Books are Back
Posted on December 14th, 2011 in Uncategorized | 4 Comments »
I was glad to read in the New York Times yesterday that bookstores are enjoying a resurgence of business this Christmas, somewhat diminishing bookseller anxiety about the impact of e-books.
...the initial weeks of Christmas shopping, a boom time for the book business, have yielded surprisingly strong sales for many bookstores, which report that they have been lifted by an unusually vibrant selection; customers who seem undeterred by pricier titles; and new business from people who used to shop at Borders, the chain that went out of business this year.
I’m not surprised. I don’t have a lot of experience with e-books—the only electronic book I’ve read was Ron Susskind’s The Confidence Men (notes on Larry Summers forthcoming)—and it just isn’t the kind of pleasing sensual experience that a physical book provides.
Besides, who wants to give an e-book for Christmas?
That said, I do still worry about the future of bookstores, partly because of a purchase I made the other day. I went to the Union Square Barnes & Noble to pick up a copy of Peter Englund’s new history of the First World War, The Beauty and the Sorrow.
I was disappointed to find that the book, with its $35 cover price, wasn’t discounted. Pretty hefty for a book.
So I pulled out my iPhone and opened the Amazon app. It asked me to scan the book’s bar code, which was easy enough to do, and up popped Amazon’s price: $23.10.
I one-touch ordered it (free shipping, a couple bucks tax)-voila!
I ordered the book Monday; it arrived in the mail yesterday (Tuesday). Saved about $13.
How can Barnes and Noble compete with that?
4 Responses
12/14/2011 3:59 pm
And how good will those prices be when Amazon has driven the competition out of business?
Worse, where will I be able to pee in Manhattan once the last B&N folds?
12/15/2011 7:21 am
Hmmm….Starbucks? Bed Bath and Beyond?
So the question is do I subsidize an economically inefficient means of distribution because I believe that it will keep prices lower in the long run to overspend now?
Or do I believe that competition from Amazon is what keeps Barnes & Noble from growing fat and lazy?
FWIW, I spend quite a lot of money at B & N, though, thanks to my member discount card, 10% less than most people…
12/15/2011 10:08 am
Hats off to some pretty amusing sports writing in the WSJ. Mike Sielsky describing the Tampa Bay-Phila hockey game: “For long stretches of the game, especially in the first period, instead of advancing forward from their own end into the maw of Tampa’s defense, the Flyers did nothing. Tampa Bay’s players, bewildered by this behavior, sat quietly at their end, too. The result: the nearly 20,000 people who came to the game had essentially bought tickets to watch 12 elite athletes stand about on the ice like a copse of elms.”
12/15/2011 12:10 pm
A couple thoughts on a subject that has many angles.
1) Amazon and Alibris have breathed new life into many small used bookstore partners that have acquired online identities. In the process, I would wager that out-of-print books are read more widely now than they used to be. Of course the authors aren’t getting any of that revenue, but the books themselves have a new life. In a seminar I taught this term I assigned 6 books and told students not to spend more than $100 — all 13 students stayed within budget. Some were in print and some were not. This is a marvel that would have been impossible a decade ago, probably at any price.
2) A fact about e-books that is going to become more important is that they are easier for people with visual impairments to read, as the impaired can adjust the font size to one that is convenient for them rather than sensible economically for the publisher in terms of the weight of shipped books. The population is aging (which will also, of course, increase the convenience of stay at home book-shopping).
The serious question remains that the first commenter suggested — what will happen if competition disappears and we become dependent, and Amazon falls under the control of (say) the guy who owns Chick-Fil-A, who wants to run his business in what he sees as a “moral” way.