The Death of Bookstores..... Maybe Not?

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**Easy E**

http://www.slate.com/articles/business/moneybox/2015/12/barnes_noble_is_dying_waterstones_in_the_u_k_is_thriving.html

You could say I have a sentimental attachment to the chain bookstore. Growing up in an intellectually impoverished American suburb, I spent much of my free time in now-defunct locations of Borders and Barnes & Noble. I read garbage, mostly: popular history magazines, Star Trek novelizations, art tomes whose pages I scoured only for frank depictions of naked women. But I had an intuitive sense that all those “wordy” books sleeping on the shelves, whose spines I raced my finger along while traveling between the café and the restrooms, would some day be the building blocks of a real, adult mind, the cathedral-like dimensions of which I could almost picture emerging through the haze of my juvenile enthusiasms. Inside Barnes & Noble, the figures of great literature literally looked down on me. A large wallpapered mural assembled them all in some grand ahistorical café. It was through that mural that I had my first encounters with the brooding fop Oscar Wilde and the fabulously bearded Anthony Trollope.

As much as I lived in and grew to love this big box of books, I eventually realized my consumer behavior there may have contributed to its decline. At Borders, the only thing I would purchase was Snapple peach-flavored iced tea. At Barnes & Noble, I bought nothing at all. This problem—the loafing-but-not-buying problem—is nothing new to the bookselling trade. In a 1936 essay, George Orwell, a former bookstore clerk, complained about loiterers like me, who alight on bookshops simply because they are “one of the few places where you can hang about for a long time without spending any money.” The digital revolution has of course turned this charming vulnerability into a lethal one—witness the fate of Borders, Waldenbooks, B. Dalton, et al.—by converting the chain bookstore into little more than an air-conditioned showroom for Amazon.com.

While Barnes & Noble devolves from a bookstore into a thing store, Waterstones is plotting an entirely different course.
In the United States, Barnes & Noble is one of the last of this dying breed, and it is in serious peril. This month, the company reported an abysmal second quarter with losses in excess of $25 million. Sales of its e-reader, the Nook, have collapsed and its stock has lost about 60 percent this year. Saddled with nearly $200 million in long-term debt, having spun off its somewhat profitable education unit and closed dozens of stores, B&N continues to wither. In an interview with the New York Times, Ron Boire, the company’s third chief executive in two years, suggested shifting the business away from reading toward things like games, gifts, and art supplies. He seemed particularly excited about 3-D printing and those oxymoronic “adult coloring books,” which Boire said capitalized on a new vogue among consumers for “physical interaction with things.”

While Barnes & Noble devolves from a bookstore into a thing store, Waterstones, the biggest bookstore chain in Britain, is plotting an entirely different course. In 2011, the company—choked with debt and facing the same existential threat from Amazon and e-books as B&N—nearly declared bankruptcy. Today, however, Waterstones isn’t closing shops but opening a raft of them, both big-box (in suburban shopping centers) and pint-size (in train stations). It has accomplished a stunning turnaround under the leadership of its managing director, James Daunt, who just announced Waterstones’ first annual profit since the financial crisis. How he pulled that off is a long story, involving old-fashioned business cunning, the largesse of a mysterious Russian oligarch, and some unexpected faith in the instincts of his booksellers.

* * *

The Waterstones flagship in London’s West End might be the largest bookstore in Europe. It’s got a whiff of intrigue about it; the basement café was once a frequent meeting place of MI5 agents, one of whom had a tête-à-tête there with Alexander Litvinenko the day before the Russian dissident was poisoned by polonium. I visited in high summer and didn’t even need to enter the shop to realize it was busy reinventing what a chain bookstore should look like. An entire window display, half a block wide along Piccadilly, was devoted not to the latest crop of beach reads and best-sellers but to one title, a classic, Françoise Sagan’s Bonjour Tristesse, copies of which were strewn about along with a suggestively toppled-over beach umbrella. A long quotation from the book was posted overhead that began: “A strange melancholy pervades me ...”

Daunt is a bookseller by trade and inclination, not a retail executive like B&N’s Boire (whose résumé includes stops at Sears and Toys R Us). Sharply dressed, soft-spoken, Cambridge-educated, Daunt had a brief career in high finance at JPMorgan, but he quit at the urging of his wife, who didn’t want to be married to a banker, and decided, in 1990, to open an independent bookshop on Marylebone High Street. He was just 26. “I was a child,” he said over coffee in the Waterstones café. “I went around with the begging bowl. It was a primitive version of crowdfunding.”

The original Daunt Books—dusty, highbrow, a bit posh—has given rise to six other locations. All are honey traps for armchair travelers, with titles arranged not by subject or author but by country. The chainlet has always been prosperous, growing sales each year despite the financial crisis and the rise of digital, which have caused a quarter of the indie bookshops in Britain and Ireland to disappear over the past five years.

While Daunt weathered this difficult market, by 2010, he had grown very concerned about what lay ahead. He knew, for instance, that if all chain bookstores collapsed, many of the small- and medium-size publishers that filled his shop and supported the authors he loved—presses like Eland, which specializes in travel writing—would also fold. “A publisher of the Eland sort will sell typically 60 percent to Waterstones, 20 percent to Amazon, and 20 percent to the indies and the rest. You cut Waterstones out, and they go bust,” Daunt said. “So I didn’t want my supply—the talent, the nurturing, the world I’m in—to just get severely buggered around.”

But saving Waterstones’ 280 stores seemed practically impossible. The company was £170 million (about $260 million) in debt and about to file for bankruptcy when, miraculously, it was rescued by the billionaire Alexander Mamut, a complicated, influential figure in Putin’s Russia who one British broadsheet dubbed “the most powerful oligarch you have never heard of.” Mamut had been talking to Daunt before the sale and immediately brought him aboard to right the ship. “He wanted to make a mark in the United Kingdom, where he had a house, educated his son, and this seemed a positive, beneficial thing worth saving,” Daunt said of Waterstones’ benefactor. “Other people buy football clubs, fund art galleries—this was his thing.”

Once at Waterstones, Daunt tore up the business plan. His first target was the so-called planogram, a kind of map that tells chain booksellers which new books go where, ensuring that each store assigns exactly the same prominence to exactly the same titles. The very best locations in the store are actually sold to publishers. This includes the so-called best-seller list, whose rankings are determined not by the popularity of a given book but by how much a publisher is willing to invest to promote it. (A similar policy of “bookstore baksheesh,” as one editor dubbed it, seems to exist at B&N.) In 2011, Waterstones earned around £30 million just for this kind of advertising, Daunt said. Considering that the company was hemorrhaging money when Daunt took it over, forfeiting this revenue stream seemed crazy, and it also offended many publishers. “By giving control back to the booksellers, we were telling the publishers, ‘We know what sells better than you.’ That’s never a pleasant message,” said Daunt. “There was extreme nervousness. But we had the advantage of being bankrupt. Crucially for us, Penguin said, ‘Sounds mad. But what are the options? So we’ll support you.’ ”

By freeing up the placement of books, Daunt was able to optimize the selection for each store based on the type of customers coming in. What sold in working-class Gateshead wasn’t the same thing that sold in affluent Kensington. In some stores, he would discount. In others, he wouldn’t. “This is sort of difficult for booksellers to get their heads around, but some of the customers actually don’t want a discount. There is a fair price for a book, I think,” he says, picking up a doorstop history by the likes of Ian Kershaw. “You’re investing a lot more than 25 quid in this. For most readers, that will probably take a good month of your life. Almost the least important thing is how much it costs.”

Waterstones in Surrey, England.
When James Daunt took over, he gave Waterstones booksellers complete autonomy over how to arrange their stores. Above, the inside of the Waterstones in Sutton, England.
Photo by Tony Monblat/Flickr

Next came the staff. Daunt shrunk Waterstones’ central office and fired half of the store managers. He gave those booksellers who remained almost complete autonomy over how to arrange their stores—from the windows to the signage to the display tables—but controlled the stock with a dictatorial zeal. Out went books you wouldn’t want to browse: reference, technical guides, legal textbooks. That—along with the real estate freed up by eliminating publisher-sponsored placements—allowed Daunt to grow the total number of titles in stores by about a quarter. With more books to browse, sales increased. The number of unsold books that were returned to publishers fell from about 20 percent before Daunt took over to just 4 percent today.

A leaner staff and more autonomy resulted in everyone working harder, but Daunt says the staff is curiously happier as a result. “You love being in a shop where people are busy,” he says. “It’s much better than being out the back, filling up boxes of returns and thinking your life is a drudgery of doing pointless administrative tasks for some nameless bureaucracy of a head office who you despise because they just dump innumerable amounts of crap books on you.” As is probably clear, Daunt still has an indie bookseller’s contempt for the big chains, even though he now runs one of them. Of Barnes & Noble, which appears more and more like a cross between an airport gift shop and a toy store, he said, “My faculties just shut down when I go in there.”

For a CEO, Daunt is refreshingly impolitic. He has called Amazon a “ruthless money-making devil” and has relished the recent resurgence of print and the plateauing of e-books. He stocked Kindles in his store up until earlier this year, when he pulled them, gleefully, citing “pitiful” sales. The revival of print, and of Waterstones, confirms in a way Daunt’s worldview. “Do not underestimate the pleasures of reading,” he said last year. “The satisfactions of the book, in the age of social media and proliferating cultural choices, are very singular.”

If Daunt has created an economically sustainable model for the chain bookstore in the Amazon age, he’s done it in large part by not having a model: Each Waterstones looks different and sells different books depending on the local audience and the business impulses of the shop’s staff. In a way, Daunt has reanimated the lifeless body of the chain bookstore by infecting it, just a little bit, with the usually profit-proof sensibilities of an indie. While there may be lessons to learn in his success, it’s hard to imagine Barnes & Noble—which has twice the number of stores as Waterstones—precisely replicating it.

I’m pulling for B&N in any case. I wish Ron Boire the best of luck with his coloring books, scented candles, and anything else that can keep America’s last great network of bookstores in business. I don’t want to imagine what my own adolescence would’ve looked like without a big, safe space to read and to think and to drink peach Snapple while sitting in vinyl armchairs. If I didn’t have that space, I might’ve drifted toward someplace a lot less welcoming, someplace where there are no beverages. Like the library.‪

Barnes and Noble is in serious trouble, but I don;t think the CEO has what i takes to save them the way Waterstone's is doing. If B&N decide to be a store of things, they are finished. There are too many stores of things, and their is no thing you can't get online for cheaper. Instead, they need to regionalize and focus on the "curated" experience.

It reminds me of the death of Blockbuster. Blockbuster died because they strayed to far away fromt he ir core business when they had Netflix on the ropes, and ended up losing everything.

**timetowaste85**

My local B&N closed last year right before Christmas. They told us that a liquor store chain from Long Island bought out the location at a stupid price point that corporate wasn't willing to challenge. A year later, no construction has been started, it's just dead storefront. I think the writing is already on the wall. My B&N was superior to the next closest and not as "busy" with stuff as the next closest. I love B&N. I can get a coffee and curl up with my newest TPB issues in an easy chair. Who wants to see that go?!

**BobtheInquisitor**

Barnes and Noble is making exactly the same mistakes Borders made in its last few years. They've greatly reduced selection, reduced the shelf life for novels, and reduced the customer experience.

I love that Waterstones trust their staff. I hate scripted sales pitches, but always love honest recommendations, even if I disagree with them.

**Kilkrazy**

If you go into Waterstones, there are little shelf talkers recommending books by the staff. Their own picks and interests, written out on slightly shabby white cards in felt tip pen.

Like you say, even if you don't agree with the pik, it's a lot better than a Computoon 2000(tm) scripted recommendation for whatever PoS has the biggest marketing budget this month.

**Crazy_Carnifex**

BobtheInquisitor wrote:
Barnes and Noble is making exactly the same mistakes Borders made in its last few years. They've greatly reduced selection, reduced the shelf life for novels, and reduced the customer experience.

Now why does that sound familiar?...

**Jimsolo**

Kilkrazy wrote:
If you go into Waterstones, there are little shelf talkers recommending books by the staff. Their own picks and interests, written out on slightly shabby white cards in felt tip pen.

Like you say, even if you don't agree with the pik, it's a lot better than a Computoon 2000(tm) scripted recommendation for whatever PoS has the biggest marketing budget this month.

Hmmm. My Barnes & Noble has this as well. Some of the staff picks are new, topical releases, but they certainly don't feel scripted. (I could be wrong, obviously.)

**Peregrine**

Honestly, who cares if the big chains die? Local independent stores, especially ones with a good selection of used books, are better when you want to browse locally and amazon is better when you know what you want and just want to have it as cheaply as possible. Outside of using gift cards I can't even remember the last time I bought anything from a chain store.

**Cheesecat**

Peregrine wrote:
Honestly, who cares if the big chains die? Local independent stores, especially ones with a good selection of used books, are better when you want to browse locally and amazon is better when you know what you want and just want to have it as cheaply as possible. Outside of using gift cards I can't even remember the last time I bought anything from a chain store.

Clothes?

**Sinful Hero**

Cheesecat wrote:
Peregrine wrote:
Honestly, who cares if the big chains die? Local independent stores, especially ones with a good selection of used books, are better when you want to browse locally and amazon is better when you know what you want and just want to have it as cheaply as possible. Outside of using gift cards I can't even remember the last time I bought anything from a chain store.

Clothes?

Your clothes aren't tailored?

But why?

**Peregrine**

Cheesecat wrote:
Peregrine wrote:
Honestly, who cares if the big chains die? Local independent stores, especially ones with a good selection of used books, are better when you want to browse locally and amazon is better when you know what you want and just want to have it as cheaply as possible. Outside of using gift cards I can't even remember the last time I bought anything from a chain store.

Clothes?

I mean the last time I bought anything from a chain bookstore.

**Ensis Ferrae**

I love books.... I pretty much cannot enter a book store without buying at least one.

My local B&N does have its few problems that I dislike (such as so much space devoted to whatever garbage is popular this week)... But, it's space is devoted fairly proportionally to what actually makes my location money. The Romance section is larger than the biography, sci-fi and fantasy, and "popular culture" (books about movies, music, comedians and the like). The kids section is also fairly large, but is a bit more "airy" than the rest of the store.

Being a history major, I obviously head to that section first in any entry to the store, and I have to say: there is quite regular turnover of books, particularly on non-American historical subjects.

But after saying all of that.... I still prefer Powell's Books in the Portland area. For those who've been to Portland, and been to Powell's will know what I'm talking about, but the main store is literally a city block. The place is so massive, that the building's rooms are divided by color, and if you're looking for a certain subject, say, history, the sign/staff will tell you history is in the "Purple room". Sports, car books and games are in the "Orange room" etc.

They sell both used and new books (though in recent years, they've begun putting more and more new books at the front of shelves, probably to drive revenues.

**Kilkrazy**

In the UK we have quite a lot of good secondhand book shops. These are not threatened by Amazon, but they are being kicked in the teeth by charity shops.

**Ensis Ferrae**

Kilkrazy wrote:
In the UK we have quite a lot of good secondhand book shops. These are not threatened by Amazon, but they are being kicked in the teeth by charity shops.

Maybe it's an oddity of the UK, but I've NEVER found even a halfway decent book at any charity/thrift shop.

The only "quality" books I've seen in those places are the "they're out there" type conspiracy theorist stuff, lol

**Wyzilla**

I hope Barnes and Noble doesn't die, mainly because it's really the only good bookstores in my area. Everything else is terrible mom and pop shops that have absolutely abysmal selection on anything, although good fiction is certainly a weak point. Sacramento doesn't have any super massive glorious bookstores like what I've seen in the Bay or Oregon. We're up gak creek in gak county and without a paddle if B&N crashes and burns. I don't like those second hand mom and pop stores at all, simply because their volume of content is absolutely tiny from my experience.

Hopefully somebody opens one of those mega bookstores in the future, or this will lead to another eventual tick in the box to move.

**BlaxicanX**

I'll miss big chain book stores. It is nice being able to walk into a book store, find something that looks interesting and plop down in a cushy chair for an hour or two and give it a read without an employee hovering over my shoulder dropping hints.

... and maybe in the end I'll buy the book, or maybe I won't. lol. I can understand how that whole "loiter around the store, then walk out having not bought anything" is a hard pill for the business to swallow, but as the consumer I quite enjoy it. I mean there's a mom n pop bookstore three blocks from my house but I've only ever been there twice- as it's small and by design has no place to sit. On the other hand I go to BnN at least once every couple of months. The majority of those visits end with me not buying anything- I've spent maybe ~$100 on books at BnN over the past three or four years- but that's still $100 more than what I've given to my local bookstore.

**Peregrine**

Wyzilla wrote:
We're up gak creek in gak county and without a paddle if B&N crashes and burns.

How? You're posting on an internet forum which means you have access to amazon and can buy anything that B&N sells.

Automatically Appended Next Post:

BlaxicanX wrote:
I can understand how that whole "loiter around the store, then walk out having not bought anything" is a hard pill for the business to swallow, but as the consumer I quite enjoy it.

Of course you enjoy it. I'm sure it's nice to be able to treat a store as your own personal library and get their products without ever having to pay for them. Too bad that isn't a profitable business model, and I'll have zero sympathy for you when you lose the ability to leech off of a business.

**Kilkrazy**

It's a long tradition in the UK and France, and doesn't seem to have been a major reason for bookshops closing down. Eventually even the most persistent 'browser' buys a book.

**timetowaste85**

Peregrine wrote:
Wyzilla wrote:
We're up gak creek in gak county and without a paddle if B&N crashes and burns.

How? You're posting on an internet forum which means you have access to amazon and can buy anything that B&N sells.

I like to walk in, get my book off the shelf and read it right away. I can't do that with Amazon. I have to wait at least two days. I don't mind paying slightly more to be able to have it right away. You want to wait for stuff? Go for it. Order online. I'd rather buy it and have it right away.

**Wolfstan**

I miss the Borders we had in Bournemouth. A big store that had a huge selection of books and magazines. I could easily spend a few hours browsing in there. Found more books that way then any other way. We have a Waterstones but I have to say I'm indifferent to it, but it is better than W H Smiths

**Easy E**

Peregrine wrote:
Honestly, who cares if the big chains die? Local independent stores, especially ones with a good selection of used books, are better when you want to browse locally and amazon is better when you know what you want and just want to have it as cheaply as possible. Outside of using gift cards I can't even remember the last time I bought anything from a chain store.

Because, as the article mentions if Big Chain Stores die, the small publishers they buy from also die.

The Waterstone's guy sums it up this way: If you look at the publishers sales of books they are 70% to big chain bookstores, 20% to Amazon, and 10% to indie bookstores. If 70% of your market disappears, who is left to cover your costs? You close down. That is why even Indies need to care if Big Chain Stores stay.

**Rick_1138**

I also cant abide the attitude that "Amazon has it".

While this maybe True, you cant beat going into a bookstore of a saturday, and perusing the shelves and seeing what takes your fancy. You can't browse in Amazon, i mean you can, but its a faff and its tailored to what you are currently looking at, where as in the book store i can jump between sci-fi to fantasy, to travel guides.

Also Waterstones often has nice displays, a coffee shop, some interesting items like collectors specials an the like.

Its great to see them doing well and stocking some really nice books. I haven't used my kindle in over 6 months, you just cant beat the feel of a book in your hands and reading of paper is more relaxing than a screen.

Also, if book stores like waterstones dhut, that means the only way to get book is the latest trash novel in the top 10 at a supermarket, or Amazon, and that means more soul destroying jobs in a warehouse, where the staff at Waterstones are usually friendly and knowledgeable (at the local one in Aberdeen at any rate

)

**Easy E**

Plus, Amazon is notoriously bad for paying out the authors/publishing houses for the books that they do sell.

**Kilkrazy**

timetowaste85 wrote:
Peregrine wrote:
Wyzilla wrote:
We're up gak creek in gak county and without a paddle if B&N crashes and burns.

How? You're posting on an internet forum which means you have access to amazon and can buy anything that B&N sells.

I like to walk in, get my book off the shelf and read it right away. I can't do that with Amazon. I have to wait at least two days. I don't mind paying slightly more to be able to have it right away. You want to wait for stuff? Go for it. Order online. I'd rather buy it and have it right away.

I bought three Kindle books while eating a hamburger at Five Guys this lunchtime and started reading them within 30 seconds.

I've even bought a Kindle book while travelling from Heathrow airport to Reading on a coach.

I prefer real books but there are advantages to Kindle.

**Ouze**

Last night I went to Barnes & Nobles to try and get some holiday shopping in. I wound up finding a stack of things I thought looked sort of neat, then I sat down and looked them up on my phone. I wound up buying every single item from Amazon in the store, and then left with only a calendar that was only a few bucks more than Amazon. This is exactly what happened the last time I went to Barnes and Nobles almost a year ago probably to the day.

I'd like to be able to support brick and mortar business, and I understand that Amazon has less physical infrastructure and so can afford deeper discounts. That being said, the average price on Amazon was 35% off from what I looked at, and I lot of them were nearly double. For example, the Fallout 4 guide was $22 on Amazon and $40 at B&N. As a customer, I feel like they simply no longer have a workable business model if they can't compete to that degree, and at the end of the day I can't bring myself to throw money away to support a 3 billion dollar company out of some sense of charity.

**Ensis Ferrae**

Ouze wrote:

I'd like to be able to support brick and mortar business, and I understand that Amazon has less physical infrastructure and so can afford deeper discounts. That being said, the average price on Amazon was 35% off from what I looked at, and I lot of them were nearly double. For example, the Fallout 4 guide was $22 on Amazon and $40 at B&N. As a customer, I feel like they simply no longer have a workable business model if they can't compete to that degree, and at the end of the day I can't bring myself to throw money away to support a 3 billion dollar company out of some sense of charity.

Not to worry: Amazon is apparently branching out into the B&M store, so you may not get to enjoy that kind of steep discount for much longer

Not that I'm knocking you checking reviews on amazon while in another store, but if it were me, I'd still just buy the ones in my hands. But that's just me.

**Avatar 720**

Ensis Ferrae wrote:
Kilkrazy wrote:
In the UK we have quite a lot of good secondhand book shops. These are not threatened by Amazon, but they are being kicked in the teeth by charity shops.

Maybe it's an oddity of the UK, but I've NEVER found even a halfway decent book at any charity/thrift shop.

The only "quality" books I've seen in those places are the "they're out there" type conspiracy theorist stuff, lol

I found half my collection of Horus Heresy books in my local Cancer Research. Unfortunately, one of them was Battle for the Abyss, but at least the money I spent on it will go towards curing whatever I contracted from reading it.

**Peregrine**

Easy E wrote:
Because, as the article mentions if Big Chain Stores die, the small publishers they buy from also die.

The Waterstone's guy sums it up this way: If you look at the publishers sales of books they are 70% to big chain bookstores, 20% to Amazon, and 10% to indie bookstores. If 70% of your market disappears, who is left to cover your costs? You close down. That is why even Indies need to care if Big Chain Stores stay.

The article, which just happens to be written from a point of view favoring the big chain store? I would be extremely surprised if that 70% died with the chain stores instead of moving to Amazon or other sources. The fact that the big chain stores currently dominate sales doesn't mean that they are irreplaceable.

Automatically Appended Next Post:

timetowaste85 wrote:
I like to walk in, get my book off the shelf and read it right away. I can't do that with Amazon. I have to wait at least two days. I don't mind paying slightly more to be able to have it right away. You want to wait for stuff? Go for it. Order online. I'd rather buy it and have it right away.

On the other hand a bookstore isn't always convenient to drive to. If I have a choice between ordering a book now and getting it in two days or spending an hour or more driving to and from the bookstore two days from now (because tomorrow I've got other plans) and paying more for the book on top of the time and gas money spent on getting it I know which option I'm going to take.

**BlaxicanX**

Peregrine wrote:
Too bad that isn't a profitable business model, and I'll have zero sympathy for you when you lose the ability to leech off of a business.

Eh, don't. When BnN goes under I'll either hang out at a library instead or just torrent books online.

Don't feel bad for me- feel bad for the book industry. Do you think that the problems that plague bookstore chains doesn't effect small local stores too? They're dropping like flies as just as quick as Borders or Barnes and Nobles- their death throes are just a lot quieter.

**Kilkrazy**

Another thing we have in the UK is seaside town secondhand bookshops that act as pay-to-borrow lending libraries.

Typically you buy a book for 50p and sell it back for 20p, something like that, or you can keep it.

They are treasure troves of OOP fiction, and great fun to browse.

The books are usually in pretty poor condition as they've been read and enjoyed by hundreds of people over the years, and I rather like that. I hate buying a new paperback for £8.99 and cracking the spine and bashing up the corners.

**Ouze**

That sounds great. When I was in college, my bus stop was right by the library. They had a huge collection of old paperbacks you could buy for 25 or 50 cents; and I used to love quickly grabbing a few if I got there early or late and had some time. If the book was good, I was happy, if it was bad, it was only 50 cents. As you say, they were all beat up and that was part of the charm for me - I'm very hard on my books (which is why I didn't usually actually borrow them as is the typical function of a library).

I own a kindle paperwhite and it's much more convenient but I do greatly enjoy the texture and even smell of a physical book. Still as a person who is increasingly aware of having a house filled with clutter, tons of books everywhere might be something I can't do anymore.