One survey I wrote about a year ago posited that 40% of the people who buy books online looked at them in a bookstore first.Ī New York Times report by David Streitfeld two weeks ago took the notion a step further. Surveys say “showrooming” - seeing a thing before buying it - is an integral part of buying books online. Even though many indie bookstores are thriving right now, thanks in large part to the disappearance of some cutthroat competition, how much longer can they thrive if books are simply becoming so vastly invisible? Two thousand bookstores vanishing would represent roughly half the total bookstores in the country. Perhaps surprisingly, it’s not good for business, either. Two thousand fewer places for people to be exposed to books is pretty obviously not good for our culture. And my brother and sister indie fanatics shouldn’t get too righteous about it either. Can you guess the rest of that story? Having poisoned the well, the Hoboken B&N itself went out of business, leaving the town - a big Manhattan bedroom with lots of well-educated, well-off residents - without a bookshop, probably forever.Īnd yet, and yet … that development gave me no pleasure, nor does the fact that this scenario is playing out across the country with increasing frequency. Back in the last century, I wrote a column attacking B&N for putting indie booksellers in Melville House’s birthplace, Hoboken, New Jersey, out of business with under-pricing, as if selling books was like selling widgets. The big chains deserve opprobrium for their vicious tactics against America’s independent booksellers, certainly.
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If you include the company’s college stores, this is going to mean 1362 bookstores disappearing from the American landscape - less than two years after 686 Borders stores disappeared.
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Stores that should have been well-stocked for the holidays were instead out of inventory and passing time until the end of the year.įor a couple of years I’ve been predicting in column after column that B&N was going to get out of the brick-and-mortar business of selling books, but seeing it finally kick into high gear has been no fun. What had been a slow shrinkage as leases ran out - a store here, a store there - turned into an avalanche after Thanksgiving. And that’s just in the last 30 days or so. Maybe you’ve noticed that there seem to be a lot of Barnes & Noble superstores closing lately? Not just stores in remote locations (like, say, this one in upstate New York), but in some of the nation’s largest metropolitan shopping areas, such as Los Angeles, San Francisco, Philadelphia, Washington, DC, Seattle, Chicago, two stores in Dallas, another in Austin, and Manhattan. Orders placed after December 16 will not ship until the new year.
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The wrong goodbye of Barnes and Noble » MobyLives