I wish Amazon brought back their 4-Star physical retail stores, it was a great place to buy gifts in person. The concept was simple: everything in the store was an item that was rated at least 4.0 stars online and there was an electronic price tag that kept its price in sync with the online version.
It's hard to trust Amazon with quality anything these days. I wouldn't shop there as for I think the employees would be less than helpful or happy to be there and Id be constantly worried about counterfeits or returns.
I spent time at the Walnut Creek one -- it was a good execution of a kind of obvious idea. It was weird that they shut them down. That said -- smaller versions of the same format in airports/commute-centers would be great.
Amazon is mostly an online company, they're not great at managing storefronts. They also really over-expanded their warehouses and physical presences which hemorrhaged cash (mostly led by Dave Clark who later stepped down as retail CEO) which was quickly shut down by Jassy who is more focused on AWS/cloud than retail presence.
I asked a clerk at the Pleasant Hill store about that closure; it was due to rent increases. Figures, considering the location in downtown Walnut Creek. Sure was a lovely store, though. Fairfield and Reno still have big stores if you're ever in the area.
Serious question: how many products on Amazon aren’t rated at least 4.0. Even the crappiest Chinese alphabet brand products are typically rated like 4.3-4.5.
I went to a Four Star store just once, to trade in a dying Kindle. The customer service was incredible, and the trade-in was actually better than promised online. I was sad to see them close.
It seemed like 90+ or more of the traffic I ever saw at the Amazon store near me was returns, including me every time I visited.
I doubt Amazon saw those as profitable, and they either didn't track well how much my purchases (and I'm assuming others) declined when it was no longer easy to deal with a person, or decided the impending labor/unionization battles would be best avoided.
If this isn't by design, it's by very happy accidental engagement with the fact that when it comes to media and related things, the time physical copies of it matter most are gifting-times. It just feels more genuinely gift-y to hand someone physical media than message them with it.
Anecdote: B&N was by far the best place to buy x-mas gifts this year
It was also by far the best place to buy board games this year, since they had a 50% off sale Dec. 26 and 27 on all their games and many of their stores have a fair selection of titles. (Some sample prices on some hot titles: Ark Nova for $37, Ruins of Arnak and Everdell for $30/each).
From what I was told by a B&N worker, this was an extension of the 2-day post-xmas 50%-off-all-hardcovers sale that they'd started doing recently.
I spent a ton of money there yesterday exactly because of the 50% off hardcovers and board games.
I haven't shopped in one in a while but after seeing how much stuff they have that I'm interested I'll be back. They even had lego sets that were sold out elsewhere.
We’ve done almost all our Christmas shopping there for years (younger kids). Still were able to do a lot of it there this year (tween to young teen age groups).
The toys there are some of our favorites (Lego and Calico Critters) and they have a lot of fun toys you’ve never heard of but are fun for the kids to try.
There's a new Barnes and Noble nearby me (just opened last year) and it is like no other B&N I've seen. It's honestly a direct carbon copy of Amazon's physical book store. All of the shelves have books with the covers out (just like Amazon's store pioneered), not tightly packed spine to spine. This means the selection is much, much, much smaller. It's more like an airport book store and just has a handful of the best sellers (despite being a huge physical footprint of a store). Games, toys, and a huge coffee shop take up most of the space. You would never go here with a specific book in mind to find, unless it was a massive bestseller. It's interesting and I'm curious to see how it does, but it's definitely not a general bookstore anymore.
Usually stores with constrained inventory by design are a sign that the company is on the upswing because they are aggressively controlling inventory.
When you see a store bulk up with crap stuffed everywhere, it’s often tied to loading up on debt and sometimes bankruptcy risk.
IMO, Barnes and Noble sees an opportunity with the struggles of Amazon in retail and the decline of Starbucks. Starbucks used to pride itself as a “third place”… now the drive through is the priority, the seating has been reduced, and the management seems more interested in fighting labor than having happy hospitality employees.
People who read tend to have money. It seems like a winning combination to have people with money hanging out in your retail establishment. Plus they can riff off of Target’s super successful pickup model that is every mom’s favorite thing ever.
> All of the shelves have books with the covers out (just like Amazon's store pioneered)
This makes me think you did not enter a bookstore before you checked out Amazon's version. Many do exactly this for the big, recognizable hits they expect to sell more of.
Also it is a symptom of JIT logistics and inventory minimization, not really a UX concern.
> This makes me think you did not enter a bookstore before you checked out Amazon's version. Many do exactly this for the big, recognizable hits they expect to sell more of.
Yeah, I worked at a chain bookstore years before Amazon ever opened a physical store and the entire bestsellers display was done covers out, as were all the endcaps. Within the aisles, we organized books so that some of the books on every shelf would be cover out, which sometimes optimizes for space, and makes for a more aesthetically pleasing shelf layout and allows for the more prominent display of popular titles and eye-catching covers.
Setting up shelves this way was part of the training and a constant practice, adjusting the display of stock throughout the day as items are purchased, removed, and returned. The entire store got a once over every night at closing.
I hope that this will be used in the future as an example of why MBAs don't always make good CEOs. You may be the best person in the world when it comes to managing a company, but if you're not knowledgeable and passionate about the product you're making and/or selling then you're going to not do very well. Off the top of my head I can think of 2 more examples: Apple before and after Steve Jobs returned and AMD before and after Lisa Su was appointed CEO.
I see it all the time in computer science. People become programmers because the pay is good. But without a love for the craft, they end up either hating life or being mediocre or both. It really does help to love what you do.
Some of that liking what you do can also be attributed to chance in the career path one stumbles upon. I’ve had programming gigs that I loved and gigs that turned out, after slowly boiling like a frog in a pan, were disfunctional and skill eroding.
It's good until that mediocre dude makes a bunch of mediocre JavaScript-based crap. And then I have to either import 9000 libraries or rewrite everything from scratch every time I do anything
I once interviewed at a company for a job that was pretty much a dream job - very niche passion. Everyone there was very into that niche.
Except for the CEO, who prided himself on not knowing anything about the field. He saw not knowing the niche as a perk; he'd focus on the "business side" only, leaving the rest to everyone else.
Idk, I can see that as being healthy (in the abstract; you were there in person so I'll bet you had a much higher signal than I do as an internet commenter.) I've definitely seen non-profits be sunk in by groupthink when being too close to a problem. Sometimes an outside perspective is what you need to reframe your approach, as long as it's tempered by lots of insider expertise.
I can see that as a good thing too. CEO is not a know-it-all, not a micro-manager, see's his job as an enabler instead of dictator, values the people lower on the ladder.
May be. Or they just look at every initiatives from a pure bottom line perspective and have no way of taking guts decision based on what they think might bring the industry forward.
The problem with the GP’s description is that the CEO took pride in not knowing the business. A good enabler type CEO who is an outsider to the business would certainly make an effort to build expertise and even passion about the business.
Well, yes. But it depends. I worked for a company which had to go through a re-organization, and in that period we got a new CEO who didn't know anything about the tech, unlike everybody else. But he was great at turning companies around to become profitable, he had done that many times before. So what he did was leaving all technical, marketing, and product decisions to the next level while he worked on getting external funding for as much as possible of our product research and development. He even took on himself to take care of necessary work in people's gardens if that meant they could do some particularly important work on a Saturday, if something critical came up. And finally, his salary was quite a bit less than mine - he said "You're the people doing the work. I don't need that much."
When the ship was turned around to get profitable he left for the next company and did something similar.
> passionate about the product you're making and/or selling then you're going to not do very well
100% agreed. Not that it isn't possible, but I'd like to start with a product person because a product person will fight for what matters to the customer and I'd prefer to be in that camp.
Satya Nadella after Balmer would be another example. Balmer did great things for MSFT stock ticker, but so much of the 90's love was lost. Satya has a massive uphill battle but with Github, VSCode and other efforts - I do believe he sincerely cares.
I did a little looking up about Ballmer after reading a book that disparaged his tenure as CEO in examples. He was at MS from 1980. I don't believe for a moment that he didn't care about the company. It was a changing time for Microsoft, mistakes were surely made, but he also laid some seeds for future growth areas like Azure.
This is like the political narrative, economy was doing badly under party X, starts doing well under Y so Y must be better. No, there were cycles and much of what happens under Y was started by X, and/or both had a lot less control than people think.
We've all seen videos of Ballmer, he was obviously a very passionate leader. Gates, Ballmer, Nadella, they're all business people and probably as evil as the other, just so happens that it is now more of a business imperative for Nadella to be seen as a good player in tech.
Reading Nadella's book is something I think everybody in this industry should do. You understand the impact his son Zain had on him and consequentially the reason why Microsoft is pushing in some of the areas it has been since he took over - accessibility being first and foremost.
> Microsoft is pushing in some of the areas it has been since he took over - accessibility being first and foremost
That's interesting to hear.
My eyes are getting older and I find the accessibility facilities in Windows 11 (and Mint as it happens) far more helpful than those on my M1 Air (little things like the ability to scale far more of the textual aspects of the OS in Windows).
Balmer cared but he didn't care about the end user in the way that we how Jobs and Nadella do as we're talking.
Balmer made office the massive cash cow it is today through amazing licensing - again great stuff for $msft, but there was no product through his tenure that people were like yea, Microsoft! The iphone was dismissed and the windows phone was too late and couldn't play catch up.
Today people are starting to care about Microsoft again. Definitely not 90s love but man I love VSCode. I really do.
Whatever Ballmer's faults, lack of passion wasn't one of them, and he was a founding member of MSFT (probably the first founder after Gates, going back to their salad days as roommates at Harvard), not a parachuted-in hedge-fund MBA. And who can forget "Developers, developers, developers!"?
The person who founded Elliott Management (Paul Eliott Singer) is far from a saint, but he has been astonishingly accurate during his career. According to Wikipedia (I did a big deep dive into this hedge fund and person after reading the submitted article), he warned about CDOs in 2006. The hedge fund also exited its holdings in Twitter in June 2022, right before the Musk-pocalypse.
I'm kind of astounded the article didn't talk about Paul Singer at all. It seems like a massive oversight to not dig into the money behind Barnes and Noble.
Then you have Peloton... passion project of John Foley (who was president of e-commerce at Barnes and Nobles) that was practically driven into the ground by the same exact mentality.
Foley was passionate to the moon and back about the product, but didn't have the business chops to follow.
Had Peloton been driven by MBAs when they went public, they never in a million years would they have taken on the types of inane liabilities that Foley and co did because they were more product driven than business driven.
Things like their massive factory build outs/buy outs and slow burn perfectionist approaches to product development would likely have been thrown out the door in exchange for slapping their label on existing hardware and shoving as many experiences down as many channels as possible.
And sure that'd leave them being called sell-outs by their original fans, but ironically that's where they're now being forced to exist since those fans were a great Kickstarter target market, but a completely inadequate target market at that scale.
Couldn't they simply try to be profitable without scaling (and its issues) to the masses? Or it's VC pressure?
(Honest question, I don't know much about peloton in general)
The original kickstarter wasn't near enough for their initial goals without VC money (they raised 300k, which was only about 1,000 a backer)
And yes, in such a capital heavy field like fitness hardware, there would have been massive VC pressure.
The only way to drive that would have been to essentially show "they scale like software, not hardware". So sell investors on rapidly increasing revenue while sweeping the massive (even by tech standards) burn rate under the rug as temporary.
Also important to take into account for why this method is successful is that people write posts like this which make you really want to go check it out. Customers who are passionate about how your business is run.
Honestly, if I was more skeptical + motivated, I'd be looking into if this post was actually a paid ad because my reaction is "where is the closest Barnes and Noble?"
Interesting insight and speculation from the comment section of the article:
>Jane Friedman
>Speaking as a publishing industry reporter & observer, I couldn't agree more with your assessment of James Daunt's leadership and business strategy. Unfortunately, the picture isn't quite as bright for B&N as those numbers would have you believe. B&N stores were once quite large (e.g., 25,000 square feet); the new stores opening are less than half that in some cases. And they're largely re-opening stores that closed during the pandemic.
>It's also concerning that during a record two years for book sales (the pandemic was great for book sales of all kinds), Barnes & Noble didn't see the same percentage increase, indicating they've lost market share. Some industry insiders believe the current private equity owner is trying to position the company favorably for sale.
A Barnes & Noble near my parents moved from their original space at one end of the mall to the other end. This new space is smaller than their original space by about half or two thirds. While they have fewer materials on the shelves (and fewer shelves), it seems more lively than the original spot did, probably because there's fewer space for the number of people who go there. I bet that the company would see that as a fair tradeoff.
Yeah probably most books sold are the best sellers not the extensive sections for less well selling stuff. Paring down is not a bad idea, and if you need references a library is a good place
No financials in the article. None available of course because it’s private. My guess is it’s loss making and debt just got a whole lot more expensive. If I was the owner I’d be looking to unload B&N fast and focus on my investments with strong cash flow and solid business models.
Moving to smaller stores in the pandemic hardly counts as a bad thing. Restructuring your leases to reduce your rent is a great idea. It gives you room to stop chasing short term revenue such as publisher deals.
Also, a loss of market share in a growing economy is also not a bad thing as long as it’s accompanied by increased profitability. What this means is that B&N has basically maintained their revenues, while significantly reducing their costs, which as the clear market leader in the space sets them up very well to pursue a more considered growth strategy based on the current environment as opposed to the pre-Amazon environment, which is what their original stores were based on.
Also, those larger stores didn’t mean much in terms of B&N as a bookseller because they were largely filled with their coffee shops and selling toys and Knick knacks.
No idea about the market share, but downsizing shops seems like a wise move.
Rent and/or property taxes and maintenance are massive overheads. Considering that bookshops are no longer trying to have every possible book someone could want in direct inventory, big shops aren't needed for any but the flagship stores.
I wish there was a book store with a great and relatively up to date technical book section. I would spend a lot of time there.
I’m not even talking up to date with the latest ChatGPT hotness, but any serious programming books written in the last 7 years - especially timeless classics that matter regardless of the technology. Rather that the same Sam’s Learn C++ book that’s been gathering dust for 20 years.
I suspect there actually is a market there, but the problem is you need a very particular book store manager that can curate this well. I guess it would have to be a labor of love, as financially the people who would do this well are busy making much more money as developers.
B&N used to have this. It was also one of the most shoplifted sections people would steal from. The books were expensive and certain ones could always be easily flipped online.
I had no idea technical books were the target to shoplifters. I imagine it wasn’t techies stealing these but other opportunists.
I never minded buying IT books even when I wasn’t in the best financial situation. 40-50 bucks for a good book could bring almost limitless rewards. One thing though, I needed to browse and skim through the book to decide whether it was a purchase or not. Most books I bought like that were thoroughly studied. I can’t say the same thing about books I bought online though.
This has been highly dependent on the particular B&N, in my experience. One in Raleigh (may have technically been Cary, NC, this was 15 years or so ago) had Knuth's TAOCP on the shelves, never seen that anywhere else. Certainly not in towns with less technical inclination (a town I lived in in GA for a decade, for instance, had a miserable technical section) where the technical book section was dominated by Windows and MS Office how-tos.
University bookstores have (or had?) plenty of this. Like UW's bookstore or the engineering bookstore for Stanford. Haven't been to one of those for a long time, however.
By "the engineering bookstore for Stanford," do you mean their visitor bookstore, the one that has a cafe and sells branded campus gear like hoodies, mugs, and pennants? Yeah, it has a TAoCP box set on the shelf, but their tech shelf is otherwise pretty small, and far smaller than their entrepreneurship and business shelves, or even the "psychology and self-help" shelf.
No. The one that used to be next to DEC SRC near the Caltrain station…but that was 1999 or so. It was just a bookstore for the engineering school, so no hoodies or stuff, or books unrelated to engineering.
Given that the only parts of the Stanford campus that are near Caltrain today are some patient facilities and the arboretum, I suspect that this is something that has not existed in decades.
> The books were expensive and certain ones could always be easily flipped online.
This finished the destruction of the technical books sections of Half Price Books.
The first half of the destruction was online shopping. No longer could you find an entire technical library hitting the store because someone just died and their family dumped everything to Half Price. The most valuable books got skimmed off immediately and never made it to the shelves anymore.
However, for a while the "standard" kind of technical books still hit the shelves so you could snag them at decent prices. However, shoplifting became sufficiently rampant that Half Price seems to have even removed those. Now, you can only get those books online, and the only books remaining on the shelves have the quality that results from them having effectively have no resale value at all.
Removing these books was what Daunt did at Waterstones.
“Daunt also removed legal textbooks, technical guides, reference books from the shelves. In return, he stocked more books that customers were delighted to discover which led to an increase in sales.” [0]
If there is “a market there”, it’s probably as a specialised store.
I'm working on opening a book store: online only, print books only (no eBooks), highly opinionated and curated inventory, mostly books published before 1980 (with exceptions), no current bestsellers, doubling down on store design (mostly text with cover images hidden by default), speed and ease of use, how recommendations (not reviews) are displayed, etc.
The catalog is still coming together, but "serious programming books" is a key offering.
That sounds pretty cool. Not sure it sounds very profitable, but I hope it is because it sounds well suited to my tastes. Have you considered curating for physical book quality? The emergence of the e-book has caused me to pay more attention to the book as an actual object. If I'm going to have an actual book in my house, it should be durable and pleasant to handle. A nicely bound book with good print quality affords a pleasure beyond just the content.
Yeah, but I'm going to start small, see where it goes. And yes, very much focused on the quality of the book—typesetting, binding, overall feel. Oftentimes I'll order a paperback from Barnes & Noble and (to me) it's not readable due to poor printing or just an insanely small font size. Over the years I've collected a lot of unique letterpress editions of short stories, poems, works of nonfiction, etc. and would like to add some of these prints to the catalog, as long as they're still available from the press.
Sad is an understatement. I found such obscure titles there that even my university library didn't have a copy. It was like going to a major research library where you could buy the books. I never went there without a few hundred in my wallet just in case.
Ada’s is small but magical. It’s nowhere near Powell’s technical books at its prime, but walking into the backroom at Ada’s really brings me back to browsing technical books 20 years ago.
I’ve never failed to go back there and find something fascinating I have never heard of before. Though most of the people studying/working in that room will always wonder what kind of person sincerely gets excited about this stuff.
B&N is pretty up to date in the computer section actually. For example, I normally see No Starch Press "The Rust Programming Language (2nd edition)" and "Rust for Rustaceans" and lots of their python books and some that I was also interested in like "The Art of 64-bit Assembly" and "Understanding the Machine." They also have a lot of security books proportion-wise. But the section is smaller than I like and leans toward the mainstream of course.
What I find however, is nothing like it used to be, at least in certain locations. I'm sure it varies by location but I miss the one closest to Redmond (Microsoft) which (at least when I went there around 2000) had multiple full rows of computer books including highly technical ones that you don't see anymore in person.
Uh, where are you seeing "Rust for Rustaceans" and "The Art of 64-Bit Assembly" at a Barnes & Noble? I just wandered into a B&N store in Cupertino after shopping at a Guitar Center, and their technology section was basically a shelf of Excel guides and XYZ for Dummies.
I'm actually surprired there's a narrative of "B&N is coming back." Their stores, what few times I've had the misfortune of wandering inside in recent years, are still excruciatingly beige, useless, and (in the words of the TLA) "crucifyingly boring."
This is the flip side of the current CEO's focus on letting local stores make their own decisions. When the decisions align with your interests (like my store's excellent manga focus), it's great! When they don't, like your example of the Cupertino store, it's pretty terrible.
Both major B&N stores in Austin have had both of those titles within the last month. They all tend to be relatively overstocked on No Starch Press stuff (not to say they don't produce good books), but understocked on basically anything else.
The best I've encountered is Foyles in London, though even that had cut back substantially prior to the pandemic when I was last there.
You'll find a lot of that in sufficiently large college towns. Berkeley, for example, is fantastic for bookstores: bleeding-edge technical sections (trying to compete with the campus bookstore for required reading), several overtly leftist bookstores for when you're really looking for a niche translation of some niche 19th century philosopher's magnum opus, and all that.
In San Jose, there used to be a bookstore named Computer Literacy. If it had to do with computers, technology, start-ups, and other related topics, this place had the books. It was truly a wonderland for book-loving geeks and nerds. I was in there a couple of times per month. Unfortunately, they charged list prices on everything, and they finally got eaten by Amazon, but while they were around, it was glorious.
CL opened a satellite store in Tyson's Corner VA outside DC which lasted a couple years. Between CL and Reiter's (which still exists in DC), I must have spent several thousands on full price trade, textbook, and reference books. This made sense because I could look closely at each book before buying to see if it merited the investment. I've found that buying online works only if the book is discounted significantly. Too often now I find the online blurb and user opinions lead me to buy a book that I wouldn't have if I'd held it in my hands before parting with $50 or more.
There was also a Computer Literacy in Sunnyvale, with a Togo’s right by it, and a Fry’s across the street and WeirdStuff Warehouse near that. That little cluster made a great destination for a lunch and geek stuff run.
In the early oughts in the Boston area, I loved going to SoftPro Books. It was also a way to socialize with techie friends. Unfortunately, the chain shut down in a few years.
I believe it was owned by an ex-Lotus employee named Rick Treitman. If someone knows him, he might have some insights into the business.
I shop at Barnes and Noble a lot, and I even subscribe to their membership program (for an annual fee I get 10% off purchases in-store and free shipping online). i dislike the way physical books take up so much space in my apartment but at the same time I can't in good faith buy e-books when they're covered in draconian DRM. I also can't get over the incident from the early 10s when Amazon deleted 1984 off of their customers' kindles.
My apartment is running out of space for all these books, and maybe the solution to this is that I need to borrow from the library more often instead of buying my own books. I really wish I could have an e-reader, but again, I don't want to spend money on things that will lock me into a single vendor indefinitely and might just arbitrarily go away.
I learned my lesson in the early-00s when online music purchases were DRM'd and I lost a lot of my collection due to Yahoo music shutting down. I also remember one of the problems being that purchases made in one store would not be compatible with a competitor's MP3 player, which locked you into a single vendor. Couldn't switch to iPod because it didn't work with the DRM that was designed for my Dell DJ (which was a POS that broke all the time but I had to stick with it because of my existing music collection).
I'd hate to have that same problem but with books instead of music.
I strip the DRM off of books the moment I buy them. Check that this is possible for you too, and you'll end up with a collection of DRM-free epub files that you can back up as you like.
I assume this violates the EULA of most retailers and subjects your account to possible deletion. Not saying that it's likely, but DRM restrictions seem like a matter of principle to some people. Even if you can strip the DRM you still don't legally own the product.
In this scenario I think the biggest issue with losing an account is the ability to aquire future purchases. But like I said, it's more a matter of principle for some. You own a book, you don't own a digital copy of a book.
This is the direction NFYs should have gone (could still go).
It would be great to be able to resell digital purchases, but that’s only on the consumer’s interest, so will never happen without an act of ${rule_making_body}.
This fundamentally does not work, because being able to copy is such an essential feature of electronic information. Think about it - you can never really "lose access" to information in the computer world unless you purposefully delete it completely, which cannot be realistically ensured.
On a related note, there ought to be a law that forbids the use of "BUY", "GET", or "PURCHASE" for things you would not in fact own. Instead, they should say "SUBSCRIBE" or "LICENSE".
Those should be for licenses with an end date. "Subscribe" and "license" don't really imply there being a definite end date to your access, but nevertheless informs you that your access is contingent upon the continued existence of the business in question, unlike things you "buy".
First, fuck those retailers for putting such conditions on things you bought to own. They're yours, so who cares.
Second, strip the DRM using Calibre, and store the books off any cloud-based platform and on your own drives, as you always should in any case given the proclivity of many content companies to just flagrantly bullshit their way into excusing themselves when they frequently steal back their customers access to stuff they ostensibly own.
Once a piece of digital content is actually yours, in your own device drives, it's only then really yours.
Keep the on-device cloud-based versions around if you like the user interface of your platform or reader, but your own digital copies elsewhere. The retailer doesn't even need to know (though I personally wouldn't give a tin shit if they did anyhow).
Yes and no. There's an important distinction between _having_ something and _owning_ something. You can have possession of figures carved from contraband elephant ivory. But if anyone who was inclined to care about such things decided to take action, a court could compel you to destroy it. Same thing with any illegal item.
But these are all "ifs and buts." Hence why it's a matter of principle and not practice. At the end of the day, most people are fine with "buying" a book that they don't own as evidenced by the sales.
Now you're just engaging in silly semantics. Yes, in all practical sense, you absolutely do own the DRM-free books you've stripped of their rent-seeking garbage. You could even take that to court and quite heavily argue that because you bought them as claimed property, they're yours. You might not win, but a case could be made and in any case, you could move digital copies anywhere you want. The ones doing wrong here are the companies that try to impose DRM on things people are buying under a notion of ownership, That these also randomly erase or reclaim things they claim to have sold only makes the wrong worse.
> Just send them your own EULA at "purchase" if you think that unilateral terms no one reads should be binding on the other party.
I've heard, explicitly from lawyers, that sending an automated process (like a website) amendments to their EULA won't hold up at all in court. It's clear that the EULA is take it or leave it, and throwing changes at something that you know will ignore them doesn't accomplish anything.
It'd be nice if we could do it, but it doesn't fit into the reality of law.
The difference between that and sending your "modifications" back is that you have an explicit, intentional choice to make: accept the EULA or don't use the site.
I think that the walls of text do need to be reigned in in acceptance of the fact that it's absurd to hire a lawyer to review all of those contracts, but I also somewhat sympathize with courts' opinions of "So you think you could just use the product and the contract doesn't apply to you because you didn't want to... Read?"
Most of those EULAs are saying what should be common sense. The law should just give me those rights, but because copyright hasn't caught up to the digital age and software we need something that allows me to copy into computer memory.
Anything that isn't 'common sense' needs to be a contract that a lawyer reviews for me
> On March 30, 2013, Judge Richard J. Sullivan ruled in favor of Capitol Records, explaining that the transfer of digital data from one storage medium to another constituted a violation of copyright, because the copy was ultimately an unauthorized reproduction, and therefore outside of the protection of the first-sale doctrine
Yeah. That’s the reason for DJs there is a license for “working copy” (bastard SIAE), especially if you’re downloading digitally and copying it to usb disk. If you are playing vinyl, they can suck my tonearm!
You need to proactively write your congressman (or local country equivalent) to make personal copies of media legal. Ideally make region locking illegal, and a dozen other things I can't remember off hand, but we have all been subject too at times.
Yes, but the concern is not a legal one, it is a practical one.
"You have been found in violation of our EULA and we have therefore permanently deleted your account. Please check our support page at <404> for more information." - Any Service, to Any User.
Now what, for Any User? Hope you're famous enough to raise a stink on Twitter to get your account back? Pay $1B in legal costs to sue them?
And if they ask about it, you simply lie, but they'll never ask. I get your theoretical concern, but I don't understand what practical the concern is, because there doesn't seem to be one. They can't peer into your hard drive or running processes, and they aren't going to track down the accounts of random internet commenters.
And how, pray tell, are they going to find out that you stripped the DRM from the books if you don't distribute them, without violating multiple privacy laws and perhaps even more?
Yeah, it is, but I rarely find the time to plug my Kindle into the PC. Of the many things I need to get done it just doesn’t seem that important worrying about the remote chance that an ebook I’ve read might be removed from my account.
I don’t think Amazon’s KFX DRM has been fully broken yet. It’s at the cat-and-mouse stage. The DeDRM tools work for some books some days, and then Amazon tweaks something and it’s broken again. To me, it feels like the beginning of the end of easily cracked DRM.
There are KFX workarounds, like getting Amazon to provide the book in the older format, but then you lose all the features only present in the KFX format.
Or were you talking about epub? I used to buy epubs from the Google store but I only bought titles that weren’t DRMed. Are epubs from Google or Apple or Kobo easily cracked?
This is absolutely one of those cases where (assuming you don't redistribute the drm-stripped epub) there is a complete ethical justification but a failed business justification, and yet...
... also, I think this is why Jobs didn't bother protecting music with DRM (except for identification of the purchasing account).
For me it's not only "Am I going to read this again", but rather "Do I want to have this available for my children to read"? That makes the pool of books significantly larger.
The city I live in’s library has a pretty extensive ebook selection that way you don’t have to buy an ebook you can just borrow it from your local library for free. And then there is always the internet archive/open library route too
>I really wish I could have an e-reader, but again, I don't want to spend money on things that will lock me into a single vendor indefinitely and might just arbitrarily go away.
I've had Kobos since abandoning the Kindle many years ago. I run two accounts with them.
One is on the device, has never purchased any books, and is a placeholder for easy software updates etc (I quite like their UI).
The other has all my purchases, but is never put on the reader. Instead I download, then use Calibre to create an open copy (for personal use only) and move it to the reader via USB sync.
It usually takes about 30 seconds to do for a book, and the result is a legally-obtained curated collection. And every book is tagged with where it came from (its legal provenance) for my own peace of mind.
My main motivation however is actually the metadata. Publishers/authors haven't got a clue when it comes to title, author, series, genre, covers etc., so all my books are now standardised and categorised and each has a cover of exactly the same size and aspect ratio. Maybe I'm an obsessive, but if you do it as and when you buy a book then it really does take a minute or two at the most. And the result is quite satisfying and, more importantly, as future-proofed as I can reasonably get whilst also being a very easy library to navigate.
In the US and many other Western countries (mostly forced by the US), circumventing or otherwise removing DRM is illegal in and of itself, even for personal use.
I like Kobo's devices for the most part, but I've only ever used KOReader on them. Kobo software seems to contain telemetry. As a side note, you can circumvent the registration requirement after wiping the reader by inserting an entry to a sqlite3 db, thus allowing your reader to be unaccounted for by Kobo or Google Analytics.
It does contain telemetry, as you say. But with a throwaway account on the device, and no payment method or other details on it, I don't really care. Plus unless I'm doing an update check (about once a year) it's always offline. I recognise it's probably still gathered info and is sending it in a bulk catch-up, but again I don't really care.
For the registration requirement you're right, but as I'm not replacing their software then by the simple expedient of a dummy account I don't need to do anything to the device, even the DB entry, and personally I'd rather not bother. Nice to know, though, thanks.
To each their own, but many people read their books many times over in a life. It can be extremely enjoyable, comforting in bad moments, and bring forth new, fresh views on one's own thoughts and the text they're reading.
If you have a good library system, it can be pretty easy to have limitless access without amassing a collection. Obviously there are some books that won’t be available, but my wife and son read hundreds of novels a year (combined) they almost universally come from the library.
Plus, increasing library circulation often increases funding, making it a virtuous cycle.
It also sponsors the development of ever more restrictive DRM schemes, which you might want to consider. Your money is always voting for a future, and I'd rather not help create a world encumbered by DRM.
I have reread my top 200 books I like more than once.
I owned well into the 2000s of books. Most bought second hand.
Most gone, but not the 200.
As life ebbed and flowed books got boxed and unboxed.
Glee ensues when a favorite shows up again.
I have a relatively good memory so I remember many details of a story.
In spite of that, the flow of rereading a good story is a pleasure.
I pretty much re-read at least two or three books a year. I do sell books if I don't like them or feel neutral about them, but nowhere near ruthless. I still have a decently-sized collection.
Depends on what type of book. I don't usually re-read novels and you're probably right that there's no point in worrying about jeff bezos taking them away, but most of my books are either textbooks which I keep around as a reference, or comics which don't take nearly as much time to re-read as a novel would.
You should also look into using an Ereader with your library. Many libraries can lend out ebooks. No idea how it actually works (I assume there's DRM on the lent books, but who cares, there's no pretension that you're the owner anyway) but it's definitely an option to consider.
The issue with this is you are still running vendor controlled spyware on a device you own to access the DRM'd books. They have a direct interest to spy on you to ensure the terms of service are not being violated. It is better to simply download already DRM-free books from libgen or something, or if that's not an option use the library to borrow physical books.
The EBooks systems most libraries use is run by Overdrive, which manages the library’s digital collection, the loan periods, the accounts, etc. they do a pretty good job, and their phone apps (Libby) is quite good.
My only real complaint about Overdrive is the premise that a copy of a book can be lent out x times. It’s a concept pushed by the publisher trying to create scarcity where none exists. Overdrive can’t do anything but capitulate. I suppose I’m also bothered by the “x copies available” concept.
im saving up to hopefully own a house someday, but buying a bigger apartment isn't as easy as it might have been 20 years ago. Boomers have rigged the real-estate market to protect their "investment" by severely constricting housing supply, and this has created pressure across the entire housing market, even for renters. This is the biggest apartment I can afford.
As someone who owns a house (after a long time of having much less space), I can state that you'll never get enough space.. not if you wish to stay married, at least. I just don't have the space for all my books, in this relatively large house. Other things constantly compete for the space. I've had to throw away a lot of books. They're hard to even give for free to used book shops, they get so many books from people like me.
In other words - I wish for unlimited storage. A house, unfortunately, isn't even close. There was a book I read, once, which had a house much larger on the inside than on the outside..
I use a Kindle for a lot of books, one reason is that it's so much easier when traveling. Another reason is that my vision isn't as good as it used to, years before I got the Kindle I changed from paperbacks to the larger variants simply to get the larger font. The Kindle lets me adjust the font to something I can read comfortably in every condition. A physical book is still better in many respects though. It looks much better, it's easier to skip forth and back, and if the book contains maps or drawings (fantasy or tech books), a physical book is tons better.
To my surprise my local library doesn't accept book donations. They have to get them through their own buying program. Which is unfortunate, my wife wanted to donate Japanese books because they have so few of them, she even bought extras for that purpose, but they can't take them.
It's worth considering just sneaking them onto their shelves.
Sometimes they get 'adopted', and if they don't then often whoever tries to check them out (which is presumably someone who wants to read them) is allowed to just take them as they are non-stock. And at the worst, the librarians will find another home for them (they are not usually destroyed; sometimes they join the book sale which benefits the library anyway).
In the past, there were used bookstores everywhere that you could sell your books to. I don’t know of any used bookstores any more except one that is really far from where I live
I think used bookstores failed because they didn’t curate their selections enough. You can’t go into one expecting to find a specific book — you go there to discover new books. When the shelves are packed with books nobody wants, it removes the reason to go there
I'm not sure how sustainable they are, but there are a couple of used bookstores near me. I think they engage in heavy curation, though -- they'll pay for your books (or even do consignment for rare/expensive ones), but only if they think they're likely to sell.
There’s still at least Half Price Books which seems to be doing fine. They usually have a impressive selection at least in old sci-fi that I sometimes go hunting for
I used to practically live at the Half-Price Books stores in my area, but for the last couple of years I've been a member at Barnes & Noble too. The thing that made the membership an easy decision for me was the manga section, but I've bought other books there, too, and did a good chunk of my Christmas shopping there this month.
"I also can't get over the incident from the early 10s when Amazon deleted 1984 off of their customers' kindles." - what an ironic book for this to happen to
The story is that publishing on a Kindle has the publisher give Amazon the right to sub-license copies that are "indefinitely" licensed to the purchaser; this is in contrast to iTunes where it really feels like they're giving you a "forever" license to something, since I haven't been able to find a story about movies outright disappearing from libraries (besides via changing countries which is an iTunes quirk).
I know it's not quite the same thing, but the Bruce Willis vs Apple disagreement over whether he has the rights to pass his music collection down to his heirs makes it clear that whilst the licence 'feels' more permanent with iTunes than with Amazon, the lifetime/ownership of the rights is about the same.
I'm with you regarding the DRM. So what I do instead is download the e book from z lib and also buy the book if I like it to support the author. So a win-win for the author as well as for me.
Buy an e-reader which doesn't require an account, like some Kobo devices (I'm most familiar with the Kobo Aura ONE which is an older device but there must be others). Then buy some books in epub format and strip their DRM, or if that's impossible, buy a copy and then pirate an epub. Then just upload those sweet DRM-free epubs to the device and enjoy your ownership.
My policy is to pay a premium for non-DRM ebooks -- supply some incentive for publishers to offer that. (Rampant piracy is what got us into the DRM nightmare in the first place.)
ebooks.com looks great, I didn't know about this! I would gladly pay a premium for non-DRM versions of all books I buy and I'll be using this as a source in the future.
However, I'm very militant against DRM, so in situations where I'm unable to acquire a DRM-free book, I will de-DRM or pirate it.
I love books but reading a paper book is a no go nowadays. So what I do if I can't get a book I want in digital format that use one of those paper cutter guillotine like tools to get rid of the book's spine (yeah I know it's sacrilege) or press down the pages with a tool so it's almost flat. Then photo each page with a cheap dslr on a stand, ocr them, and voilá I have my own ebook in whatever format I want. I can make highlights, take notes etc. The process can be accelerated with two dslrs and aligning the pages in a diy wood stand.
Also there are book scanners out there, but don't know the price on these.
If you're actually paying for the books, de-DRM them. But pay for them.
I personally read on a Barnes & Noble Nook, my fourth e-ink reader. I absolutely love it, I would go so far as to say that the current generation has a _better_ reading experience than dead trees. But I use Calibre and remove the DRM, for the same reasons that you state. I view the books not as entertainment but rather as culture. Culture worth preserving.
Since I was moving between cities and countries, i started to give away books that i’ve read as a present to my friends. Only fictions though, that I usually never read them again. It’s also nice way to have someone to discuss and talk about them.
Something I took away from this is they don't discount books, they don't compete on price.
And that makes sense, anyone looking for a good price is going online, if you are in the store you are not price sensitive. And of course this means B&N is much more profitable than they would be otherwise.
Lowes is doing this too - their prices for plumbing products are insane - $12 for something that goes for $2 online, but they are betting that anyone buying in the store needs it NOW and will pay anything.
They discount selectively. Monday and Tuesday this week all hardbacks were 50% off. There are regular displays with "buy one get one 50% off". Some new books get marked down as well: I got Andrew Koppelman's "Burning Down the House" a week ago and it had a $5 off sticker. Occasionally, there are coupons for "15% off your order". And of course, members get 10% off (nearly) everything. When I've checked books on their web site, the books seem to be discounted more often than not, but usually not as much as Amazon or Walmart. But you're right that there isn't an across-the-board discount for everything in the store.
I’m always skeptical of turnaround stories that claim to be all about the love of the product or whatever. I’m sure that works sometimes - Apple in the aughts obviously - but realistically running a public company is a more hard nosed endeavor.
I have lived bookshops since I was young, I always felt like I might find something amazing and secret in them. They held a kind of mystic for me (1990s).
This changed in the 2000s. I do miss the massive borders books we had. I do have to say the all the Waterstones I've been into in the last 15 years have all those toys, calenders, etc the OP doesn't like; and the bigger stores all have Costas.
It seems like the key insight is that bookstores are no longer places to get books.
If I want a specific book, I already know where to go: the internet. No physical store is ever going to compete on inventory ever again. Amazon will eat you alive.
I go to bookstores to discover new books, and to enjoy the feeling of being around books and the people who love them. The CEO realized this, and leaned in hard.
It's a really, really smart recognition of when passion for the product is actually a business advantage, and not just a warm fuzzy.
It's very hard to do good recommendations -- even for Amazon/Goodreads! -- without people who care about what they're recommending. Those recommendations are now a bookstore's real product.
Maybe if you want the latest release of a popular author. In my experience, book inventories held by bookstores have decreased dramatically, which fits with the “carrying a curated selection” narrative. If I want anything released more than two years ago, the book store rarely has it, unless it’s a staple like 1984.
Depends on the store. I can have Amazon deliver me Egan by January 6 (9 days from now), or I can walk down to the local sci-fi store and pick one up off the shelf today. Of course, Barns and Noble don't even stock his books.
I'm not a prime member, but it's just before midnight Wednesday 28 December. If I order by 2am then Amazon UK says I can have Greg Egan's "Diaspora" (paperback) on Friday. None of the local bookshops open until after New Year (rural UK).
I'm rarely that desperate but Amazon delivery beats petrol costs here and can take only a day longer (assuming goods are even on the shelf locally).
I can get it from bookshop.org on Friday too, but it is £15.50, vs Amazon's £10.50.
Books just seem like such a bad thing to counterfeit. There is a super long tail of products, they weigh a lot and are expensive to ship, and aren’t expensive or high margin to begin with.
> I can get it from bookshop.org on Friday too, but it is £15.50, vs Amazon's £10.50
France and a few other countries have the right idea here - the same book always costs the same, regardless if it's on Amazon, local bookstore, big chain store. There's a unique price set country-wide for the edition, and that's it, they have to compete on other things.
We used to have that in the UK (the "Net Book Agreement") for most of the 20th century, but it collapsed in the 1990s, I think under pressure from big chain bookshops like Dillons that wanted to be able to attract customers with discounts on books.
In the US, I think most (all?) retail price "fixing" got thrown out many decades ago. But new books mostly sold at list price pretty much until Amazon came along. There were exceptions. Some places had discounts on current hardcover bestsellers. And there was one place in Cambridge that was unusual for having pretty much across the board 15% or so discounts.
Ordering books not in stock also wasn't possible at a lot of stores and, when you could, it often took many weeks.
But costs are different, so that seemed like it would harm the ability of small businesses to compete? Wouldn't it be better to have a 'most favoured nation' deal where the cost of the book to a supplier (from the publisher) is fixed. That seems like it would create better competition? I can pay more for better service, for example.
I feel like Amazon used to be a good place for discovering new books and that they decided at some point it was more profitable to steer customers toward sponsored (if that's the word for it) items. Nowadays I look at Librarything for suggestions.
Like pretty much every big tech company they have figured out that it's more profitable to give you what you don't want. If they give you what you want right away it's less time you spend looking at ads or potentially getting exposed to new things to buy. Google search results haven't become worse on accident. Amazon and eBay are the same way, poor search results create more conversions and more time engaged. It's the digital equivalent of grocery stores putting milk on the back wall.
i understand this is a drifting a bit, but to your grocery stores with milk on the back wall comment: we did a grocery store trip yesterday (full size grocery store) and i counted 7 different places they had salsa. different types of salsa at each location. four different locations (opposite corners of the store) for different types of cheese.
it’s maddening the direction these companies are pulling us towards.
Last week I needed a copy of Atlas Obscura to gift to someone. I checked my local Barnes and Nobles website, they had a a copy on a shelf so I went and bought it.
No way I would ever risk buying such books from Amazon. I am concerned about the condition it would arrive in, scams and delays.
I bought a second book based on a librarian's recommendation. There was only 5 or 6 books of the kind I was interested in. It made choosing one easier.
There was a post here, a few weeks ago, by an author, complaining that Every. Single. Copy of his book on Amazon was a fake.
Books are ridiculously easy to counterfeit, and can bring in quite a bit of cash.
Amazon has made the conscious business decision to be a counterfeit souk. I guess they make lots of money from it, and I suspect they don’t really care about their retail brand anymore. From what I hear, it’s actually a loss leader.
i thought amazon would dominate and conquer books market but they never got beyond just super basic concept of selling a book online. Finding interesting books is awful, everything is an ad. reading on kindle is ok. i have prime and once or twice a year read a free book on it.
i assume the problem is complacency. I don’t think buying real solid books has really changed on Amazon at all in past 5 years. kindle digital reader is same as it was 5 years ago. i wonder how many people work in kindle and what they actually do.
Well, Amazon used to be ahead. I vividly remember using their "Find me this out-of-print book" service once and being very positively surprised that it actually worked. Signed up for the out-of-print book, got a message about 3 months later, and BANG, there it was, in my mailbox. That was one of the moment when I thought "well, they are really doing a great job" That has changed since, especially since the website design has been fucked up with ads everywhere.
amazon a product manager focused organization in many parts of their business. Person A comes to america to study for masters or mba. A gets hired by amazon. A is under pressure to release features to increase sales or show how their feature is attributed some top or bottom line metric increase. A fears losing job under amazon cut throat culture and will optimize for exactly that. No amazon job means bye bye visa you go home. if you have family, sell everything and move back.
so as you could guess customer benefit is not primary or even second third focus.
company leadership create culture of one incentive. workers output optimizing for that incentive.
You aren't trying to say that foreign workers are responsible for all the problems at Amazon, not the American management? Come on. I dont believe these "the management is innocent" memes.
To add to that, if I'm getting cheap knockoffs (non-books in this example), I might as well get them from Shopee/Lazada etc since they almost invariably cheaper than Amazon.
Potentially silly question, but how can a book be a fake? Do you mean someone copied the title and put their own text? If I order a book, let's say Infinite Jest, I care that the book contains the words that correspond to the novel written by David Foster Wallace. If that is the case, I got what I wanted. I don't really care who printed it or what the cover looks like.
Do you care about the value of your purchase? If you spend, say, $150 on a scientific textbook, and then you cannot show it in public because you would look like a pirate, you should care.
And that is the best case of a readable, complete book. Maybe you get only the first 500 pages, or the figures are cut off, or it is a degraded scan of a printed book.
The problem is of course much worse for collectible books for which even getting an official reprint or a different edition instead of the real thing would be a problem.
Aside from the issue of the original author not receiving payment, counterfeit books can actually have textual errors as well. A few years ago when the 3rd edition of The Art Of Electronics was published, I saw quite a few warnings posted online not to buy from Amazon. These counterfeits were poorly printed and had many typographical errors, many of which made the information factually incorrect and caused that specific copy to be untrustworthy. So especially for a reference text like that, a counterfeit can actually cause harm if the information isn't correct.
Well, this illustrates the issue that many corporate entities have about open-sourcing their software code.
A book is a bunch of words, delivered to a reader via some medium. In order for a book to work, the words must all be delivered in readable format; whether printed out on a physical media, or delivered electronically, as text strings.
Because of that, copying the text is trivial. I have a scanner, under my desk, that will completely scan a book, if I unbind that book, and drop in the pages. I also have software that will OCR those scans. I have heard of OCR software that does a lot better than mine.
Writing a book is hard. I mean, really hard. I've done it. It can take months for an author to write a book that I can read in a couple of days (unless the author is Mercedes Lackey, or James Patterson).
Software is similar. Once it is written, reproducing it is trivial. After all, it's just a bunch of words. To make it even more convenient, almost all software is already rendered into electronic form.
With both of these, the only thing preventing anyone from simply copying the text, is the law, and there are lots of people (nations, even) that have absolutely no respect at all for the law. They will happily copy and reproduce the text.
It's entirely possible to have counterfeits of higher quality than the original. You could, for instance, sell a fancy, gilt-edged, leather-bound version of a book that has only been released as a mass-market paperback.
But what gives it real value, is the text.
You could steal software that drives a fairly humble Web site, and convert it to drive a megasite, or a design for a limited edition, artisanal product, and turn it into a cheap, mass-market knockoff.
In any of these cases, the originator of the text; whether an author, or a programmer, derives zero gain from it, and it can actually do damage to them, as the knockoffs could have real problems, and do brand damage, or the fake book could be published with the seal of the real publisher, and that publisher could see reputational damage, if the book contains textual errors (like lots of OCR'd books do).
It's a fairly big topic, and there are organizations that are dedicated to either freeing up artistic copyright, or overenforcing it.
The basic deal, is that, if you want art, you need to compensate the artist enough to make that art. AI might be at the point where that art could be faked, but I'm not sure if we are really there, or this is all a bunch of hype.
I ordered a paperback a couple years ago. Kundera, not a completely obscure book. The page on Amazon showed a Harper Perennial paperback with the squiggly line drawing cover art like I was expecting.
What I received looked like the cover head been designed in Word. Solid red, some generic oil painting print, and black text. The contents of the book was even worse. It looked like it was printed on a dot matrix or something.
Needless to say I returned it and have not bought a book from Amazon since.
Splotchy hard to read type, low quality paper and binding, poorly aligned text, rough edges from blunt cutting, weird cover possibly in a different language, and the knowledge that the authors aren't getting money from your purchase.
I bought makeup as a present for someone and while they were appreciative of the thought and time that went into my gift, they had to ask me if I got it off Amazon because they couldn't actually use it if I did. Counterfeit makeup gives her skij condition a skin rash and she's been burned more than once on that so she has to be extra cautious.
A few days ago, someone asked on a forum suggestions for spending a large Amazon gift coupon on books and games.
I started looking for rare, expensive and/or old books that I know about, and at the first result page I realized how futile it was, between unknown quality, unknown marketplace sellers, unreliable listings, the chance of scammers, and the ridiculously inaccurate mass of irrelevant search results that drown out relevant ones.
Other people actually recommended, in harsh terms, to buy electronics etc. on Amazon and get books and games from proper sources.
It is quite obvious to the mass public, not a special insight, that Amazon doesn't love to sell stuff: not only books and media, but anything except maybe Prime subscriptions.
I don't even buy electronics from Amazon much anymore. Walmart and Bestbuy will price match, good return policy and most importantly not fear of knockoffs due to how Amazon comingles.
I use Amazon as a primary source for stuff that I know are generic, don't care about knockoffs and want variety. i.e iPad cases, simple furniture
Amazing just how far Amazon has fallen due to counterfeit products and scammy sellers.
It is unfortunate but understandable if you get scammed buying a pair of "certified" Apple earbuds or lightening cables from a Chinese seller at a price 70% less than you'd pay at Apple, Fair enough and buyer beware.
But if you can't even buy a BOOK that's sold by Amazon itself without getting scammed, then it seems we have a serious problem, and it is not surprising that Amazon stock is down over 50%.
A few years ago Austin opened up a new main public library. When it was being proposed I thought "why are we spending millions and millions on a library in the digital age?".
Boy was I wrong, and I'll happily eat crow for how wrong I was. The new library building is beautiful, super inviting and some of my favorite architecture anywhere. I love going there to work or read. They also do a great job making the building welcoming and accessible to all, while at the same time preventing it from getting trashed by the homeless (looking at you SF public library) with a simple no sleeping/no lying down rule.
Welcoming, inviting public spaces can do very well if people understand why they are desirable.
Maybe yours is inviting, the one near me redid sections that used to be used by the homeless or unemployed and made them "teen spaces" and directed huge chunks of money at turning the space into a community center... in the vein of a JCC or low rent country club for the folks who went to the universities surrounding it.
(I haven't been to the SF public library in a while, but the few times I went in as a Mozilla intern the staff were so rude I ended up buying books and selling them at a used bookstore when finished rather than be treated rudely by folks who were within a year or two of me, from the same department I graduated from. Maybe there's a reason people don't respect that space, and it's not just because they're mentally ill and/or down on their luck.)
the one near me redid sections that used to be used by the homeless or unemployed and made them "teen spaces" and directed huge chunks of money at turning the space into a community center
My issue is they did this at the expense of other, more disadvantaged groups.
I myself have been coming in and out of their space trying to job hunt.
(Turns out a common trope is people don't want to socialize with someone who "lives with their parents" or is un/under employed.)
So picture you're trying to study for OSCP, and you can't find a space that's quiet. In a library.
And what you'd think would happen is someone would go "oh, you're in IT? I know someone looking for that" and solve the issue.
And then instead, they treat it like a game -- or worse, start acting purposefully othering.
That is my core complaint -- that both those spaces and those resources in the monetary sense divert disproporionately to folks who, frankly, sometimes interact in ways that make me question why they strive so hard to interact with teenagers all day.
(Also, it was often not new users -- just bigger, more elaborate programs for the same rich kids from the suburbs who used to pay for special camps and programs... but now having them held in spaces those who couldn't afford them used to do self education.)
I hope taking the time and energy to type that out helps.
Someone else commented that the library is one of the last noncommercial spaces... I honestly don't have that impression at all. I got the sense if you're not using it to do remote work, or as a community center, but to... check out materials and use them... you are unwelcome unless you're buying stuff (coffee, supplies etc) or part of one of the groups that makes substantial donations when they're not making noise.
what's the problem with having a part of the library be intended for young people and students? That seems like a better use of the space than having the city turn the library into a daytime homeless shelter.
I think the main reason isn't the shelter itself, but that being around a large number of fellow homeless people is dangerous because of the rampant mental health issues, drug abuse, and violent crime.
The problem is similar to what happened when low income housing (the "projects") concentrated the poor into economic ghettos.
If they're "poor", don't they have to rent or buy low income housing, and so "concentrate into economic ghettos"?
There is no policy concentrating the poor with each other, any more than there is a policy that concentrates the rich with each other. The market makes available different products, and different economic market segments purchase different products. With a policy, or without a policy, the poor will live with the poor.
> That seems like a better use of the space than having the city turn the library into a daytime homeless shelter.
I prefer it being a homeless shelter, its cold as hell in chicago right now. It would be nice for them to have some some space there.
Whenever there is a cold wave we all wonder whats happening to the ppl left out there. It would be nice for them to have one more option. give everyone else peace of mind, lol.
I mean... That sounds great. Our library too has activities and spaces and it's brilliant. It helps bring in next generation of readers and get everybody engaged and it's awesome :-)
It's an important Third Space, and one of the only noncommercial Third Spaces left: A Third Space is a space which isn't home or work which can be used for socialization and potentially other, more goal-directed things, like informal classes. Shopping malls and other commercial spaces can be Third Spaces, but they have a profit motive which incentivizes them to kick people out for "loitering" or otherwise using the space without paying money. Libraries, lacking that incentive, can host more relaxed gatherings without having to make people do things that can be monetized.
Our local library here in the Netherlands is like this. The local archery club practices inside a few nights a week. There is a full court gymnasium, a stage and enough space to seat a few hundred people. There is a coffee bar, pool tables, plenty of seating and even a few books! ;)
The building is open until 11pm 4 days a week, with reduced hours on Friday and Saturday; closed on Sunday. I guess it's no surprise that the website describes as more of a "Multifunctioneel Centrum" as opposed to just a library!
Missoula, Montana (the veritable Hub Of The World, I know... eat your heart out, Boston) has a Makerspace in its public library, has classes for it, and allows people to reserve time so staff can provide one-on-one time and troubleshooting. It's a perfect use of the space. It also has things like D&D guilds for teens and adults and something called the Democracy Project, which is apparently a civic engagement project for teens.
Hoping you learned that this crow applies to libraries in general and not just this one library. They are way more than just books. Some of them even rent out small appliances and tools these days, as well as hosting classes.
I record episodes for my open-source-software podcast from the recording room at my city's main branch library, sparing me the need to invest in a professional-quality mic or a soundproofed acoustically-neutral room. Shoutout to the Boston Public Library.
The most beautiful reading room I’ve ever been in. I wanted to go into NYC’s public library reading room, but they don’t allow visitors, which was a bummer. (Or at the very least it’s strongly discouraged unless you’re truly there doing work, rather than just wanting to sit there for a few minutes and soak it in or read a little)
You’d think! Whatever the sign said (I didn’t take a photo), it was clear they were discouraging people to just step in quick to look around. Perhaps truly reading wasn’t discouraged, but compared to the lack of such a sign at Boston Public Library, it felt very different.
But the number of tourists in NYC compared to Boston is probably a big difference.
It's been a few years and, at one point, they were doing renovations but I've definitely hung out in the Rose Reading Room at the NYPL in the past. And there's nothing on the NYPL's current site to suggest it's not open for just sitting and reading.
Bingo, it was exactly this. I was pretty bummed, being a fan of libraries in general, a fan of Ghostbusters, and a fan of nice places to read and work.
If I’m coworking in NYC sometime, maybe I’ll ask what kind of research I must be doing to get to read there. I’m guessing with the physical books only available there?
Atlanta opened a beautiful new main public library, and they treat everyone who enters like a potential criminal. They check your bags for weapons and run metal detector wands over you. Basically the worst library experience I've ever had. Once you get in there, there are hardly even any books, and they close at 6 pm. I can see why people would prefer to chill in a Barnes and Noble.
Libraries are one of the last bastions of being able to be somewhere legally without spending money. With the homeless crisis we shouldn't be surprised that these places are used in this way - it's 100% an expected outcome.
It's a logistics and resources problem - libraries are: shelter, safety, heating/cooling, running water, restrooms, a place to sit... Truth is we don't afford that to everyone here and a lot of people ignore the cruelty/suffering. Hell - some even justify and celebrate it.
Churches were and arguably are, still a big one. Granted, only one day a week but still.
I think it's fine to encourage people to spend time at the library. I know as a kid, I grew a lot as a person at our local library.
They had after school activities once a week, it was about a mile down the road, so we had to learn to be responsible walking after school. The librarians were always kind to us, even though I'm sure as teenagers we probably weren't always a carbon copy of the model, upstanding citizen.
I could spend time with my friends discussing various topics, with easy information available if we couldn't agree on the facts. Plus, I kissed my wife for the first time on the bench outside. Libraries are great :)
Not just one day a week. A lot of churches open to homeless all during the week. It makes sense because it's a waste of resources to let a large heated building sit empty the other 6 days of the week that aren't Sunday when they can use that space to help the less fortunate.
I moved out of SF during the pandemic but before that the city had homeless and mentally ill people and there was no security check at the library, and it was full of books.
As an active library user w a 4 year old and 1 year old going to the bathroom at the sf library wasn’t a good situation- so for many folks (disabled, those w young children) the library was not available to them.
It was my experience at a bathroom on the SF main public library that led me to post my comment about it. It was beyond disgusting. There was literal shit smeared all over a stall, and bathroom had essentially been commandeered by mentally ill people living there.
I contrast that with the library in Austin. Obviously, as a free, warm, comfortable space, there are tons of homeless people there. But, unlike in SF, the Austin library doesn't let them trash the place - the homeless there are just using the library like everyone else. There is a strict no sleeping/lying rule (which I've seen enforced) which prevents anyone from basically taking over a section of the library. The bathrooms have always been immaculate whenever I've used them.
IMO the Austin library's policy toward the homeless shows how you can be respectful and welcoming to all while still requiring everyone who enters to respect the building.
Let's split the distance. Every big city has some homeless, but no western European city has such problems with homeless people and guns to the extend to be a problem that requires screening visitors to a library, or having metal detectors, and drug and gun checks in public buildings...
>they treat everyone who enters like a potential criminal. They check your bags for weapons and run metal detector wands over you. Basically the worst library experience I've ever had
I don't believe there are many other parts of the world where this happens.
Some college libraries are open to the public as well, and are often really amazing spaces. I grew up going to one with multiple levels of sub-basements, and even as a kid, I just enjoyed the sense of it. Like a secret that only I knew about, full of ancient knowledge.
...No idea if it's still open to the public or not these days, but if I ever get back there I'm going to make a point of finding out.
Libraries and librarians always seem to far ahead of things on a meta level. My town (Halifax, Nova Scotia) also built a beautiful library recently. Once of the criticisms levelled at it was that it didn't really have stacks all over the place.
It has become an incredibly valuable community hub. Books are a bit of an excuse to enjoy its architecture and function. I've been there for countless hours with my children as they have grown up.
I'm also consistently impressed by the staff. In a time when every business is complaining about staffing and using it as an excuse for bad quality and bad service, it seems that most libraries are staffed with total professionals who do their job day in and day out and do it well.
I co-founded a library technology company, and I didn’t realize this until those initial discussions with my cofounders. Librarians were so far ahead of the curve of adopting electronic delivery. They came up with a variety of technologies and standards to accomplish this when nothing else had been specified or built. It’s quite inspiring.
I even met the librarian who invented the phrase “surfing the internet” at a librarian conference. Yes, a librarian was there to coin phrases at the dawn of the web!
I'm in loose circles involving archivists in addition to librarians and can confirm that they have some of the most nuanced and insightful takes on information management: discovery, curation, search, etc., especially how these systems serve human users as interfaces to knowledge. It seems obvious to say but feels important to reiterate.
My introduction to the Internet as an immigrant back in 1996 was hugely thanks to accommodating librarians at the middle school I attended. Netscape on a 486 running Win 3.11 was not ideal, but it's also where I created my first website, a Simpsons fan site on Tripod (rip).
The Halifax central library really is a sight to behold. That is the sort of investment i would hope the public could rally behind because it is visible and immensely useful. Even if you don't visit the actual building, the online services provided by Canadian libraries is among the best in the world.
Many Canadian cities are upgrading their libraries and i for one am overjoyed to see that!
Not the author, but it seems like they are saying that, at first glance, it seems unreasonable to spend millions of dollars on a physical structure to hold books when all of the same information is housed online and accessible digitally. But, upon further consideration, there are secondary benefits that make a library a net benefit for the community.
The Calgary public library (downtown) is like this as well: unique architecture and lots of "non-book" things. I wish they did a better job with the drug users in and around it though.
I just visited Helsinki, and if you’re ever around there, go see oodi. It’s an amazing space. They even have a small makerspace in there with 3D printers, lasercutters,…
>"why are we spending millions and millions on a library in the digital age?"
Because the less well off may not have enough devices or internet access to do things digitally. It's also good if you have young kids. You can't read that book which has different textures for all the animals digitally.
> Because the less well off may not have enough devices or internet access to do things digitally.
Is that really still true? I've traveled in many poor counties where people live in shacks with no plumbing, yet still all have internet connected smartphones. Only in the most remote villages with no electricity or phone signal are people still truly disconnected.
I'd argue it's not necessarily about the devices, it's about paying to rent electronic copies of books. I'm not poor, but I find that to be a prohibitively expensive way to do any appreciable amount of reading. Especially when there is a building down the street that can get me just about any book for free.
I don't know what their data plans are like or how good their network is.
In AU, you can still get really cheap prepaid plans that don't really have a lot of data all things considered. For example, right now I can get an Amaysim SIM for $100, and you get 60GB for 365 days. https://www.amaysim.com.au/plans/long-expiry-plans/
This is roughly 165MB a day. Probably amazing compared to a poor country, but it's all relative.
In FF, incognito window, uBlock origin allowed in incognito windows:
- google.com is 500kB
- twitter.com is 4MB
- tiktok.com is 5MB
- youtube.com is 6MB
- facebook.com is 300kB
- Commonwealth's Netbank is 2MB
This is not even considering all the other data you need for using those websites. If your mobile phone and your mobile data is your main source of connectivity, it's really easy to blow through it all just on basic things.
The data plans in most developing countries are actually quite good.
For example, the best overall plan I've used anywhere in the world is in Thailand. You can get unlimited 10Mbit service for $5 a month. The coverage is extremely good even in the mountains or islands, latency is excellent, and I've used over 100 GB without hitting any additional throttles. And that's with AIS. There are cheaper companies and plans if you wanted.
Check out Nashille’s library! They even have a teen-focused makerspace, with 3D printers, a music studio, rentable Ardurino kits. Check it out - inspiring.
PS: +1 to Austin’s library. It’s an incredible space. Grab a coffee at the cafe, and hang out on the beautiful roof terrace. Breathtaking views, and it’s a great place to meet people (and what better people to meet than library people!); PS: they are building a makerspace there too - stay tuned…
Sadly in the UK, libraries continue on a decline of being underfunded, shut half the week, and sometimes sold off (usually to housing development companies).
A few have managed to keep going (mostly due to the communities taking direct control) and they have done wonders in keep up with the times.
Just want to add some weight to how awesome Austin's library is, they rent laptops, have 3D printers, even a zine section, and an upper terrace with plants and a view etc which is the perfect place for study group sessions.
It's a great place, just wish there was free parking.
My local library is similar a new building going from a Brutalist design building (depressing) to a new all glass single floor building. With 3d printers, coffee shop, and all kinds of stuff.
The library in Linden, NJ--a working class town--is beautiful. My town is much wealthier, but our library is nowhere near as nice. I definitely appreciate that a town that probably has more challenges has such a nice piece of public infrastructure.
The latest version of "look inside" has become super stingy. The default is to show you the first twenty pages or so, then you have to use "Surprise Me", which feeds me one page at a time at some random location, most of the time in the first twenty pages I've already seen. In technical books, that's not enough to get a feel for the actual content. It used to be better, you could read several pages for each "Surprise Me".
It's really off-putting. In a bookstore, I can stand there ten minutes and make sure the book is worthwhile. Technical books are expensive.
Amazon treats me like a deadbeat, even though I buy lots of books from them.
> The default is to show you the first twenty pages or so,
For anything other than a novel, that's usually the least representative sample. That'll give you the copyright, table of contents (admittedly useful) and the Preface and the Introduction and a page with a couple of quotations on it.
Not really great to judge the quality of writing / code samples or whatever you're interested in.
I always used to use zlib for "flicking through" a book the way you would in a bookshop to see if it was worth buying it.
> It's really off-putting. In a bookstore, I can stand there ten minutes and make sure the book is worthwhile. Technical books are expensive.
We have a local chain that sells well curated used books and it's brilliant. Picked up my copy of Godel, Escher, Bach because I saw it on the shelf and flipped through and was like 'Yes, please!'
> The latest version of "look inside" has become super stingy. The default is to show you the first twenty pages or so, then you have to use "Surprise Me" [...]
Note that this is only for print editions. For Kindle editions it does not have "Surprise Me". For those "Look Inside" seems to just show you the same sample that you get if you ask it to send a sample to your Kindle.
I've found this is often completely useless for music books and math books as the sample doesn't get far enough in to actually have any music or math notation, and it is terrible handling of such notation that often makes an otherwise good Kindle book unreadable.
I once bought a Kindle edition of "Proofs from the Book" and it had been produced apparently using OCR which didn't know how to handle anything other than normal letters, digits, and common symbols. Things like integral signs, summation signs, and set relationship symbols showed up as whitespace.
Another math book I bought had many of the equations as graphics. Reading on the Kindle app on a computer or tablet was fine. The images were scaled to a reasonable size and were quite readable. On an eInk Kindle however they were not scaled. They were tiny and required more magnification than my best magnifying glass had for me to read them comfortably. I had to tap them to get a menu that would let me show the image full screen. This made reading the book incredibly tedious both from the slowness of the Kindle and only being able to see one equation at a time this way.
I don't understand how the same people who hang out around bookstores + make recommendations (which you classify as "good") aren't the same people on Goodreads writing reviews/making recommendations as users (which you recommend as bad?)
Goodreads is extremely annoying to use. It’s annoying to write interesting reviews which don’t surface compared to uninteresting reviews anyway. It’s annoying to look for books with interesting reviews and searching for anything a bit specific is completely impossible. I don’t know anyone who seriously like reading and use it.
The recommendations you would get inside a bookstore have nothing to do with this kind of experience. You are having an actual conversation about what you like and are looking for.
I tried using GoodReads and my problem was it was terrible for discovery, which is the only thing I cared about. Now it’s really just a tracker for books I read on Kindle.
The incentives for the reviewers are different. On-line reviewers (often) get caught up in review-counting and status-seeking. They want to be a "Top Reviewer".
In a store the person has to go out of their way every time they recommend the same book. It's one-to-one vs. one-to-many. There's more of a chance they really do think highly of the book, maybe even years after reading it. That's valuable.
My local bookstore can generally match Amazon in terms of delivery times, including next-day, although I have to go and collect it (but they're local, so they're easy to get to). They know me now too, so I just drop them an email and they reply when it's arrived. I'm in the UK though, so I guess the smaller distances may help compared to larger countries.
Bookstore buying has one benefit in that you can verify the condition of the book. I'm really sick of getting bruised books in the mail. So, with expensive hardbacks, I've shifted to ordering through a b&m so I can be sure of getting an undamaged book.
I'm puzzled where you see that "key insight" in the linked article. I came away with the feeling that the key insight was: if you want to sell books, you must love books.
Did you use the present tense to describe the past, before James Daunt took over, perhaps? I could understand "the key insight was that bookstores were no longer places to get books," but the entire article seems to be about how B&N has become a place to get books, because the CEO loves books, and empowers local stores to also love books and therefore sell them well.
I think your comment actually highlights the key insight.
For a long time, the fact that the bookstore was the _only_ place to “get books” occluded the fact that it was the _best_ place to explore and appreciate books. Amazon stripped away the veneer by showing that, actually, bookstores weren’t so ideal for “getting books” after all (book not carried, book not in stock, can’t find the right shelf, etc). Daunt is therefore succeeding by refocusing on “loving books,” as you put it, rather than on transacting books.
You might “get books” at a bookstore, but that’s probably not why you went there in the first place.
> Daunt is therefore succeeding by refocusing on “loving books,” as you put it, rather than on transacting books.
New B&N is much more focused on transacting (whether its books or other merchandise) than at any time in its past history. That’s why it works: B&N in the past has focused more than the current B&N on speculative/aspirational attempts to build demand and novel businesses (whether its effectively selling prime space for publisher’s promotions as discussed in the article, or the attempt to build B&N’s own Nook business by large dedications of space, or B&N’s bizarre restaurant business), the current version is focused on stocking and moving what the local stores know they can move.
Maybe my reading of the article is colored by the fact that I have become a frequent shopper at B&N within the last two years, but no, I go to B&N to get books, and so do many others, as evidenced by the statement in the article that sales are rising.
I don't know that I really disagree with anything you're saying about discovery and so on, but you keep describing it as a key insight of the article which doesn't seem to talk about it even a little bit. It sounds like your key insight, maybe, although the article seems to offer counter-evidence to your claim.
> Amazon seems invincible. … If [Toys R Us] couldn’t compete with Amazon, how could B&N hope to do any better?
> Daunt started giving more power to the stores,”
for example by
> ask[ing] employees in the outlets to take every book off the shelf, and re-evaluate whether it should stay.
I suppose I drew from this that those local employees were producing a better atmosphere for book-browsers than publishers’ marketing budgets had, and took that as evidence of this “discovery” strategy. Does that strike you as a stretch?
The “get books” wording may have been more confusing than clever. For my part, I hoped to convey that I (maybe you too?) go to B&N to browse books even when I’m not looking for anything in particular, not that I go for things other than books.
This is exactly my thought process as I read the title. It was fairly obvious that Barnes & Noble pivoted their business model (starting about a decade and a half ago). It was already happening with the Borders bankruptcy; but that solidified and accelerated the change. Now BN’s business model is more aligned with general leisure (books, board games, gadgets, coffee, etc) than a “book store”.
They are a case study in business school that selling tchotchkes and trinkets is more profitable than books. I disagree with GP's article. It is the same myth in tech that "engineers make better founders" and "companies ran by execs with engineering backgrounds are more successful". It is feel-good masturbation for professionals without objective data backing it. In this case they are running with "booklovers run better bookstores". Not necessarily generalizable to all booksellers. The pandemic has shown that cheap rates play an oversized role in picking winners and losers.
Nonetheless what TFA says is absolutely true about both his original stores, Daunt Books, and Waterstones here in the UK. Waterstones is immeasurably better under his stewardship than it was before. If he’s turned around the biggest bookshop chains in both the UK and the US, he must be doing something right.
It’s possible that there’s more than one successful business model though, right?
I think the lesson may be that B&N wanted to be a successful bookstore and they achieved that by doing a better job serving book buyers mostly by giving individual stores more autonomy. That doesn’t mean another chain couldn’t succeed by turning into a books & trinkets store with a focus on high margin trinkets.
I can see where you're coming from, there are multiple angles. B&N is setting themselves up as a bookstore for book lovers, and Inigo is setting themselves up as a book store for culture lovers.
Bookstores never really were the place to get specific books. Yes, you could, but in essence you'd just place a remote order.
Bookstores always were places to make discoveries, to learn, to have people recommend books for you. My first bookstore experiences go back to the late 70s, and the ones that stick in my mind as memorable? Two stores that had fiercely opinionated voracious readers as employees, who both knew books and their customers. (I could literally go there, as a kid, and ask "what book do I want to get my dad for Christmas", and they'd inevitably make fabulous recommendations that I wasn't old enough yet to figure out by myself)
This extends beyond bookstores - all stores are ultimately in the business of caring about customers and being deeply knowledgable about what they sell. The rest is logistics.
And, historically, those remote orders were sort of an exception process whereby your order would often not get sent to the bookstore until whenever they next got a delivery from whoever the publisher was.
Huh. Now I wonder if that system is regionally different. My experience was back in Germany, and delivery times were (unless it was a rare book) pretty predictably about a week.
I'm talking about the 1980s or so--so a long time ago. There were some big city bookstores that would have a special customer service desk but my recollection from rarely using was that it would take a while. In general, I remember special orders for books not in the store as not really being a customary thing generally. (And for out of print books being pretty much on you to look through individual stores.)
80s as well. But then, I was but a wee lass, and maybe my choices were easily available, just not in store.
Still, now I'm deeply interested in reading an account of how different book selling systems in the 80s worked. (Yes, I'm avoiding other tasks, why do you ask? ;)
Definitely. For a long while (pre-covid), bookstores where my favorite place to hang out, drink a coffee, and browse! There's still something wonderful about having a physical book in your hands.
I actually really enjoyed the Amazon Books stores when they first opened; they were full of books, and not customized recommendations to me but actually the top rated and top-selling books across US Amazon shoppers.
But I feel like they succumbed to the same problem B&N did here, for different reasons -- they became full of kitchen gadgets and devices, because people were buying more things and less books on Amazon itself, and the stores started to mirror that.
> It's very hard to do good recommendations -- even for Amazon/Goodreads! -- without people who care about what they're recommending.
But is that a property of the recommendations or of the circumstances under which they are received?
It's possible that the quality of a recommendation generated by an AI based on psychological profiles is superior, so that if it was followed, the book would be enjoyed. But it's not being followed, because it appears too unlikely and the reader doesn't trust the AI.
If that's true, the competitive advantage of the physical interaction would not actually be the recommendations themselves, but the atmosphere it creates which makes readers susceptible to listening to them.
That is not how AI works and that is not what it is designed to do. AI doesn't understand you, nor does it care to - it just puts you into a bucket and recommends a set of products people in that bucket are statistically more likely to buy and keep buying, regardless of their quality. It's only if you land in a bucket with people who only buy good stuff that you get recommended good stuff. If you even get clipped by an edge of one of the ginormous junk buckets - it's over - junk central for you.
Now, some people, maybe most even, will try and do the same to you. But not all, and store owner can optimize for those who won't.
I mostly agree, but for me Goodreads has given some good suggestions over the years as well.
But one thing especially is the “friend activity”. There are some friends that I have connected with whom have a similar reading preference to me. Discovering what they are reading / have read and rated has influenced my buying decisions quite often. When I lived near those friends, we would talk about the books as we had more contact, but since moving halfway across the world that does not happen as often. Goodreads is great for that (imo).
They can do the old-fashioned thing: order them for you. It may cost a bit more, but it's like in-store delivery (which is fine, if you're not too remote). It's too little, too late for B&N for this, but it can help smaller bookshops. And you'll get to know the personnel or the owner a bit better when you do.
In my experience, more often than not, Amazon ships books with very poor protection, and they arrive a little bent or creased in places. They never used to do this, but now it’s terrible. For that reason, alone, I like to buy books at actual stores.
> It seems like the key insight is that bookstores are no longer places to get books.
FWIW, this was considered common sense when I was in library school 20 years ago: that is to say, it was presented to us as a fact rather than a question. I don't think this was a unique or novel insight by B&N, rather a question of execution in the transformation of an already large company and, I suppose, the financial discipline to survive the competition.
Agreed: it's not the concept alone, but the execution. BN, Borders, BAM!, and others all tried the same strategy.
Borders is already out of business, and BAM! looks like it's on its way (it's no longer public so financials are difficult to know, but part time employees report that they get more or fewer hours based on how many gift cards they sell, which indicates cash flow problems).
BN is the only one doing well, and it's my opinion that this is due to being a comfortable place to buy and read books. By contrast, book selection at BAM! is atrocious, and the cafes all seem cold, uninviting, and surrounded by gimmicks and toys.
I think the key insight is that a CEO with a background in the field, and who loves the field - such as James Daunt who became B&N's CEO but has a background as a bookstore owner - can do better than your average MBA.
This is perhaps the passage from the article that resonated the most with me:
> If you want to sell music, you must love those songs. If you want to succeed in journalism, you must love those newspapers. If you want to succeed in movies, you must love the cinema.
> But this kind of love is rare nowadays. I often see record labels promote new artists for all sorts of gimmicky reasons—even labels I once trusted such as Deutsche Grammophon or Concord. I’ve come to doubt whether the people in charge really love the music.
In a world where everything is now digital, physical goods have a lot more appeal. That's really what it comes down to, and they leaned into that hard.
It's the same reason why vinyl is continuing to grow. People want something they can actually own. Books are not immune to this and there is something inherently more satisfying about having a bookshelf with the books you've read versus a library of ebooks.
In line with this, the owner of a book store in the Boston area told me that older folks lean towards digital books and younger folks prefer physical books. This seemed a bit counter-intuitive, given that one might have expected older people to prefer the paper books that they are used to -- as an example, an older relative of mine, an avid reader, has a Kindle but rarely uses it.
I don't recall how he explained this, but it might've been that older folks don't want to accumulate more stuff while younger people have room to grow a collection as well as the point you make about wanting to acquire non-digital goods (and, relatedly, perhaps to have experiences that take them away from their screens).
Man do I want to believe the lessons here. I just wonder if B&N success is also maybe due to the pandemic murdering poorly capitalized independent bookstores and they see an opportunity.
You did technically use the word in your statement ("...all that money,") but you also implied that the example of James Daunt said more than "James Daunt is a good hire if you run a bookstore company," which might or might not be true.
What did the CEO do? He gave control to the workers. They got to choose what books go where and on what shelves. Most businesses can learn from this. Give control to the people who care. This is how most co-ops work and why they are special. Gaming world has Valve following a similar model.
The reason why CEOs have so much impact is because they are at the top of a tree and make all the important decisions. this isn't a consequence of the amazing (or terrible) nature of CEOs, it's just the outcome of the corporate structure.
With a little imagination, we can imagine other corporate structures...
It's easy to imagine other structures. Whether they'll work better or worse is something else entirely.
Business has evolved into the current structure, and since in a free market it's survival of the fittest, it appears to be optimal. After all, businesses exist to make money for their owners, not CEOs.
But what if we don't have a free market, never have, and never will have. Also most misunderstand 'survival of the fittest' which Darwin never said.
Evolution is about creatures fitting to their environment. If you have a complex environment, you have complex animals. If you have a simple environment, you have simple animals. It has nothing to do with 'robustness' or 'strength' or any notion of 'good'.
Similarly, if free markets are an optimizing system, they are a deeply flawed one. The constraint of spot trades and singular prices. And of course externalities, make them poor at optimization where it matters. So if we had free markets (we don't), what 'optimal' is very constrained and simple relative to what people need.
Combine stores like B&N and Half-Price with alternative online resources like AbeBooks, Discogs, e-bay, etc., and you really don't need inconsistent crap like Amazon in your life anymore.
I can't be the only one who is fed up with the bait & switch experiences. Being an asshole or otherwise indifferent to the customer is eventually going to add up over time.
I vaguely recall thinking that B&N was doing better a few years before the pandemic, in the sense that despite their financials, it was feeling more appealing to shop there than it had been in like ... 2012?... and was tending to have more people in it. Maybe I'm misremembering the timeline? But I'm pretty sure it was pre-pandemic.
Regardless, can't agree more that a CEO whose interest is in something besides money-grabbing at the expense of the health of the business is actually how you make a store successful. Somewhat more cynical about the long-term health because it seems like once stores become appealing, they'll cash in on that by going back to money-grabbing, but we'll see...
I've gone to Barnes & Noble 2 - 3 times a week for 10 - 15 years. I sit in the cafe with my cafe mocha and do some work, then browse books for a while. I never get tired of it. I read about their financial problems through the 20-teens and was sadly expecting that they'd go under.
When James Daunt was named CEO, the changes were immediate. The spacer boxes appeared on the shelves; as someone else mentioned, they allow books to be placed cover forward, which is better for visual appeal. The front cover is what book designers design for. It also reduces the number of books on the shelves, which helps keep inventory lean.
They rearranged the shelves on the store floor so you had fewer rows of parallel shelves like an old-school library. In my store, shelves were arranged to create a little enclaves for mystery and detective fiction and for hardback fiction. The store layout is more varied and interesting.
On several occasions, I've seen guys who were, from their conversations, some kind of "store layout consultants" talking to the managers and discussing moving stuff around and changing displays.
The folks who worked at the store were very encouraged. Many had been through the big layoff in 2018 (when a lot of full-timers were abruptly let go - see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16389342). They liked the new changes - it was clear that the company was finally being run by someone who understood books. (I read somewhere - can't find the link - that Daunt even thinks about the angle of the shelves, because he thinks a certain angle is best for visibility.)
The company seemed to be more realistic about what wasn't working. Most significantly, the Nook section near the door disappeared. Other smaller things that weren't selling (like Lamy fountain pens) also disappeared. Inventory in general is more controlled: They started turning over the magazines much faster, to the point where if I was interested in a magazine I found I couldn't wait too long.
The technical book section isn't what it used to be, but they do carry a lot of No Starch books. I'm not a programmer, but I have a few No Starch books and e-books. I like the publisher (and given the problems with their books being counterfeited on Amazon, I'd rather buy a paper version in store if I want one).
Some stuff they've done in my store doesn't make sense to me - for instance, separating fiction into hardback and paperback. The classics section has been partially separated by publisher. I don't think that's how people look for books: They ask for "Crime and Punishment", not the paperback edition of "Crime and Punishment", or the Penguin edition. People want to see all the editions of "Crime and Punishment" together so they can compare and choose. Right or wrong, at least these are changes which reflect someone thinking about books.
The pandemic closure was a setback, and a lot of people who used to work at my store didn't return to work. But the store has come back pretty well. There's nothing else like Barnes & Noble, so I hope these changes work out.
> Some stuff they've done in my store doesn't make sense to me - for instance, separating fiction into hardback and paperback.
Eh, that makes sense to me: I really don't like hardback and will never voluntarily buy one, because manipulating the covers separate from the pages distracts from reading and makes me feel like I need 3-4 hands to manage it.
> I really don't like hardback and will never voluntarily buy one
Same, though for me it's all about the space they take up. Followed closely by the cost mark-up. I'm buying the words not the form, so I want it in the most convenient (physical in this case) form possible.
Love the story, can’t help but feel it is a little too early to judge a success.
I believe it though and because it is hard, it is unlikely to repeat in other industries. I love my job, but the amount of time for me personally to provide discovery is hard. Need total buy in from an organization and it seems like something on the verge of bankruptcy is the best place to see it happen.
I love this story for many reasons but the big one is the lesson about "selling out your mission." It seems naive and quaint to say "The job of a bookstore is to sell books that people want." except that is really true. We used to have a bookstore called "A Clean Well Lighted Place for Books" that had the vibe described here.
Here's the thing though, profit and loss people get made decision makers. And it is a super simple decision process "Do I take $10M from this publisher to push their book or do I try to find books people are willing to buy?" well the easy answer is take the money. But as this story points out, it is the wrong answer. Once you're taking money like this your interests are no longer aligned with your customer, they are aligned with the publishers you buy from.
That said, the store I've been to most doesn't seem to have changed its layout from selling games/puzzles + coffee bar + bookstore. (something mentioned in the article as being phased out) but perhaps that will change as they get around to it.
Now if someone would do this transformation for a grocery chain I would love to have one of those near me!
I've bought five magazines at Barnes and Noble in the past two months, after not buying any magazine for probably 15 years. I don't know why but I go in, something catches my eye, and I buy it. I have no desire to subscribe, three of the magazines are focused on things I've never considered but maybe now do.
I wrote a bunch of LOB software for B&N's CS and B2B departments early in my career. I loved working there and I'm very happy to see an article like this.
Our local B&N has had a remarkable turnaround this past year or two. It was in deep decline for many years. A third of the store was given to toys, another third to movies/music, and what was left of books saw little traffic. Now, they have just finished a major remodeling and it's back to all books. The parking lot is nearly full and I have to negotiate around many browsers in the aisles.
It's been many years since I've seen a bookstore so full of books and customers (outside of Powell's in Portland). I noted two major differences from how B&N was many years ago. First, the proportion given over to fiction is much greater. Second, there is an enormous youth section, maybe a third of the store.
Ted Gioia produces some great essays. It’s hard to pinpoint the theme of his blog (something something music and media) but he routinely grabs me, even on topics I didn’t think I was interested in.
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[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 320 ms ] threadI doubt Amazon saw those as profitable, and they either didn't track well how much my purchases (and I'm assuming others) declined when it was no longer easy to deal with a person, or decided the impending labor/unionization battles would be best avoided.
And B&N has become a media-heavy giftshop.
It was also by far the best place to buy board games this year, since they had a 50% off sale Dec. 26 and 27 on all their games and many of their stores have a fair selection of titles. (Some sample prices on some hot titles: Ark Nova for $37, Ruins of Arnak and Everdell for $30/each).
From what I was told by a B&N worker, this was an extension of the 2-day post-xmas 50%-off-all-hardcovers sale that they'd started doing recently.
I haven't shopped in one in a while but after seeing how much stuff they have that I'm interested I'll be back. They even had lego sets that were sold out elsewhere.
The toys there are some of our favorites (Lego and Calico Critters) and they have a lot of fun toys you’ve never heard of but are fun for the kids to try.
When you see a store bulk up with crap stuffed everywhere, it’s often tied to loading up on debt and sometimes bankruptcy risk.
IMO, Barnes and Noble sees an opportunity with the struggles of Amazon in retail and the decline of Starbucks. Starbucks used to pride itself as a “third place”… now the drive through is the priority, the seating has been reduced, and the management seems more interested in fighting labor than having happy hospitality employees.
People who read tend to have money. It seems like a winning combination to have people with money hanging out in your retail establishment. Plus they can riff off of Target’s super successful pickup model that is every mom’s favorite thing ever.
This makes me think you did not enter a bookstore before you checked out Amazon's version. Many do exactly this for the big, recognizable hits they expect to sell more of.
Also it is a symptom of JIT logistics and inventory minimization, not really a UX concern.
Yeah, I worked at a chain bookstore years before Amazon ever opened a physical store and the entire bestsellers display was done covers out, as were all the endcaps. Within the aisles, we organized books so that some of the books on every shelf would be cover out, which sometimes optimizes for space, and makes for a more aesthetically pleasing shelf layout and allows for the more prominent display of popular titles and eye-catching covers.
Setting up shelves this way was part of the training and a constant practice, adjusting the display of stock throughout the day as items are purchased, removed, and returned. The entire store got a once over every night at closing.
Love comes and goes. Wonder is forever.
The last line of code I wrote “for fun” was in 1996. The number of things I’ve done as hobbies since then is a mile long.
But it is rare enough that it is worth pointing.
Except for the CEO, who prided himself on not knowing anything about the field. He saw not knowing the niche as a perk; he'd focus on the "business side" only, leaving the rest to everyone else.
Got the offer, turned it down because of that.
The problem with the GP’s description is that the CEO took pride in not knowing the business. A good enabler type CEO who is an outsider to the business would certainly make an effort to build expertise and even passion about the business.
100% agreed. Not that it isn't possible, but I'd like to start with a product person because a product person will fight for what matters to the customer and I'd prefer to be in that camp.
Satya Nadella after Balmer would be another example. Balmer did great things for MSFT stock ticker, but so much of the 90's love was lost. Satya has a massive uphill battle but with Github, VSCode and other efforts - I do believe he sincerely cares.
This is like the political narrative, economy was doing badly under party X, starts doing well under Y so Y must be better. No, there were cycles and much of what happens under Y was started by X, and/or both had a lot less control than people think.
We've all seen videos of Ballmer, he was obviously a very passionate leader. Gates, Ballmer, Nadella, they're all business people and probably as evil as the other, just so happens that it is now more of a business imperative for Nadella to be seen as a good player in tech.
That's interesting to hear.
My eyes are getting older and I find the accessibility facilities in Windows 11 (and Mint as it happens) far more helpful than those on my M1 Air (little things like the ability to scale far more of the textual aspects of the OS in Windows).
Balmer made office the massive cash cow it is today through amazing licensing - again great stuff for $msft, but there was no product through his tenure that people were like yea, Microsoft! The iphone was dismissed and the windows phone was too late and couldn't play catch up.
Today people are starting to care about Microsoft again. Definitely not 90s love but man I love VSCode. I really do.
Looks like the hedge fund installed the new ceo when they purchased Barnes and Noble.
That hedge fund is probably filled with MBAs.
There's one MBA on their management committee. Heavily outnumbered by JDs.
I'm kind of astounded the article didn't talk about Paul Singer at all. It seems like a massive oversight to not dig into the money behind Barnes and Noble.
Foley was passionate to the moon and back about the product, but didn't have the business chops to follow.
Had Peloton been driven by MBAs when they went public, they never in a million years would they have taken on the types of inane liabilities that Foley and co did because they were more product driven than business driven.
Things like their massive factory build outs/buy outs and slow burn perfectionist approaches to product development would likely have been thrown out the door in exchange for slapping their label on existing hardware and shoving as many experiences down as many channels as possible.
And sure that'd leave them being called sell-outs by their original fans, but ironically that's where they're now being forced to exist since those fans were a great Kickstarter target market, but a completely inadequate target market at that scale.
And yes, in such a capital heavy field like fitness hardware, there would have been massive VC pressure.
The only way to drive that would have been to essentially show "they scale like software, not hardware". So sell investors on rapidly increasing revenue while sweeping the massive (even by tech standards) burn rate under the rug as temporary.
Honestly, if I was more skeptical + motivated, I'd be looking into if this post was actually a paid ad because my reaction is "where is the closest Barnes and Noble?"
>Jane Friedman
>Speaking as a publishing industry reporter & observer, I couldn't agree more with your assessment of James Daunt's leadership and business strategy. Unfortunately, the picture isn't quite as bright for B&N as those numbers would have you believe. B&N stores were once quite large (e.g., 25,000 square feet); the new stores opening are less than half that in some cases. And they're largely re-opening stores that closed during the pandemic.
>It's also concerning that during a record two years for book sales (the pandemic was great for book sales of all kinds), Barnes & Noble didn't see the same percentage increase, indicating they've lost market share. Some industry insiders believe the current private equity owner is trying to position the company favorably for sale.
Also, a loss of market share in a growing economy is also not a bad thing as long as it’s accompanied by increased profitability. What this means is that B&N has basically maintained their revenues, while significantly reducing their costs, which as the clear market leader in the space sets them up very well to pursue a more considered growth strategy based on the current environment as opposed to the pre-Amazon environment, which is what their original stores were based on.
Also, those larger stores didn’t mean much in terms of B&N as a bookseller because they were largely filled with their coffee shops and selling toys and Knick knacks.
Rent and/or property taxes and maintenance are massive overheads. Considering that bookshops are no longer trying to have every possible book someone could want in direct inventory, big shops aren't needed for any but the flagship stores.
I’m not even talking up to date with the latest ChatGPT hotness, but any serious programming books written in the last 7 years - especially timeless classics that matter regardless of the technology. Rather that the same Sam’s Learn C++ book that’s been gathering dust for 20 years.
I suspect there actually is a market there, but the problem is you need a very particular book store manager that can curate this well. I guess it would have to be a labor of love, as financially the people who would do this well are busy making much more money as developers.
I never minded buying IT books even when I wasn’t in the best financial situation. 40-50 bucks for a good book could bring almost limitless rewards. One thing though, I needed to browse and skim through the book to decide whether it was a purchase or not. Most books I bought like that were thoroughly studied. I can’t say the same thing about books I bought online though.
This finished the destruction of the technical books sections of Half Price Books.
The first half of the destruction was online shopping. No longer could you find an entire technical library hitting the store because someone just died and their family dumped everything to Half Price. The most valuable books got skimmed off immediately and never made it to the shelves anymore.
However, for a while the "standard" kind of technical books still hit the shelves so you could snag them at decent prices. However, shoplifting became sufficiently rampant that Half Price seems to have even removed those. Now, you can only get those books online, and the only books remaining on the shelves have the quality that results from them having effectively have no resale value at all.
“Daunt also removed legal textbooks, technical guides, reference books from the shelves. In return, he stocked more books that customers were delighted to discover which led to an increase in sales.” [0]
If there is “a market there”, it’s probably as a specialised store.
[0] https://startupmarketer.co/how-a-physical-bookseller-turned-...
The catalog is still coming together, but "serious programming books" is a key offering.
I’ve never failed to go back there and find something fascinating I have never heard of before. Though most of the people studying/working in that room will always wonder what kind of person sincerely gets excited about this stuff.
What I find however, is nothing like it used to be, at least in certain locations. I'm sure it varies by location but I miss the one closest to Redmond (Microsoft) which (at least when I went there around 2000) had multiple full rows of computer books including highly technical ones that you don't see anymore in person.
I'm actually surprired there's a narrative of "B&N is coming back." Their stores, what few times I've had the misfortune of wandering inside in recent years, are still excruciatingly beige, useless, and (in the words of the TLA) "crucifyingly boring."
The best I've encountered is Foyles in London, though even that had cut back substantially prior to the pandemic when I was last there.
Borders was always so much better for technical books :(
I believe it was owned by an ex-Lotus employee named Rick Treitman. If someone knows him, he might have some insights into the business.
My apartment is running out of space for all these books, and maybe the solution to this is that I need to borrow from the library more often instead of buying my own books. I really wish I could have an e-reader, but again, I don't want to spend money on things that will lock me into a single vendor indefinitely and might just arbitrarily go away.
I learned my lesson in the early-00s when online music purchases were DRM'd and I lost a lot of my collection due to Yahoo music shutting down. I also remember one of the problems being that purchases made in one store would not be compatible with a competitor's MP3 player, which locked you into a single vendor. Couldn't switch to iPod because it didn't work with the DRM that was designed for my Dell DJ (which was a POS that broke all the time but I had to stick with it because of my existing music collection).
I'd hate to have that same problem but with books instead of music.
It would be great to be able to resell digital purchases, but that’s only on the consumer’s interest, so will never happen without an act of ${rule_making_body}.
But damn I wish my Steam library had a resale value.
If it says "license" on the button rather than buy then find another store...
This is not legal advice and is my own personal opinion.
Second, strip the DRM using Calibre, and store the books off any cloud-based platform and on your own drives, as you always should in any case given the proclivity of many content companies to just flagrantly bullshit their way into excusing themselves when they frequently steal back their customers access to stuff they ostensibly own.
Once a piece of digital content is actually yours, in your own device drives, it's only then really yours.
Keep the on-device cloud-based versions around if you like the user interface of your platform or reader, but your own digital copies elsewhere. The retailer doesn't even need to know (though I personally wouldn't give a tin shit if they did anyhow).
Yes and no. There's an important distinction between _having_ something and _owning_ something. You can have possession of figures carved from contraband elephant ivory. But if anyone who was inclined to care about such things decided to take action, a court could compel you to destroy it. Same thing with any illegal item.
But these are all "ifs and buts." Hence why it's a matter of principle and not practice. At the end of the day, most people are fine with "buying" a book that they don't own as evidenced by the sales.
most people are under the impression that they own the things they've paid for, and the inevitable rug pulls always take them by surprise.
rejecting the bullshit rules of rent-seeking parasites would be a more worthy principle to pursuit.
Buying a DRM book and stripping the DRM doesn't deny the seller, nor author, anything they previously had. It just lets you do what you paid for.
Just send them your own EULA at "purchase" if you think that unilateral terms no one reads should be binding on the other party.
This is not legal advice and is my own personal opinion.
I've heard, explicitly from lawyers, that sending an automated process (like a website) amendments to their EULA won't hold up at all in court. It's clear that the EULA is take it or leave it, and throwing changes at something that you know will ignore them doesn't accomplish anything.
It'd be nice if we could do it, but it doesn't fit into the reality of law.
I think that the walls of text do need to be reigned in in acceptance of the fact that it's absurd to hire a lawyer to review all of those contracts, but I also somewhat sympathize with courts' opinions of "So you think you could just use the product and the contract doesn't apply to you because you didn't want to... Read?"
Anything that isn't 'common sense' needs to be a contract that a lawyer reviews for me
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capitol_Records,_LLC_v._ReDigi....
> On March 30, 2013, Judge Richard J. Sullivan ruled in favor of Capitol Records, explaining that the transfer of digital data from one storage medium to another constituted a violation of copyright, because the copy was ultimately an unauthorized reproduction, and therefore outside of the protection of the first-sale doctrine
AKA distribution. Without distribution, the owner cannot claim damages. So making your own copy for your own use does not fall under this.
"You have been found in violation of our EULA and we have therefore permanently deleted your account. Please check our support page at <404> for more information." - Any Service, to Any User.
Now what, for Any User? Hope you're famous enough to raise a stink on Twitter to get your account back? Pay $1B in legal costs to sue them?
And while iOS, MacOS, Windows, Android are not known to deliver exact details of everything you do it is known they send back some "telemetry".
Given the way the world is going, your comment - while true now - may not be valid in 10 or 20 years.
They can't.
There are KFX workarounds, like getting Amazon to provide the book in the older format, but then you lose all the features only present in the KFX format.
Or were you talking about epub? I used to buy epubs from the Google store but I only bought titles that weren’t DRMed. Are epubs from Google or Apple or Kobo easily cracked?
... also, I think this is why Jobs didn't bother protecting music with DRM (except for identification of the purchasing account).
Books or music as a service, when you think you've bought them, is terrible.
I organize by age (using a ring buffer method) and have an honest “am I going to read this again?” review of my oldest shelf every few months or so.
https://github.com/joeycastillo/The-Open-Book
This may be up your alley.
One is on the device, has never purchased any books, and is a placeholder for easy software updates etc (I quite like their UI).
The other has all my purchases, but is never put on the reader. Instead I download, then use Calibre to create an open copy (for personal use only) and move it to the reader via USB sync.
It usually takes about 30 seconds to do for a book, and the result is a legally-obtained curated collection. And every book is tagged with where it came from (its legal provenance) for my own peace of mind.
My main motivation however is actually the metadata. Publishers/authors haven't got a clue when it comes to title, author, series, genre, covers etc., so all my books are now standardised and categorised and each has a cover of exactly the same size and aspect ratio. Maybe I'm an obsessive, but if you do it as and when you buy a book then it really does take a minute or two at the most. And the result is quite satisfying and, more importantly, as future-proofed as I can reasonably get whilst also being a very easy library to navigate.
In the US and many other Western countries (mostly forced by the US), circumventing or otherwise removing DRM is illegal in and of itself, even for personal use.
I like Kobo's devices for the most part, but I've only ever used KOReader on them. Kobo software seems to contain telemetry. As a side note, you can circumvent the registration requirement after wiping the reader by inserting an entry to a sqlite3 db, thus allowing your reader to be unaccounted for by Kobo or Google Analytics.
For the registration requirement you're right, but as I'm not replacing their software then by the simple expedient of a dummy account I don't need to do anything to the device, even the DB entry, and personally I'd rather not bother. Nice to know, though, thanks.
My wife and I are ruthless about not collecting stuff
Plus, increasing library circulation often increases funding, making it a virtuous cycle.
I have a relatively good memory so I remember many details of a story. In spite of that, the flow of rereading a good story is a pleasure.
We listen to music over and over why not reread.
My only real complaint about Overdrive is the premise that a copy of a book can be lent out x times. It’s a concept pushed by the publisher trying to create scarcity where none exists. Overdrive can’t do anything but capitulate. I suppose I’m also bothered by the “x copies available” concept.
is obviously to get a bigger apartment.
In other words - I wish for unlimited storage. A house, unfortunately, isn't even close. There was a book I read, once, which had a house much larger on the inside than on the outside..
I use a Kindle for a lot of books, one reason is that it's so much easier when traveling. Another reason is that my vision isn't as good as it used to, years before I got the Kindle I changed from paperbacks to the larger variants simply to get the larger font. The Kindle lets me adjust the font to something I can read comfortably in every condition. A physical book is still better in many respects though. It looks much better, it's easier to skip forth and back, and if the book contains maps or drawings (fantasy or tech books), a physical book is tons better.
House of Leaves was such an experience to read. I really liked how they had a unique take on the medium and act of reading.
Sometimes they get 'adopted', and if they don't then often whoever tries to check them out (which is presumably someone who wants to read them) is allowed to just take them as they are non-stock. And at the worst, the librarians will find another home for them (they are not usually destroyed; sometimes they join the book sale which benefits the library anyway).
I think used bookstores failed because they didn’t curate their selections enough. You can’t go into one expecting to find a specific book — you go there to discover new books. When the shelves are packed with books nobody wants, it removes the reason to go there
The story is that publishing on a Kindle has the publisher give Amazon the right to sub-license copies that are "indefinitely" licensed to the purchaser; this is in contrast to iTunes where it really feels like they're giving you a "forever" license to something, since I haven't been able to find a story about movies outright disappearing from libraries (besides via changing countries which is an iTunes quirk).
I recently got a new ereader (Pocketbook InkPad Lite) that's working well for this: https://www.neilvandyke.org/ebooks/
However, I'm very militant against DRM, so in situations where I'm unable to acquire a DRM-free book, I will de-DRM or pirate it.
Also there are book scanners out there, but don't know the price on these.
I personally read on a Barnes & Noble Nook, my fourth e-ink reader. I absolutely love it, I would go so far as to say that the current generation has a _better_ reading experience than dead trees. But I use Calibre and remove the DRM, for the same reasons that you state. I view the books not as entertainment but rather as culture. Culture worth preserving.
And that makes sense, anyone looking for a good price is going online, if you are in the store you are not price sensitive. And of course this means B&N is much more profitable than they would be otherwise.
Lowes is doing this too - their prices for plumbing products are insane - $12 for something that goes for $2 online, but they are betting that anyone buying in the store needs it NOW and will pay anything.
I have lived bookshops since I was young, I always felt like I might find something amazing and secret in them. They held a kind of mystic for me (1990s).
This changed in the 2000s. I do miss the massive borders books we had. I do have to say the all the Waterstones I've been into in the last 15 years have all those toys, calenders, etc the OP doesn't like; and the bigger stores all have Costas.
I don't buy books now, I just go to the library.
If I want a specific book, I already know where to go: the internet. No physical store is ever going to compete on inventory ever again. Amazon will eat you alive.
I go to bookstores to discover new books, and to enjoy the feeling of being around books and the people who love them. The CEO realized this, and leaned in hard.
It's a really, really smart recognition of when passion for the product is actually a business advantage, and not just a warm fuzzy.
It's very hard to do good recommendations -- even for Amazon/Goodreads! -- without people who care about what they're recommending. Those recommendations are now a bookstore's real product.
I might want to revisit this in a year or two.
I'm rarely that desperate but Amazon delivery beats petrol costs here and can take only a day longer (assuming goods are even on the shelf locally).
I can get it from bookshop.org on Friday too, but it is £15.50, vs Amazon's £10.50.
I can trust my local bookstores.
France and a few other countries have the right idea here - the same book always costs the same, regardless if it's on Amazon, local bookstore, big chain store. There's a unique price set country-wide for the edition, and that's it, they have to compete on other things.
Ordering books not in stock also wasn't possible at a lot of stores and, when you could, it often took many weeks.
it’s maddening the direction these companies are pulling us towards.
No way I would ever risk buying such books from Amazon. I am concerned about the condition it would arrive in, scams and delays.
I bought a second book based on a librarian's recommendation. There was only 5 or 6 books of the kind I was interested in. It made choosing one easier.
Amazon is tainted brand.
Books are ridiculously easy to counterfeit, and can bring in quite a bit of cash.
Amazon has made the conscious business decision to be a counterfeit souk. I guess they make lots of money from it, and I suspect they don’t really care about their retail brand anymore. From what I hear, it’s actually a loss leader.
i assume the problem is complacency. I don’t think buying real solid books has really changed on Amazon at all in past 5 years. kindle digital reader is same as it was 5 years ago. i wonder how many people work in kindle and what they actually do.
so as you could guess customer benefit is not primary or even second third focus.
company leadership create culture of one incentive. workers output optimizing for that incentive.
It's not only about you.
(And I know DFW is dead, but he has an estate. And living authors have bills to pay.)
And that is the best case of a readable, complete book. Maybe you get only the first 500 pages, or the figures are cut off, or it is a degraded scan of a printed book.
The problem is of course much worse for collectible books for which even getting an official reprint or a different edition instead of the real thing would be a problem.
A book is a bunch of words, delivered to a reader via some medium. In order for a book to work, the words must all be delivered in readable format; whether printed out on a physical media, or delivered electronically, as text strings.
Because of that, copying the text is trivial. I have a scanner, under my desk, that will completely scan a book, if I unbind that book, and drop in the pages. I also have software that will OCR those scans. I have heard of OCR software that does a lot better than mine.
Writing a book is hard. I mean, really hard. I've done it. It can take months for an author to write a book that I can read in a couple of days (unless the author is Mercedes Lackey, or James Patterson).
Software is similar. Once it is written, reproducing it is trivial. After all, it's just a bunch of words. To make it even more convenient, almost all software is already rendered into electronic form.
With both of these, the only thing preventing anyone from simply copying the text, is the law, and there are lots of people (nations, even) that have absolutely no respect at all for the law. They will happily copy and reproduce the text.
It's entirely possible to have counterfeits of higher quality than the original. You could, for instance, sell a fancy, gilt-edged, leather-bound version of a book that has only been released as a mass-market paperback.
But what gives it real value, is the text.
You could steal software that drives a fairly humble Web site, and convert it to drive a megasite, or a design for a limited edition, artisanal product, and turn it into a cheap, mass-market knockoff.
In any of these cases, the originator of the text; whether an author, or a programmer, derives zero gain from it, and it can actually do damage to them, as the knockoffs could have real problems, and do brand damage, or the fake book could be published with the seal of the real publisher, and that publisher could see reputational damage, if the book contains textual errors (like lots of OCR'd books do).
It's a fairly big topic, and there are organizations that are dedicated to either freeing up artistic copyright, or overenforcing it.
The basic deal, is that, if you want art, you need to compensate the artist enough to make that art. AI might be at the point where that art could be faked, but I'm not sure if we are really there, or this is all a bunch of hype.
What I received looked like the cover head been designed in Word. Solid red, some generic oil painting print, and black text. The contents of the book was even worse. It looked like it was printed on a dot matrix or something.
Needless to say I returned it and have not bought a book from Amazon since.
I started looking for rare, expensive and/or old books that I know about, and at the first result page I realized how futile it was, between unknown quality, unknown marketplace sellers, unreliable listings, the chance of scammers, and the ridiculously inaccurate mass of irrelevant search results that drown out relevant ones.
Other people actually recommended, in harsh terms, to buy electronics etc. on Amazon and get books and games from proper sources.
It is quite obvious to the mass public, not a special insight, that Amazon doesn't love to sell stuff: not only books and media, but anything except maybe Prime subscriptions.
I use Amazon as a primary source for stuff that I know are generic, don't care about knockoffs and want variety. i.e iPad cases, simple furniture
It is unfortunate but understandable if you get scammed buying a pair of "certified" Apple earbuds or lightening cables from a Chinese seller at a price 70% less than you'd pay at Apple, Fair enough and buyer beware.
But if you can't even buy a BOOK that's sold by Amazon itself without getting scammed, then it seems we have a serious problem, and it is not surprising that Amazon stock is down over 50%.
Boy was I wrong, and I'll happily eat crow for how wrong I was. The new library building is beautiful, super inviting and some of my favorite architecture anywhere. I love going there to work or read. They also do a great job making the building welcoming and accessible to all, while at the same time preventing it from getting trashed by the homeless (looking at you SF public library) with a simple no sleeping/no lying down rule.
Welcoming, inviting public spaces can do very well if people understand why they are desirable.
(I haven't been to the SF public library in a while, but the few times I went in as a Mozilla intern the staff were so rude I ended up buying books and selling them at a used bookstore when finished rather than be treated rudely by folks who were within a year or two of me, from the same department I graduated from. Maybe there's a reason people don't respect that space, and it's not just because they're mentally ill and/or down on their luck.)
They adapted and drew in new users. How awful.
I myself have been coming in and out of their space trying to job hunt.
(Turns out a common trope is people don't want to socialize with someone who "lives with their parents" or is un/under employed.)
So picture you're trying to study for OSCP, and you can't find a space that's quiet. In a library.
And what you'd think would happen is someone would go "oh, you're in IT? I know someone looking for that" and solve the issue.
And then instead, they treat it like a game -- or worse, start acting purposefully othering.
That is my core complaint -- that both those spaces and those resources in the monetary sense divert disproporionately to folks who, frankly, sometimes interact in ways that make me question why they strive so hard to interact with teenagers all day.
(Also, it was often not new users -- just bigger, more elaborate programs for the same rich kids from the suburbs who used to pay for special camps and programs... but now having them held in spaces those who couldn't afford them used to do self education.)
I hope taking the time and energy to type that out helps.
Someone else commented that the library is one of the last noncommercial spaces... I honestly don't have that impression at all. I got the sense if you're not using it to do remote work, or as a community center, but to... check out materials and use them... you are unwelcome unless you're buying stuff (coffee, supplies etc) or part of one of the groups that makes substantial donations when they're not making noise.
Shelter is a far higher priority than reading.
The problem is similar to what happened when low income housing (the "projects") concentrated the poor into economic ghettos.
If they're "poor", don't they have to rent or buy low income housing, and so "concentrate into economic ghettos"?
There is no policy concentrating the poor with each other, any more than there is a policy that concentrates the rich with each other. The market makes available different products, and different economic market segments purchase different products. With a policy, or without a policy, the poor will live with the poor.
And form "economic ghettos".
I prefer it being a homeless shelter, its cold as hell in chicago right now. It would be nice for them to have some some space there.
Whenever there is a cold wave we all wonder whats happening to the ppl left out there. It would be nice for them to have one more option. give everyone else peace of mind, lol.
They have spaces for business meetings, rooms for night classes, groups to meet and so on!
They really are a wonderful mix of community services.
Plus libraries are still a great place to take young children. They often have seperate kids areas where you can spend an hour or two with toddlers.
Libraries arnt stuffy old quiet buildings anymore!
The building is open until 11pm 4 days a week, with reduced hours on Friday and Saturday; closed on Sunday. I guess it's no surprise that the website describes as more of a "Multifunctioneel Centrum" as opposed to just a library!
(For those not living in the area, this is the largest of the Washington, DC, public libraries, downtown at 9th and G NW.)
But the number of tourists in NYC compared to Boston is probably a big difference.
If I’m coworking in NYC sometime, maybe I’ll ask what kind of research I must be doing to get to read there. I’m guessing with the physical books only available there?
Fun factoid about NYPL: it's a private nonprofit, not a municipal establishment like many other libraries.
It's a logistics and resources problem - libraries are: shelter, safety, heating/cooling, running water, restrooms, a place to sit... Truth is we don't afford that to everyone here and a lot of people ignore the cruelty/suffering. Hell - some even justify and celebrate it.
What other free indoor facilities existed in the past?
I think it's fine to encourage people to spend time at the library. I know as a kid, I grew a lot as a person at our local library.
They had after school activities once a week, it was about a mile down the road, so we had to learn to be responsible walking after school. The librarians were always kind to us, even though I'm sure as teenagers we probably weren't always a carbon copy of the model, upstanding citizen.
I could spend time with my friends discussing various topics, with easy information available if we couldn't agree on the facts. Plus, I kissed my wife for the first time on the bench outside. Libraries are great :)
You're expected to donate, you're just allowed not to.
https://sfist.com/2013/08/27/were_doomed_sf_main_library_bat...
And yes, with children access to a bathroom is necessary.
Also now elsewhere and going to library is so fun. We can bike etc. they are reasonably strict though. No sex, drugs, sleeping etc
I contrast that with the library in Austin. Obviously, as a free, warm, comfortable space, there are tons of homeless people there. But, unlike in SF, the Austin library doesn't let them trash the place - the homeless there are just using the library like everyone else. There is a strict no sleeping/lying rule (which I've seen enforced) which prevents anyone from basically taking over a section of the library. The bathrooms have always been immaculate whenever I've used them.
IMO the Austin library's policy toward the homeless shows how you can be respectful and welcoming to all while still requiring everyone who enters to respect the building.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sovereign_states_by_...
The below article seems to indicate and average of around 700k in the EU.
https://www.greaterchange.co.uk/post/does-europe-have-a-home...
I don't believe there are many other parts of the world where this happens.
It has become an incredibly valuable community hub. Books are a bit of an excuse to enjoy its architecture and function. I've been there for countless hours with my children as they have grown up.
I'm also consistently impressed by the staff. In a time when every business is complaining about staffing and using it as an excuse for bad quality and bad service, it seems that most libraries are staffed with total professionals who do their job day in and day out and do it well.
I even met the librarian who invented the phrase “surfing the internet” at a librarian conference. Yes, a librarian was there to coin phrases at the dawn of the web!
A bit of internet surfing turned up her story about it: https://www.netmom.com/surfing/birth-of-a-metaphor
Many Canadian cities are upgrading their libraries and i for one am overjoyed to see that!
> The new library building is beautiful, super inviting and some of my favorite architecture anywhere. I love going there to work or read.
Im confused. Why did you initially oppose it? Seems like you like it because its nice but surely that wasn't your original concern.
https://makerspaces.make.co/
Because the less well off may not have enough devices or internet access to do things digitally. It's also good if you have young kids. You can't read that book which has different textures for all the animals digitally.
Is that really still true? I've traveled in many poor counties where people live in shacks with no plumbing, yet still all have internet connected smartphones. Only in the most remote villages with no electricity or phone signal are people still truly disconnected.
In AU, you can still get really cheap prepaid plans that don't really have a lot of data all things considered. For example, right now I can get an Amaysim SIM for $100, and you get 60GB for 365 days. https://www.amaysim.com.au/plans/long-expiry-plans/
This is roughly 165MB a day. Probably amazing compared to a poor country, but it's all relative.
In FF, incognito window, uBlock origin allowed in incognito windows: - google.com is 500kB - twitter.com is 4MB - tiktok.com is 5MB - youtube.com is 6MB - facebook.com is 300kB - Commonwealth's Netbank is 2MB
This is not even considering all the other data you need for using those websites. If your mobile phone and your mobile data is your main source of connectivity, it's really easy to blow through it all just on basic things.
For example, the best overall plan I've used anywhere in the world is in Thailand. You can get unlimited 10Mbit service for $5 a month. The coverage is extremely good even in the mountains or islands, latency is excellent, and I've used over 100 GB without hitting any additional throttles. And that's with AIS. There are cheaper companies and plans if you wanted.
The worst thing being that, of course, the libraries in rich neighborhoods have no homeless people and are generally nicer.
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Library_of_Birmingham * https://www.oodihelsinki.fi/en/ * https://wellcomecollection.org/pages/Wuw19yIAAK1Z3Smm * https://www.gladstoneslibrary.org/
others?
https://www.architectmagazine.com/project-gallery/john-henry...
https://www.library.nashville.org/
PS: +1 to Austin’s library. It’s an incredible space. Grab a coffee at the cafe, and hang out on the beautiful roof terrace. Breathtaking views, and it’s a great place to meet people (and what better people to meet than library people!); PS: they are building a makerspace there too - stay tuned…
A few have managed to keep going (mostly due to the communities taking direct control) and they have done wonders in keep up with the times.
It's a great place, just wish there was free parking.
They are important - maybe the most important - library customers.
It's really off-putting. In a bookstore, I can stand there ten minutes and make sure the book is worthwhile. Technical books are expensive.
Amazon treats me like a deadbeat, even though I buy lots of books from them.
For anything other than a novel, that's usually the least representative sample. That'll give you the copyright, table of contents (admittedly useful) and the Preface and the Introduction and a page with a couple of quotations on it.
Not really great to judge the quality of writing / code samples or whatever you're interested in.
I always used to use zlib for "flicking through" a book the way you would in a bookshop to see if it was worth buying it.
We have a local chain that sells well curated used books and it's brilliant. Picked up my copy of Godel, Escher, Bach because I saw it on the shelf and flipped through and was like 'Yes, please!'
Note that this is only for print editions. For Kindle editions it does not have "Surprise Me". For those "Look Inside" seems to just show you the same sample that you get if you ask it to send a sample to your Kindle.
I've found this is often completely useless for music books and math books as the sample doesn't get far enough in to actually have any music or math notation, and it is terrible handling of such notation that often makes an otherwise good Kindle book unreadable.
I once bought a Kindle edition of "Proofs from the Book" and it had been produced apparently using OCR which didn't know how to handle anything other than normal letters, digits, and common symbols. Things like integral signs, summation signs, and set relationship symbols showed up as whitespace.
Another math book I bought had many of the equations as graphics. Reading on the Kindle app on a computer or tablet was fine. The images were scaled to a reasonable size and were quite readable. On an eInk Kindle however they were not scaled. They were tiny and required more magnification than my best magnifying glass had for me to read them comfortably. I had to tap them to get a menu that would let me show the image full screen. This made reading the book incredibly tedious both from the slowness of the Kindle and only being able to see one equation at a time this way.
The recommendations you would get inside a bookstore have nothing to do with this kind of experience. You are having an actual conversation about what you like and are looking for.
In a store the person has to go out of their way every time they recommend the same book. It's one-to-one vs. one-to-many. There's more of a chance they really do think highly of the book, maybe even years after reading it. That's valuable.
Did you use the present tense to describe the past, before James Daunt took over, perhaps? I could understand "the key insight was that bookstores were no longer places to get books," but the entire article seems to be about how B&N has become a place to get books, because the CEO loves books, and empowers local stores to also love books and therefore sell them well.
For a long time, the fact that the bookstore was the _only_ place to “get books” occluded the fact that it was the _best_ place to explore and appreciate books. Amazon stripped away the veneer by showing that, actually, bookstores weren’t so ideal for “getting books” after all (book not carried, book not in stock, can’t find the right shelf, etc). Daunt is therefore succeeding by refocusing on “loving books,” as you put it, rather than on transacting books.
You might “get books” at a bookstore, but that’s probably not why you went there in the first place.
New B&N is much more focused on transacting (whether its books or other merchandise) than at any time in its past history. That’s why it works: B&N in the past has focused more than the current B&N on speculative/aspirational attempts to build demand and novel businesses (whether its effectively selling prime space for publisher’s promotions as discussed in the article, or the attempt to build B&N’s own Nook business by large dedications of space, or B&N’s bizarre restaurant business), the current version is focused on stocking and moving what the local stores know they can move.
I don't know that I really disagree with anything you're saying about discovery and so on, but you keep describing it as a key insight of the article which doesn't seem to talk about it even a little bit. It sounds like your key insight, maybe, although the article seems to offer counter-evidence to your claim.
> Amazon seems invincible. … If [Toys R Us] couldn’t compete with Amazon, how could B&N hope to do any better?
> Daunt started giving more power to the stores,”
for example by
> ask[ing] employees in the outlets to take every book off the shelf, and re-evaluate whether it should stay.
I suppose I drew from this that those local employees were producing a better atmosphere for book-browsers than publishers’ marketing budgets had, and took that as evidence of this “discovery” strategy. Does that strike you as a stretch?
The “get books” wording may have been more confusing than clever. For my part, I hoped to convey that I (maybe you too?) go to B&N to browse books even when I’m not looking for anything in particular, not that I go for things other than books.
But it's more of a place to discover books. That's what the CEO did.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indigo_Books_and_Music
They are a case study in business school that selling tchotchkes and trinkets is more profitable than books. I disagree with GP's article. It is the same myth in tech that "engineers make better founders" and "companies ran by execs with engineering backgrounds are more successful". It is feel-good masturbation for professionals without objective data backing it. In this case they are running with "booklovers run better bookstores". Not necessarily generalizable to all booksellers. The pandemic has shown that cheap rates play an oversized role in picking winners and losers.
I think the lesson may be that B&N wanted to be a successful bookstore and they achieved that by doing a better job serving book buyers mostly by giving individual stores more autonomy. That doesn’t mean another chain couldn’t succeed by turning into a books & trinkets store with a focus on high margin trinkets.
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/01/books/booksupdate/indigo-...
Many paths to the same destination.
Bookstores always were places to make discoveries, to learn, to have people recommend books for you. My first bookstore experiences go back to the late 70s, and the ones that stick in my mind as memorable? Two stores that had fiercely opinionated voracious readers as employees, who both knew books and their customers. (I could literally go there, as a kid, and ask "what book do I want to get my dad for Christmas", and they'd inevitably make fabulous recommendations that I wasn't old enough yet to figure out by myself)
This extends beyond bookstores - all stores are ultimately in the business of caring about customers and being deeply knowledgable about what they sell. The rest is logistics.
Still miss that store :)
Still, now I'm deeply interested in reading an account of how different book selling systems in the 80s worked. (Yes, I'm avoiding other tasks, why do you ask? ;)
But I feel like they succumbed to the same problem B&N did here, for different reasons -- they became full of kitchen gadgets and devices, because people were buying more things and less books on Amazon itself, and the stores started to mirror that.
But is that a property of the recommendations or of the circumstances under which they are received?
It's possible that the quality of a recommendation generated by an AI based on psychological profiles is superior, so that if it was followed, the book would be enjoyed. But it's not being followed, because it appears too unlikely and the reader doesn't trust the AI.
If that's true, the competitive advantage of the physical interaction would not actually be the recommendations themselves, but the atmosphere it creates which makes readers susceptible to listening to them.
Now, some people, maybe most even, will try and do the same to you. But not all, and store owner can optimize for those who won't.
But one thing especially is the “friend activity”. There are some friends that I have connected with whom have a similar reading preference to me. Discovering what they are reading / have read and rated has influenced my buying decisions quite often. When I lived near those friends, we would talk about the books as we had more contact, but since moving halfway across the world that does not happen as often. Goodreads is great for that (imo).
That cannibalizes the bookstore you like to visit.
FWIW, this was considered common sense when I was in library school 20 years ago: that is to say, it was presented to us as a fact rather than a question. I don't think this was a unique or novel insight by B&N, rather a question of execution in the transformation of an already large company and, I suppose, the financial discipline to survive the competition.
Borders is already out of business, and BAM! looks like it's on its way (it's no longer public so financials are difficult to know, but part time employees report that they get more or fewer hours based on how many gift cards they sell, which indicates cash flow problems).
BN is the only one doing well, and it's my opinion that this is due to being a comfortable place to buy and read books. By contrast, book selection at BAM! is atrocious, and the cafes all seem cold, uninviting, and surrounded by gimmicks and toys.
This is perhaps the passage from the article that resonated the most with me:
> If you want to sell music, you must love those songs. If you want to succeed in journalism, you must love those newspapers. If you want to succeed in movies, you must love the cinema.
> But this kind of love is rare nowadays. I often see record labels promote new artists for all sorts of gimmicky reasons—even labels I once trusted such as Deutsche Grammophon or Concord. I’ve come to doubt whether the people in charge really love the music.
It's the same reason why vinyl is continuing to grow. People want something they can actually own. Books are not immune to this and there is something inherently more satisfying about having a bookshelf with the books you've read versus a library of ebooks.
I don't recall how he explained this, but it might've been that older folks don't want to accumulate more stuff while younger people have room to grow a collection as well as the point you make about wanting to acquire non-digital goods (and, relatedly, perhaps to have experiences that take them away from their screens).
You know better. "money" is not "them", if you need more elucidation.
"which might or might not be true" is yet another variation of the same rhetorical argumentative trick.
So... not all CEOs are worth paying outrageous amounts for, and the world track record on making that decision is not very encouraging.
The reason why CEOs have so much impact is because they are at the top of a tree and make all the important decisions. this isn't a consequence of the amazing (or terrible) nature of CEOs, it's just the outcome of the corporate structure.
With a little imagination, we can imagine other corporate structures...
Business has evolved into the current structure, and since in a free market it's survival of the fittest, it appears to be optimal. After all, businesses exist to make money for their owners, not CEOs.
Evolution is about creatures fitting to their environment. If you have a complex environment, you have complex animals. If you have a simple environment, you have simple animals. It has nothing to do with 'robustness' or 'strength' or any notion of 'good'.
Similarly, if free markets are an optimizing system, they are a deeply flawed one. The constraint of spot trades and singular prices. And of course externalities, make them poor at optimization where it matters. So if we had free markets (we don't), what 'optimal' is very constrained and simple relative to what people need.
Combine stores like B&N and Half-Price with alternative online resources like AbeBooks, Discogs, e-bay, etc., and you really don't need inconsistent crap like Amazon in your life anymore.
I can't be the only one who is fed up with the bait & switch experiences. Being an asshole or otherwise indifferent to the customer is eventually going to add up over time.
Regardless, can't agree more that a CEO whose interest is in something besides money-grabbing at the expense of the health of the business is actually how you make a store successful. Somewhat more cynical about the long-term health because it seems like once stores become appealing, they'll cash in on that by going back to money-grabbing, but we'll see...
When James Daunt was named CEO, the changes were immediate. The spacer boxes appeared on the shelves; as someone else mentioned, they allow books to be placed cover forward, which is better for visual appeal. The front cover is what book designers design for. It also reduces the number of books on the shelves, which helps keep inventory lean.
They rearranged the shelves on the store floor so you had fewer rows of parallel shelves like an old-school library. In my store, shelves were arranged to create a little enclaves for mystery and detective fiction and for hardback fiction. The store layout is more varied and interesting.
On several occasions, I've seen guys who were, from their conversations, some kind of "store layout consultants" talking to the managers and discussing moving stuff around and changing displays.
The folks who worked at the store were very encouraged. Many had been through the big layoff in 2018 (when a lot of full-timers were abruptly let go - see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16389342). They liked the new changes - it was clear that the company was finally being run by someone who understood books. (I read somewhere - can't find the link - that Daunt even thinks about the angle of the shelves, because he thinks a certain angle is best for visibility.)
The company seemed to be more realistic about what wasn't working. Most significantly, the Nook section near the door disappeared. Other smaller things that weren't selling (like Lamy fountain pens) also disappeared. Inventory in general is more controlled: They started turning over the magazines much faster, to the point where if I was interested in a magazine I found I couldn't wait too long.
The technical book section isn't what it used to be, but they do carry a lot of No Starch books. I'm not a programmer, but I have a few No Starch books and e-books. I like the publisher (and given the problems with their books being counterfeited on Amazon, I'd rather buy a paper version in store if I want one).
Some stuff they've done in my store doesn't make sense to me - for instance, separating fiction into hardback and paperback. The classics section has been partially separated by publisher. I don't think that's how people look for books: They ask for "Crime and Punishment", not the paperback edition of "Crime and Punishment", or the Penguin edition. People want to see all the editions of "Crime and Punishment" together so they can compare and choose. Right or wrong, at least these are changes which reflect someone thinking about books.
The pandemic closure was a setback, and a lot of people who used to work at my store didn't return to work. But the store has come back pretty well. There's nothing else like Barnes & Noble, so I hope these changes work out.
Eh, that makes sense to me: I really don't like hardback and will never voluntarily buy one, because manipulating the covers separate from the pages distracts from reading and makes me feel like I need 3-4 hands to manage it.
Same, though for me it's all about the space they take up. Followed closely by the cost mark-up. I'm buying the words not the form, so I want it in the most convenient (physical in this case) form possible.
I believe it though and because it is hard, it is unlikely to repeat in other industries. I love my job, but the amount of time for me personally to provide discovery is hard. Need total buy in from an organization and it seems like something on the verge of bankruptcy is the best place to see it happen.
Here's the thing though, profit and loss people get made decision makers. And it is a super simple decision process "Do I take $10M from this publisher to push their book or do I try to find books people are willing to buy?" well the easy answer is take the money. But as this story points out, it is the wrong answer. Once you're taking money like this your interests are no longer aligned with your customer, they are aligned with the publishers you buy from.
That said, the store I've been to most doesn't seem to have changed its layout from selling games/puzzles + coffee bar + bookstore. (something mentioned in the article as being phased out) but perhaps that will change as they get around to it.
Now if someone would do this transformation for a grocery chain I would love to have one of those near me!
So there's that.
It's been many years since I've seen a bookstore so full of books and customers (outside of Powell's in Portland). I noted two major differences from how B&N was many years ago. First, the proportion given over to fiction is much greater. Second, there is an enormous youth section, maybe a third of the store.