Posted on 08/17/2010 2:01:07 PM PDT by Ernest_at_the_Beach
BOSTON (MarketWatch) -- Are we about to see bookstores closing across the country? I suspect so.
Look at the depressing proxy battle for what remains of Barnes & Noble Inc. /quotes/comstock/13*!bks/quotes/nls/bks (BKS 15.35, +0.29, +1.93%) , the world's largest chain of bookstores. You could hardly dominate an industry more than B&N has dominated the landscape of traditional bookstores. Yet its fortunes have fallen so far that management has hoisted the white flag and put it up for sale.
Barnes & Noble stock, which was flying high above $45 five years ago, has plummeted below $15. Wall Street's view of its prospects is so dim that not even the news of a bid battle has set it alight. The only bright spot: The company's e-book sales, which rocketed 51% last quarter.
(A vignette of a company in decline: Barnes & Noble's annual filing shows that management and staff owns 5.5 million stock options, granted to them in previous years to give them an incentive to work harder and smarter. The options have an average exercise price of $20.19 -- meaning most of them, if not all, are now seemingly worthless.)
(Excerpt) Read more at marketwatch.com ...
Ebooks are convenient. I like my Nook, but can you get Janes Fighting Ships, or the art of Georgia O’Keefe, or an illustrated cookbook by Bobby Flay? There are a multitude of volumes that cannot, at the present, betranslated to Ebooks. The B/W Eprint doesn’t allow it, and current LCD tech is not viewable in bright light and consumes the battery.Finally, as a constant customer in B&N, will the Ebook allow me to peruse SOF,MHQ,Cooks Magazine,or Sci Fi while comfortably seated and drinking a iced coffee while good music plays over the speakers. I could do these at home, but there is a communal experience that can’t be duplicated.
I like browsing at B&N and Borders, but I can’t stomach paying almost 2X more for books than I do on Amazon. Its a real quandry.
I am truly sorry that your experience of book stores is so negative.
Books don’t need batteries.
Last I knew e-book retailers were still losing money on e-books. If big box book retailers are about to go belly up, discount stores and internet sales will bear more responsibility than e-books. And FWIW, I won’t bother getting an e-reader until the prices for e-books drop big time.
There is a large used bookstore in our local mall but they play load, rap type music. Enough to drive out a bibliophile.
Good points on the eBooks. There really is no way for the average person to know how many copies of any particular e-book really sold. They are all virtual copies with no mass, no tangible proof the sale took place or way to validate that a copy really was sold - other than audit the customer base.
But, a good book is a good book - without regard to the medium. I prefer the e-book because I can’t misplace them, they require no storage space in my home, and when I move it’s one less heavy box to haul up the stairs.
As an audiophile and an engineer with a past involving designing audio amplifiers for companies such as Harmon Kardon - I would beg to differ with your analysis on sound quality of the CD vs vinyl. The reason the heavy duty audiophiles insisted on vinyl was because the delicate harmonics required higher end gear to hear and appreciate. A Master LP on a good system sounds fantastic - however I’ll put the best Master LP against a SACD anytime. Unfortunately for all of us, the market has spoken and determined that .mp3’s are ‘good enough’ for most, and that CD’s will remain the most popular medium for outright sales.
The other thing that has not remained still is technology. A class AB amplifier system of the 70’s and 80’s is no match for the Digital amplifiers of today. A relatively low-cost quality receiver from a quality manufacturer exceeds the best receivers of just 20 years ago. With Ultra THX II becoming almost standard today - there is nothing that can match that capability from the times that LPs were made.
One could argue, with good cause, that the difference you hear in listening to the LP has more to do with harmonic distortion and ‘coloration’ found in the pre-amplifers than in any improvement in the source medium. Consider, the music that was cut into the LP was first stored in magnetic media on 1.25 inch audio tape; and since about 2000 - the method of storing that music was digital.
So, in short - what is on the CD is what was used to make the LP. At least, that is pretty much what is going on today. True, the digital methodology used in the recording studio is closer to SACD than current CD technology - it’s no longer analog from the guitars and vocals all the way to the platter. Those days are gone.
They're on a free ride a the moment, but somewhere down the line, there's a few billion dollars to be made by lawyers, and /then/ we'll see the death of the bookstore as we know it.
But it is going to be one heck of a bumpy ride.
very true indeed BrookH. I buy a few books from Amazon. I really do appreciate Amazon for both their price and the Amazon Wish List.
At least once a week, however, I like going to a brick and mortar supplier. I love the whole browsing aspect of that type of purchase.
I love my Kindle, and I hope Amazon wins the “format wars” but there are some books that ONLY work if you hold them in your hands - especially kid books, or books with illustrations.
You can manage your own files - they can’t get it if you back it up...
I work at a Amazon.com warehouse and I can tell you they run a very good distribution center. There are many things they need to work on, but we get plenty of orders to send out, to say the least. We keep hiring people almost on a consistent basis, some of it because of high turnover. While they may dominate e-books, I just don’t see that taking over Amazon.
Never thought of that. Of course, I have a houseful of books and noticed the last couple of times we have looked at houses that people don’t have book cases built in anymore.
“Amazon /quotes/comstock/15*!amzn/quotes/nls/amzn (AMZN 129.28, +0.42, +0.32%) says it’s now selling more e-books than paper-based books — about 43 % more in the last quarter, including about 80% more in the final month”
That statement is misleading. I believe what they mean is that Ebooks are selling 43% more than last quarter, which may be a higher percentage than how much the sale of hardbacks/paperbacks grew since the last quarter. I work for Amazon, and at our last meeting Amazon grew about that much in the last quarter counting everything altogether.
I love old and out of print books. An e-book is disposable. My wonderful old books (and picture books) are not. For awhile I sold books on ebay. But it got to be a hassle, people are a pain in the neck, plus ebay constantly changed the rules. I decided it wasn’t worth the work.
I love them too. I am always looking for those kinds of books! I look for all the bookstores where I live but there is one thing I notice. They all sell the same books. I live about 7 miles from a Joseph Beth and I rarely find what I am looking for. I wind up ordering it on Amazon anyway. Sometimes, when I am at work, I will come across a book that looks interesting. The only really bad part of my job lol.
But the medium does matter. So far none of the e-readers are as easy on the eyes as books, so much like the CD - LP thing not all copies of the same book are built evenly. I like books because I can get them a lot more cheaply, and they are easier to read, and they just plain feel better in the hand.
A high end audio system will show you the difference in sound quality more clearly. But a high end audio system is not necessary to detect the difference. I’ve got one of those LP players like you can get from BB&B, it’s got LP and CD and I’ve got albums in both media, the sound quality difference is readily detectable. CDs still have an easy to detect tinier sound, they’ve gotten better but LPS still have them beat for overall sound. LPs will never come back to dominate the market, but LPs have come back as a real presence in the market. I was just at Best Buy today and the LP selection was fairly impressive, about half of one row, only about 10% of the space CDs had but still a good chunk of real estate considering it’s a media that was declared dead 20 years ago, and it was the shelf second closest to the registers.
I’m sure there are a lot of odd reasons for the difference in sound quality, but that’s immaterial. What matters is there is a clear obvious difference that can be observed on $200 worth of equipment.
Amazon’s data is always funky like that. Because they never give the raw numbers on anything. It’s why I only pay slight attention to their declarations. There’s so much background that is needed to make Amazon’s published numbers actually meaningful, and they give none of that data, it’s best just to treat it as apocrypha.
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