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 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.


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.

I hate ordering online. I'm also old fashioned, as I don't search for a specific title. I instead just randomly browse history, sci fi, philosophy, etc and pick up titles that I find interesting and tear through them multiple times to soak up as much knowledge as possible (or entertainment in basic fiction with no philosophical point). I especially love the bookstore the larger it is, as it means I browse even longer and find even more interesting books to buy.

I simply hate all forms of digital reading. The only saving grace for me is that we have good libraries, although remembering to return books can be a real pain.

The UK's small towns can't maintain a well-stocked library any more, and they either close down or get run by volunteers.
Even big towns and cities have trouble. Too many new books to buy, and such a tiny budget...

So here, bookshops fill the gap where countries like the US manage.

I dropped into a small independent bookshop yesterday, and grabbed a big coffee-table book at an unmarked 40% off. I got to browse the whole stock, by category, and they got to suggest what to look at with the shelf-top displays.

As long as Half-Price books remains a thing, I'm good.

B&N won't be able to do what waterstones have done for one simple reason. They don't have James Daunt. What has changed for Waterstones is simply that Daunt is running it as a small, agile shop with a single charismatic leader. You can't go and replicate this in a colour by numbers way. James is a top guy, a strong leader and an astute business man who understands his market. No amount of corporate branding will copy that and they need to find their own way. Having worked in the industry and delt with him I have a lot of respect for James and am glad to see he is doing well.

If you go to the Waterstones at Piccadilly Circus, it is a mighty temple of books.

I think a lot of it just has to do with price inflation. I can wander a B&N for an hour and find nothing I feel like picking up, but I'll reap the shelves of a used bookstore or library bookstore like a madman.

I love to support indie bookstores and most of them sell used. There's nothing warm and cuddly about paying the operational overhead of a faceless corporation.

I understand the cost of printing and distribution but the massive drop in value from a retail book to a used book just kills the perceived value for most people

I don't know why books cost so much. 40 years ago I could buy a paperback SF for 20 pence. A similar book now will be £8, an increase of 40 times.

The mechanical cost of publishing is cheaper than ever. The whole production line has been digitalised from original author to press, all of which used to involve a lot of hand work..

Maybe it's just general inflation. Lots of other things are now a lot more expensive.

I assume that production cost have dropped, but the cut an author or agent (or whoever) takes needs to be higher.

Perhaps there are fewer people buying books now, so the royalty per copy sold needs to be increased, causing a higher price despite lower manufacturing cost.

I think there is a factor of many more titles being published, many of which probably make a loss, and require higher prices of all books in order to defray the losses.

 Kilkrazy wrote:
I don't know why books cost so much.

Sales went down extremely quickly. Most people now reading books have a strong emotional relation to the medium itself and thus are willing to pay very high prices.

 Kilkrazy wrote:

I think there is a factor of many more titles being published, many of which probably make a loss, and require higher prices of all books in order to defray the losses.

I'd read an article a few years ago that basically said that if your name wasn't King, Koontz, Rice, etc. Odds are, you'd better keep your day job while waiting for your book to make you anywhere near enough money to live on.


I think that yes, there's a lot more titles being published, but if we're honest, how many of those titles are absolute garbage? I kind of have to assume that even the big name authors' contracts with the publishers state that a certain (small) percentage of sales money goes to the collective pool of authors in that publisher, and thus guys like Anne Rice or Stephen King are helping to carry "lesser" authors along. Of course, this is only talking about the world of literature/sci-fi and fantasy, romance, horror, etc. As when you look at the bio section for the majority of history books, they are teaching professors who are writing as well. Or there's the religious books where you get people getting suckered into buying those books, etc.

 Sigvatr wrote:

 Kilkrazy wrote:
I don't know why books cost so much.

Sales went down extremely quickly. Most people now reading books have a strong emotional relation to the medium itself and thus are willing to pay very high prices.

It has always been true that books sales obey the Pareto Law that 80% of sales are to 20% of the audience.

Is there actually any evidence for the argument that sales hasve declined very quickly? Surely there must be annual sales statistics or somerthing...

 Kilkrazy wrote:

Is there actually any evidence for the argument that sales hasve declined very quickly? Surely there must be annual sales statistics or somerthing...

I'll have to see if I can dig it up, but there was an article somewhat recently talking about book sales trends. Basically, there was a fairly heavy dip in books before the Kindle, Nook and other devices were released. When they were released there was a "massive" spike in e-sales (e-readers, ebooks, etc) but in the couple years since initial release, the market is trending back closer to 50/50 book/electronic.

Here's a report from the Publisher's Association. It doesn't show a 50/50 split in ebooks versus paper books in the US market.

US Book Market 2010-2014

http://www.booksellers.org.uk/BookSellers/media/SiteMediaLibrary/IndustryNews/US-Book-Market-2010-2014.pdf

I have read newspaper reports that the sales of e-readers are well down on a couple of years ago. I would guess this is because everyone who wants one has got one -- the old Pareto Principle at work again -- so they are only selling replacements now.

Speaking personally, I had my first eReader, a Sony unit, about seven years ago, and I am now on my third Kindle. I replace them when they break, which is fairly often going by my experience, so perhaps ereading is not as cheap as you might think from the lower price of individual titles.

OTOH it has enabled me to reaed a huge amount of free, out of copyright material.

 Jimsolo wrote:

 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.)

Mine had a single bookshelf (admitedly placed in a relatively prominent aisle) of staff picks but I haven't seen it for a while. In the meantime, the bobblehead little dolly collection has been growing significantly.

 warboss wrote:

 Jimsolo wrote:

 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.)

Mine had a single bookshelf (admitedly placed in a relatively prominent aisle) of staff picks but I haven't seen it for a while. In the meantime, the bobblehead little dolly collection has been growing significantly.

My local waterstones has these, too. The one for the Pathfinder core rulebook says "what DnD 4th should have been."