Posted on 10/21/2010 1:08:45 PM PDT by SunkenCiv
...my generation is the bridge between the golden years of print newspapers and now, for better or worse, news by iPhone. Nothing in publishing is as consistently unchanging as change... America was built on competition and innovation. Challenges are meant to be embraced and met. And when I hear independent booksellers complaining about big-box retailers pushing them out of business, I am reminded of a great bit of wisdom my mother dispensed once...
In the town where I live, I heard retailers decrying a move by Wal-Mart to put a store on the outskirts of town. "They'll kill business!" was the usual cry.
But my dear mother said, "They complain about competition from Wal-Mart, but I remember when these mercantiles were the only game in town and they raised prices because they knew people had little choice. So the story goes both ways."
She's quite correct, of course. Which brings me to the real state of book-selling in America: Nobody is so big they crush smaller competitors forever. Often, as with everything else in life, one needs only some good old-fashioned perseverance.
It was reported some months ago that the Borders chain was experiencing severe cash-flow problems. It's hard to believe, if you see the gleaming stores from the sidewalk and then venture in to partake of the easy atmosphere, coffee and treasure trove of books... Then this week, it was announced that B&N wasn't immune from trouble, either...
I spend quite a bit of time schlepping through airports, and while I do want, as my geek brother-in-law mocks, a computer the size of a matchbox ("Yes, I do, Brent"), I want it because my love of reading puts straining weight on my luggage. I'd trade four hardcover books and shoulder surgery for an e-reader...
(Excerpt) Read more at wnd.com ...
I bought my CD-ROM set of Nat’Lampoon for $3 (used). Whole decades of Nat’Geographic for $2 each (sealed). Wonder when I will be able to find a full (ancient) run of Nat’Enquirer to complete the library...
Rolling Stone was maybe $5 for the full run (used, with rebate).
All bought at a used book store (with some “new” deadstock). Thanks to Half Price Books.
Half-Price Books rocks!
It is a different experience to hold an issue of Life Magazine in your hands (or in my case a bound volume of issues, bought at a library book sale). The printing techniques never duplicate the effect on screen and the sheer size of the page is something else to take in.
Schulers opened a location in the mall a few months before I quit. The opening of a competitor didn't have a big impact on our sales. What had a huge--and disasterous--effect on our sales was the company's decision to "rework" the frequent shopper program, changing it from a user-friendly program which strongly encouraged repeat sales to a pricey mess with almost no benefit to the consumer.
I was at the mall for the first time in years just recently. The store is gone. So there's that. I'm not trying to draw any parallels; I left Waldenbooks in 1997, so I'm in no position to try to reason why that one particular (once successful) store failed. For all I know, the chain no longer exists.
I'll say this, though: I am a voracious reader, as are all five members of my family, and we frequently shop at the B&N near our house. Good prices, good selection, excellent customer service. Several times a year I will special order movies and cds from the store. I've never made use of their little cafe because, as a former waitress, I don't do frou frou java. But I have noticed that all the tables in the cafe are generally full, so a need appears to be filled.
Once every couple of years (say five or six) I will stop in at the used bookstores on the MSU campus, just to remind myself why I don't offer them my patronage on a regular basis. Prices as high as B&N, hit or miss selection, and some of the snottiest sales staff I have ever encountered...what's not to love? No, thanks.
I don't think these particular shops are true "mom and pops"--they are more along the lines of campus fixtures, surviving because each fall a new crop of blossoming scholastic intelligentsia arrive on campus, armed with Mommy's plastic, itching to prove how deep they are by spending a stupid amount of money on a tattered copy of The Naked and the Dead. I mean, really. They'll never open the book (one hopes). It'll look ubercool on their bookshelf, though. In secret they'll continue to reread the Harry Potter series and those vampire books that are so popular now.
Books they probably got at B&N!
I would like for them to survive. I have another 18 years until retirement.
On an individual level, businesses do come and go. It’s hard to believe that indie bookstores will completely vanish.
A bookseller at our local B&N (about to close because the landlord tripled the rent on them--a CVS pharmacy is going to take over the space) told us that they had to get rid of the cushy chairs because homeless people would take them all day and piss their pants while sitting there.
The Waldens around here vanished a while ago. Around ten years ago, the North Kent Mall was torn down (replaced by a Lowes), which took care of the Bargain Books and Walden inside; the indie bookstore that had been out by Plainfield disappeared a few years earlier.
The Walden in Woodland Mall had survived for decades, moving once within the mall, that was about 20 years ago. At one point there were three bookstores in Woodland, I’m drawing a blank as to their names; Walden was in the middle for size, and on the SW wing; the Doubleday (aha) was smaller, and on the NE wing; the, hmm, can’t recall the name of it, bigger than Walden, was on the NW wing. Those others weren’t around for very many years.
The Woodland Walden made its move sometime during or shortly after the first Bush administration, so, circa 1990. The space it moved to was much larger and right on the corner by one of the entrances. I generally went there around Christmas (historically the only time I actually go to malls anymore) and occasionally during the year when I had points to spend (must have been that program you mentioned).
I have a warm spot for Walden because it was literally the first bookstore I ever visited, and I started spending my small amount of hard-earned childhood cash there when I was able to even go there.
I could see that being a problem in an urban core. The first B&Ns I visited were in the late 1970s, in Boston (there were two or three of them I think, I visited a couple if memory serves), and they were more like the old B&N remainder / new catalog, not fancy, just tables (some were crappy ones) piled with books and standup pricetags. No chairs that I remember.
My favorite brick and mortar bookstore.
http://stevensbooks.com/
I also shop Amazon and occasionally go in Barnes and Noble at the mall usually when my husband is in Joseph A. Bank.
This was in Encino, a residential Los Angeles neighborhood far from the urban core where it’s a rare house that sells for under a million dollars. But there’s a large park not too far away where there’s enough places hidden away where they can camp.
Encino men?
Nice website. I first learned of the online used book search engines from a bookstore proprietor in upstate NY (this was in the 1990s sometime; when I’m out of state, I nearly always wind up finding and visiting at least one bookstore; that trip it was like five ;’) and that kicks the hell out of the big new-title retailer websites. Amazon figured that out early on, and affiliated (at first) with one of the big three used book search engines. But I used one search engine to locate a kinda weird book for a friend (he’d given me a list of a half dozen to look for while on the trip, and I *am* a great friend, so...) in a local, or rather nearby bookstore. I’d never used the searches before, obviously. I walked into the place, no one around but a couple of other customers. The proprietor came in from outdoors (he stored much of his inventory in another part of the same old building), saw my printout, and said, “wow, two in a row”. The women waiting ahead of me had come in for another searched title.
Nobody mentioned ABE yet? It’s great! And Books for Less over by the Mall of Ga, love that place.
I received an original on the Lost Dutchman Mine from Abe Books. A treasure in itself. I believe the author was Sims.
Some of the search engines have come and gone. There used to be a Dogpile-like multi-engine (one search box, many searches made) called, hmm, something obvious like www.everybookstore.com and I used that to track down a couple of really hard to find ones.
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