Barnes and Noble Woes

[David Bingham]

I had an interesting experience at Barnes and Noble over the weekend. I wanted a Vintage Guitar Price Guide and found it on sale for $19.96 on the B & N web site. Regular price was $29.95. I found another book that was regularly $33.95 for $23.95 so together they qualified for free shipping. There was also a link to check the local store and, to my surprise, both were in stock. You could even reserve them for local pickup from the web site. Great! Great, that is, until I got to the store. They had them alright, but at full list price. I asked about price matching and they don't match their own web site because the local store has too much overhead. Okay, I understand that a brick and mortar store has higher overhead and I would have been happy to pay a reasonable "instant gratification" fee on top of the web price but 50% seemed a bit excessive so I didn't get them. I checked Amazon when I got home and not only did they have them for the same price as the B & N "sale" price but there is a new version of the price guide due out next month and Amazon offered the option to pre order it. Needless to say, B & N lost out all the way around. I found out later that some stores, oddly, will place the online order for you at the web price to be shipped to your home if you ask. So, they won't match the web price but they will pay their store employees to order it for you at the web price. And they wonder why the chain is struggling. I love having a local book store with a decent selection, especially of magazines, and I understand the difficulty and cost of doing so. Therefore I'm willing to pay extra for the convenience and will continue to shop there. However, there is a limit and I'll definitely be careful to check around before buying anything that costs more than $20 or so.

[Chuck Tweedy]

The "Nook" went down in flames, so BN is on the rocks. The only reason they are still out there is that Borders crumbled first and they are standing on the rotting corpse to keep their nose above water.
I really hope that paper-book retail goes back to funky mom&pop shops

[Ron Belanger]

Coming from a long career in being a publisher's rep to bookstores and retail, I am totally with you Chuck. It was painful to see some of the grand old independent bookstores fail and fade away. There are still a few left, but they are few and far between.

[David Bingham]

The Nook wasn't a bad product but it wasn't a really good one either and with B&N faltering, people were rightly afraid they'd end up with an unsupported doorstop. The thing I never understood about Borders is that they seemed to sell everything except books. Over half the local store was CD's, DVD's, and oddities that I don't know who would buy. The selection of books was sparse at best. B&N, except for the useless coffee shop, has lots of books but they try to have a little of everything which means that they don't have much of any one thing and dedicate shelf space to things that don't have much local appeal. We had a great Waldenbook with a large corner store and a outstanding selection so, of course, it was downsized and moved into the mall where it died a quick death along with the B Dalton just a few doors down. McKay's Used Books and CD's is the only notable independent store and they only deal in used. McKay's has moved twice into a larger space. They're now bigger than B&N and it never fails to impress me that they have a full parking lot at 10 am on weekdays. Unfortunately, what they don't have is magazines and, for all their faults, B&N has far and away the best selection in town. That's what I'm going to miss.

[Thomas Dooher]

My kids wanted to get me an e-reader/tablet, and the new Nook HD had just come out, was spec'd better than the Kindle Fire, had expansion, etc. But, they got me a Kindle Fire HD. In retrospect, a better decision at that point. Out here, we have Half Price Books, a small change, the B&N stores, and quite a few local independants.

[John Mueller]

I have a nook but I have added an N2A card (Nook 2 Android https://www.n2acards.com/ ) in the simm slot to turn it into an android tablet. B&N shot the nook in the foot when they made it into a crippled android platform that only ran B&N selected apps. Let's see 3000 apps nook and 300,000 apps android. That's not a hard choice. I never use it as a straight nook anymore. I use the free version of Aldiko as my goto reader, and to purchase books I use Baen Ebooks http://www.baenebooks.com/ ( Be sure to check out the FREE LIBRARY at the bottom of the categories menu) or the free android Nook app. Aldiko will read nook files and I like it far better than the nook or Kindle reading apps. When my nook dies I'll replace it with and Android tablet and reload my books and apps.