media — have managed to get approval from the Honourable James Moore, Minister of Canadian Heritage and Official Languages. In Amazon’s case, they had to grease the wheels with $20 million.

And they probably had to agree not to call him the Honorable James Moore. A good part of the justification for the Investment Canada Act is to keep American “culture” from corrupting Canadians (as one might infer from the ministry that enforces it).

I was *very* annoyed, because the device won’t even switch on for the first time without registering, but after I created a gmail account it let me register with no problem at all. The first thing after registering I rooted it
Now I can have many reading aplications on the NST, not just the one provided by manufacturer.

I consider it extremely rude from a manufacturer to hold your device *hostage* until they force you to register. This is one of reasons that I will not use their store. The other main reason for not using their store is that they do not let me use it because I do not have USA billing address.

Because the in-store prices are frequently higher than their on-line store is. I’m not talking about Amazon being cheaper, this is their own web presence.

Honor the same price in-store that you do online at the register, and I’ll buy more books in-store. I still browse in-store to find new things, because it’s not easy enough to do that online.

The selection was the thing. It caused Crown Books (a discount chain store) to go out of business. But as Borders put store everywhere, the selection thinned, and sales went down. B&N thinned out an already thin selection and stocked more non-books.

Just before Borders went under, the selection was so poor I HAD to buy from Amazon to find the books I wanted. B&N was worse.

Why is B&N going to go out of business? Because I can finishing browsing in less than 15. Because they only want to sell books that can be stacked in many copies. Because I’m not going to drive to a B&N, find the book I want isn’t stocked, place a special order, wait two to four weeks, then drive back to pick up the book.

Why should anyone even bother with B&N?

That is why I expect that if B&N were to go away (I’m skeptical, BTW, they’re not *that* close to the edge) it wouldn’t be a really big deal except for the folks losing their jobs. Avid readers would find their books with indies or online and the casual readers would still get their bestsellers. And the BPHs would barely notice.

I agree with those who pointed out that B&N’s limited international presence doesn’t explain its declining U.S. sales. I suspect the major factor there is that more people who buy books as gifts do so online and, when they think online, they think Amazon.

B&N also seems to be displaying a less-than-impressive enthusiasm for ebooks. In very early December, I published Hospital Gowns and Other Embarrassments: A Teen Girl’s Guide to Hospitals in both print and digital formats. The results are revealing.

Given the ebook directly, Amazon literally processed and released the digital version overnight, while Apple took about a week. The minor ebook distributors, Sony, Kobo, Diesel etc, download it from Smashwords within a week and sold it shortly thereafter.

B&N took almost a month to download the digital version from Smashwords (Dec. 28), and a week later it still isn’t available online, although the print version has long been there.

That sends a message to savvy ebook buyers. If you want to get an ebook quickly after its release, don’t buy a Nook.

Places like Target and Walmart are fine for lead titles in most genre lines like romance, but they don’t have the selection even a small bookstore has, nor do they sell genres like science fiction, and they have peculiar tastes about what is and isn’t acceptable. Some romance publishers have had to change a cover they considered too racy while at the same time, they sell erotica like 5O SHADES.

Plus, these stores are only interested in what make the most profit with the least space. The day that books stop selling to their satisfaction, they are gone with as little fanfare as a towel color that is no longer popular.

And, it will be very easy for books not to make enough profit to satisfy them because books have a very small markup of around 3-5%.

When you consider that some furniture has a 1000% to 5000% markup which allows huge profits even with buyer-perceived bargains and other products have similar markup values, that 3-5% is pretty dang pathetic.

And in bookstores like B&N, that’s why you see so much space which offers novelties like games and other nonbook items because they do have such a high profit involved.

I generally agree with you, but suggesting that the hopelessly meager selection of book titles at the local WalMart, Target or grocery story (Maybe 200 titles) is at all equivalent to a decent bookstore is a stretch.

Yes, it is a sales outlet…for only a handful of major titles. I think book publishers would almost be better off not offering these titles to WalMart & Target since they can only sell a handful of titles to them.

These limited selections have drained away a LOT of sales for B&N/Borders stores…but probably not so much profitability since these books were often sold at a steep discount to get traffic and hopefully convince people to buy backlist while they were there).

The end of B&N is not the end of print publishing…but boy is it going to fragment the industry. I wonder if the end of B&N would make the industry look a lot more like the comic book industry — a couple of major distributors who wield incredible power and nothing but independent stores, with a constant cycle of existing stores closing and (often undercapitalized) new stores opening. I don’t think that’s going to be particularly good for publishing.