MarketWatch: Get ready for the bookstore massacre

By Brett Arends


BOSTON (MarketWatch) -- Are we about to see bookstores closing across the country? I suspect so.

Look at the depressing proxy battle for what remains of Barnes & Noble Inc., the world's largest chain of bookstores. You could hardly dominate an industry more than B&N has dominated the landscape of traditional bookstores. Yet its fortunes have fallen so far that management has hoisted the white flag and put it up for sale.

Barnes & Noble stock, which was flying high above $45 five years ago, has plummeted below $15. Wall Street's view of its prospects is so dim that not even the news of a bid battle has set it alight. The only bright spot: The company's e-book sales, which rocketed 51% last quarter.

(A vignette of a company in decline: Barnes & Noble's annual filing shows that management and staff owns 5.5 million stock options, granted to them in previous years to give them an incentive to work harder and smarter. The options have an average exercise price of $20.19 -- meaning most of them, if not all, are now seemingly worthless.)
digits: It's the end of bookstores as we know them

As for the other giant of traditional bookstores: Borders Group Inc. stock has plummeted by as much as 95% from its peak. Indeed, Borders stock, at around $1.20, is now a fraction of the cost of a book. ............(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.marketwatch.com/story/are-bookstores-doomed-2010-08-17?link=kiosk

They couldn't step into the 21st century, lower their prices so book and movie lovers would continue to shop, not to mention running all the mom and pop places out of business. No sympathy here. Amazon + free shipping+ netflicks works for me.

I'm hardly a Luddite, but this is one trend I'm not so happy about.

Love the smell of old used books. And for a while, we still have libraries.

I chuckled, but in a sad way, because that's probably true.

I take my kids there and we walk home with books and enthusiasm to learn something. Somehow that doesn't translate online.

Not to mention the smell of book paper.

and still realize that nothing lives forever.

Scrolls have their charm. Leather bound books are lovely, well built, items. There's nothing wrong with appreciating them, while also understanding that the paperback was a welcome improvement.

The loss of big books stores is merely a transition. The services they provide that are still relevant will appear elsewhere as long as they are wanted and needed. The fact that they won't necessarily be filled with dead trees won't be all that important.

Whether scrolls, leatherbound, or paperbacks, a book has a personality of its own. And they recycle pretty well.

Somehow "that new file I downloaded" doesn't engender the same sense of discovery.

They've had several starts and stops with e-books, predominately because of the interface issues. I don't think they're done yet. Apparently one "holy grail" of the electronic book industry is "flexible" display. People want it to bend and flex as they interact with it.

although I'm holding out to buy one until they get display issues down. I'd be a lot more receptive if they allowed the publisher to choose a default font and page layout - to me, that's an integral part of the experience.

Meanwhile, I'm almost finished reading this beautiful B&N edition of the Complete Tales and Poems of Edgar Allan Poe. It cost $18, probably less than it would have 50 years ago.

http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/25525

:)

Just one of 33,000 (and growing) books preserved digitally forever by Project Gutenberg.

I suspect that these are the kinds of improvements that will be coming. The revolution will probably be "dynamic content". i.e. the reader being involved in the story, not just a passive observer.

when directors involved the audience in the story. They found out that much of the audience didn't want to be involved, or they weren't that interesting.

But like virtual reality it will probably have a niche.

The conclusion from much of that was that there was too much demand for interaction. It was a bit like 3-D movies, the technology doesn't enhance the movie, it tends to be an "add on" to the movie. It has been proposed that the interaction can be as little as chosing a tone of voice so to speak.

For me, as well as lots of other people, probably, reading a book is a totally sensual experience.

From the feel of the book, the way it sounds when it's riffled or tapped...the smooth or rough finish of the pages...

The smell of the paper

Sometimes if there are very smooth pages in the middle, like the kind that they print photos on, I rub the pages on my face and rub my hands over the pages.


I have this totally bizarre love affair with books that's been going on for over 50 years, since I was a child.

When people have left me...hurt me...disappointed me...

The books were always there.

:)

pretty damn certain it will say the same things next time you take it down.

Download an e-book, and what guarantee do you have that it hasn't been edited since the last time you looked at it? Or, that the next time you look at it, it will will include everything you remembered from last time?

There is a permanency about the printed word which e-books will never have.

I don't look forward to a Wiki-world.

Even your current copy in reader can be made "permanent" by simply turning the wireless off.

Books will be gone within a century. Note I didn't say year or decade but the idea that a century from now humans will still write words onto paper, bind them up, physically transport them around the world, store them in warehouses, place them in retail stores, transport them to a residence/library and then store them forever on bookshelves (subject to the ravages of time and environment) will seem archaic at best.

would be all that's needed to throw us into a dark age.

I'm no luddite - I am, after all, using a computer here - but I have absolutely zero faith in electronic media for the preservation and dissemination of knowledge.

I have literally hundreds of 3.5 floppies that are absolutely useless - every bit of information is gone forever - because modern media won't read them. The 5.25 floppies I threw out decades ago - same thing. My first (unpublished) novel was written on 5.25 floppies - if it wasn't for the hard copies I made, printing on paper, it might as well have never been written. My second and third (unpublished) novels were written and stored on 3.5 floppies - same thing. Oh, and my background notes, they hundreds of pages of material that went into the development of the novels - such as dictionaries of the invented languages, histories of the mythical lands, details of the lives of the pantheons created which were referenced in the novels but never printed out as part of the novels - they're gone. Lost to outmoded electronic media. So, even if by weird circumstance I did publish, and future generations were interested in finding out how I developed these worlds, they'd have nothing.

And there is no way I'm the only example of this.

The collapse of every major civilization has been accompanied by the destruction of its libraries by barbarians who did not value them. I don't care if you are talking about the clay tablets of Mesopotamia, the torching of the great library of Alexandria, the purging of heretical texts by the church, the sack of Rome, or the destruction of the Maya codices. Every one of those required the physical destruction of physical items, and through it all some survived to inform later generations. Today, all it takes is a minute change in the electronic media to wipe out history. 80% of all silent films made have been lost forever. 50% of films made before 1950 don't exist anymore, simply because of changes in the media. Videotape of TV shows from the 50s and 60s cannot be replayed today because of the changes in the technology and the failure to preserve them in the more modern format - we can watch 'I Love Lucy' forever, but 'The Untouchables' is gone.

Who is to say that with everything in electronic media there won't be some clever barbarian who unleashes a virus that will destroy, forever, 10,000x the knowledge lost in the fires of Alexandria?

The only safeguard against that is printed books. Not books preserved in the ether-sphere, or on disks, or imprinted on crystals, or whatever cool technology that comes along - but BOOKS.

There is no reason you couldn't copy the file from 5.25" to 3.5" to CD to DVD to Bluray etc while the technology existed.

The 5.25" drive was invented in 1976 and wasn't really "gone" (as in very difficult to find media & drives commercially) until 1990.
The 3.5" drive was invented in 1982 and wasn't really "gone" until 2010 (Sony finally stopped production).
The CD-R was invented in 1990 and readily available by 1995 and is still very much available.
The DVD-R was available by 2000 and is also very much available today.
The BD-R was available by 2006 and is also very much available today.

The overlap between those medias was huge. The digital copy was only lost due to ignorance and a failure to plan. No more inevitable than your only paper copy being lost due to theft, fire, or flood.

"80% of all silent films made have been lost forever. 50% of films made before 1950 don't exist anymore, simply because of changes in the media. Videotape of TV shows from the 50s and 60s cannot be replayed today because of the changes in the technology and the failure to preserve them in the more modern format - we can watch 'I Love Lucy' forever, but 'The Untouchables' is gone."

Most of early film works were lost due to the effect of time of film medium.


"Who is to say that with everything in electronic media there won't be some clever barbarian who unleashes a virus that will destroy, forever, 10,000x the knowledge lost in the fires of Alexandria?"

MEH. Physics say it can happen. A ebook burned on a write-once DVD is not erasable by a virus.

"The only safeguard against that is printed books. Not books preserved in the ether-sphere, or on disks, or imprinted on crystals, or whatever cool technology that comes along - but BOOKS. "
That is a luddite view. So imagine 1000 years from now, 10,000 years from now, 1 billion years from now. Humans will still be cutting down trees, turning them into pulp, converting that to paper, bleeching it, printing ink on the paper, binding those papers into a book.

Really?

It isn't a matter of if it simply is a matter of when. Maybe ebooks of "today" are too early. Maybe the transistion won't be for another decade, another century, another milenium however it will happen.

It is inevitable.

you may know that the US Constitution and the Declaration of Independence - the original documents - are virtually unreadable. Seems they were mounted on a wall by a window for years, and the sun has faded them to the point where only some characters are visible.

I'd like to think there's no possibility that certain parties with certain ideologies may construct conspiracy scenarios to facilitate the "rewriting" of both documents.

I have data that was originally entered on my Apple II computer and saved to 360k 5.25" floppies. I converted it to text format and copied it over to larger format 5.25" floppies when I got my first PC. As I upgraded my computers and storage media, I kept doing the same thing. The only data I have "lost" is stuff that I had no backed up before a hard drive crash or stuff I decided was not worth keeping.

BUT if something happens to me and I do not actively continue to move the data to new formats, it will be lost.

I can remember stories from 20 years or more ago that many military veteran records were lost because no one thought to transfer them to new media when the old computer tape machines were outmoded. Yes, they faithfully stored the tape reels, but ten years too late realized that the machines to read them were no longer in existence. And, being magnetic tape, the surface of the tapes were flaking off and may not have been readable any more.

About the same time, NASA was appealing for donations of floppy disks - the disks they needed for some of their old computers were no longer being sold and they were hoping average people would have some that could be used. In that case, if I remember correctly, Radio Shack found a stock of the right size in one of their warehouses and donated them. I seem to remember that NASA needed 8" floppies - not something the average home user would have had.

I do prefer printed books - I have an entire room in my house dedicated to my library. But we have to remember that MOST of what humans have produced has been ephemeral. Currently I am reading through my collection of old science fiction anthologies. Many of the magazines in which the stories were originally published no longer exist except in obscure private collections and most had very small distribution. So except in these old anthologies they are hard to find. Even the anthologies had little distribution, so out of the billions of people on the planet, few have seen these works. And the old paperback copies I have are disintegrating. They were printed on cheap pulp paper which is literally eating itself from the acids in it. And the glue in the binding is no longer holding the pages in - if the glue has not been eaten by insects. If these are not preserved by putting them in electronic format, I expect they will no longer exist in another fifty years - there is not enough interest to pay for re-printing them.

Another category of book whose life span has been extended are family and place histories. In the mid to late 1800s, many of those were published, often privately with small distribution. For genealogists, those were great places to find obscure family links, but they were often hard to find hidden away in local libraries and private collections. Now, many of those books have been put on the internet in a range of formats - Internet Archives (archive.org) has them for free download (as well as a lot of other media). Ancestry.com has many but you have to pay to use their excellent search engines to access them.

Besides the dead trees, what will be the other services missed?

I hardly ever hit bookstores or libraries, that's why I ask.

People go to a B&N for socialization, a bit of research, and some quiet isolation. There also "book signings" and product displays. They also sell food and coffee.

How is not having the paper or hardback book going green?

Just think of all the mountaintops that will be destroyed providing electricity to download internet books. Destroying mountaintops has nothing to do with going green.

Why not have more trees farms? or use hemp?

Also, this is class war, as not everyone can afford a computer.

Why do we turn over our right to free speech to the internet world.

Valuable books could be "accidently" deleted, or "edited".

THIS IS TERRIBLE!!!!!

Ironic, but if one wants to go to "Mayberry" where there are mom & pop operations, etc. then they have to come to San Francisco neighborhoods, NYC, etc...


Funny that the media tries to associate small town values with conservatives, but you have to go to Liberal cities to find neighborhoods that look like the old USA.

I don't live in an urban area and there are several great mom and pop bookstores in my area. Talk about elitism...

Twenty years ago we had four.

n/t

"Southern Basher", because that's where the post I replied to was leading, and subsequent posts use the same talking points as repugs do: my America is more valid than yours, so yours isn't America, really. Not everyone in the south or in a non urban area is an uneducated yokel with their finger up their nose. And I think the observation that there is a lack of bookstores in rural areas says more about the fact that the population of a given rural county is usually quite small, and likely not enough to support a bookstore (or a record shop, or a music store) than it does about the intelligence of the locals.

Namely, my beloved home towns from childhood & high school.

Still speak with a HEAVY drawl, still eat mac & cheese, still get to church on time too.

Not a comment on the intellignece of fellow Southerners- a comment on their apparent willingness to abandon their local businesses and allowing walmart, etc. to roll through and change everything. At the time, I'm sure they just thought it was an intellignet choice- the "free market" doing it's thing.

So a small population explains the trend? Not so sure about that. If they are large enough to support Walmart, etc- then they are certainly large enough to support the Mom & Pops. Seems like certain town councils, local govts. and then the consumers sold out their small town culture to the trans-nationals- all you have to do is look at the signs on the main drags to confirm this.

If you have not seen this with your own eyes in certain small towns & suburban areas, then you are not paying attention.

Guess what- many of the San Francisco suburbs in CA look just like many of the small towns in the South-big box stores, starbucks, hardly anything local or "Mayberry" there either.

I'm getting tired of being called an elitist, "basher", or whatever for supporting local USA business ownership over our shitty service economy run by dis-loyal trans-nationals. Apparently this is how we get our "centrist", "everyday guy" credentials these days- to characterize people who advocate local businesses, local farms, etc. as "elitist", latte liberals, etc.

And I meant it in the sense of the common DU perception that only good liberals and Americans live on the east and west coast.

But I see what you are saying- people are wrong if they do not realize that good people live everywhere. I agree, and never meant to convey anything to the contrary.

I look back to 3 small towns I grew up in NC, SC and GA.

Hardly nothing but walmarts and big box stores. Hardly any more local diners, just applebees type joints. Lots of empty buildings where local appliance, hardware and colthing stores used to be.

The 2 neighborhoods I've lived in in SF look JUST like the small town downtown areas looked when I was a kid. So do the hoods I've seen in NY. Local hardware, local repair shops, local coffee shops, you name it. Looks just like my old home towns did in the early/mid 70's

Sorry- but I reject the notion that it is elitist to note that many small town, conservative cities have not been loyal to their local businesses, while many urban areas preserved this culture. Seen it with my own eyes.

If this type of characterization upsets those coveted red state swing voters,then maybe we need to educate them as to how they have allowed corporations to run over their communities and their small-town culture- as opposed us playing up to them by trying to find an "elitist" behind every urban lamp post.

There are a few independent bookstores. And sadly, i don't live in a liberal city. I hope to again one day. :)

3 small towns in 3 states DO fit my characterization. Glad there are some exceptions.

A disturbing trend to me, either way.

Compete or die. It is the way of free* markers.

Before someone goes off on a tirade about markets aren't completely free how about freeER markets.

ran thousands of "mom and pop places out of business"? Of course not.

How about the people that work at Borders and B & N? Are they just stupid, too?

and Pop stores were already gone. Where in my post did you see where any employee of any bookstore was called 'stupid?' Perhaps you shouldn't make shit up.

I would go to an Indie bookstore in a heartbeat and so would many, if you can find one. I would even prefer a good used book store but those are gone as well.

Something to differentiate or add values other than price.

Trying to open a bookstore with no niche, no edge, no competitive advantage is a good way to lose a ton of money.

in our community, and we are just outside of Seattle. There are independent bookstores here, too. Every purchase from amazon.com and Netflix is money out of their pockets.

The larger bookstores employ people, too. Maybe they should have gone to work for amazon.com and Netflix.

Ebooks make reading fun again. Tired of carrying that 4 pound novel to work to read at lunch, the Kindle weighs about 10 ozs. Big difference. And costs are plummeting too. I may miss coffee table books but there is always Amazon.

Better yet, the local library.

...... Luckily there are still quite a few small independent bookstores in southeast Michigan, particularly Ann Arbor.

All of the end caps are either repuke books by Palin, Beck et al or are pushing Twilight crap.

I've started having to get most of my books through Amazon, because no one else carries them.

I say good riddance to stores that focus on hate speech and the lowest common denominator

They just want to move product.

And I express that concern as comic book collector!

I've just always viewed my enjoyment of comic books as something separate from reading to learn...I'd rather go to my local comic specialty shop for that in any event- the dudes behind the counter there know me and know my tastes.

... this could lead to the re-emergence of independent book stores.

it's one of the few places here that hires "non-conformists".the only privately owned bookstores here are "Christian"...although they don't seem to do much business.

then sell them back.

I read great books and they make a profit. :)

the smaller guys a chance to get back into the game! :bounce:

and the ones catering to niche markets, like romance or crime fiction, seem to be doing quite well, especially if they have a book recycling program. It's also a college town, meaning the college bookstore will always be there, too.

Chain bookstores seem to be the ones in the most trouble.

They were much more fun and less "kitch" than those big, airy Starbucks-pedding box stores.

I'd rather blow dust off a rare find in the back of McKay's (local store with a couple of regional stores) any ole day.

In addition to the big box, we have four other locally-owned books stores.

You'd think we'd be more educated here with all those bookstores, but, sadly, my county is Republican. :hi:

I was expecting just another novelty. But ended up being as impressed with "the new" as when I first got an mp3 player and Netflix. Those shitty chain bookstores might just be going the way of video stores, I figured.

drive Mom & Pop stores that understand and cater to the local market out of business by undercutting anything they sell, borrow shitloads more money, fail to make profit, declare Chapt. 11, leaving a wasteland of decaying stores and shuttered competitors behind you, The End.

The United States aggregate demand curve, for nearly all non-essentials--is shifting downward and to the left.

This is sad that businesses are failing, but there will be so many casualties of the consumer bubble slowly deflating.

We used our credit cards like drunken sailors and we spent our home equity on furniture, commercial-grade appliances
and a host of other extravagant wants that we really couldn't afford.

It was a phase. And that phase is winding down. Yes, people will always need things and people will splurge
and spend money. However, shopping for baubles, junk and trying to keep up with the Jonses isn't as fun as
it used to be.

Barnes and Noble is just one of those casualties. People are looking for bargains. They're shopping at used
book stores and the Salvation Army.

Look for this in many, many sectors.

I think there's going to be a bomb dropped on the restaurant industry and also on retail stores in malls.

Americans spent (either by necessity or choice) beyond their means for roughly last 30 years. You can't "undo" that in a year or two.

So for the next decade (yes decade) the deleveraging consumer will act as a headwind to any economic expansion.

In essence by borrowing (negative savings rate) consumers pulled forward their purchases. A portion of their spending for 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013..... 2020 was already spent (via credit).

This temporarily helped boost sales, revenue, employment but it wasn't sustainable. Just like adding 500,000 temporary job to employment stats. In 6 months you will "pay for it" by having 500,000 jobs lost.

Then the balloon pops

all the great individually owned book stores had to close their doors because they couldn't compete with the Wal-Mart type of bookstores headed by Crown Books, Walden Books and Barnes & Noble. I guess now they have folded because of the internet and websites like Amazon. I remember back when Westwood Village, which is adjacent the UCLA campus in Los Angeles, was lined with book store after book store of all kinds selling just about anything that was ever printed in them, new and used.

Then the developers moved in building high rises and as a result raising the rents and value of the surrounding properties. One by one the book stores closed their doors to be replaced by clothing outlets like the GAP and fast food delis. The arrival of Crown Books et al sealed their doom. Barnes & Noble chain stores were different back then and competed with the mom and pops with their back list and literary offerings. When Crown Books arrived they changed their brand into what we know today as Barnes & Noble especially since they seem to promote right wing political authors, like Ann Coulter and Bill O'Reilly, prominently and hide the progressive authors way back in the shelves. What will the right wing propaganda machine do without them if they go out of business?

The internet is on its way toward killing them all and the formats they sell.

Why buy anything when you can get it "for free"?

I love browsing at Barnes & Noble but I can get literally EVERY BOOK at 30% off or so from Amazon. Even Barnes & Noble.com doesn't offer the same deals Amazon does.

I know, they want you to sign up for some membership card, but I just want to buy books without being a card member or whatever. Just give the good deals to everyone and it'll greatly improve their business.