Anybody know when paper books died? Suddenly we find our flow of intelligent information and ideas revolving pretty much around two Kindles, two IPads, and an old MacBook. I recently carted off a box of our few remaining paper bound books from what was once a thriving in-home library to an obscure storage shelf in the garage. More room needed for CDs, DVDs, charging docks, cradles and transformers and cords of every type. (Gads I hate those d*** cords.) But when did it happen? Anybody remember when the death of paper books occurred?
http://dealbook.nytimes.com/2014/04/03/liberty-media-to-sell-most-of-its-stake-in-barnes-noble/?_php=true&_type=blogs&_r=0
Comments
The decreasing reading habits was also noted on CNBC yesterday when talking about this.
cman said: "I see more people reading In Kindle commercials than in real life."
OK - fair enough. But, if you travel by air much you'll likely see quite a few Kindles. (Leno once quipped how, after a flight encountered turbulence, hundreds went flying through the cabin:-). But, you also need to realize that the newer IPads are quite good for reading - some would say superior to a Kindle. (And don't tell me you don't see lots of IPads:-)
Two things.
First, the DRM protections e-readers are built around locked consumers into one content provider or another. With Amazon's name recognition they were able to produce cheaper devices and win the market share war. I suspect it seems like there are less books because there are so many more devices, but that is a complete guess.
Second, I worked at a B&N for some time after I left grad school and was getting settled. While there might well be a decline in reading habits, the brick and mortar business model is just broken.
It costs a lot of money to ship books and it costs a lot of money to sit on that merchandise until it sells. Large stores can return over $400,000 worth of books after Christmas rush, and there were somewhere over 700 stores. The result is that margins on book sales are fairly tiny within the store. Well under 30% for most books. And stores just don't know when they're getting that money on any individual product, so there is a potential time value loss.
BN's whole model is to get people into stores. The memberships, the free wifi, the cafes, even allowing people to read free on their Nooks for an hour a day. B&N management assumes sales will follow. But why would individual consumers buy anything in the store when they can get it at Amazon for substantially cheaper? The biggest corporate no-no for B&N is selling anything in the store for the online price, unless its a ship-to-home order, which is technically a BN.com order. The whole model just encourages people to use brick and mortar stores for showrooming. You end up with demanding customers who aren't actually spending any money.
B&N used to be a good place to work as far as retail went. They paid decently, had a great benefits package and didn't require hard sales from employees. All that changed when Borders went under and they went to the Nook model. First benefits were axed for all but full time employees. Then individual employees with no specific technical skills were forced to do Nook sales and trouble-shooting. Recently store level management have had raises and bonuses threatened over membership sales and cutting hours. People who used to get 30-40 hours a week now get less than 5. No one wants to work under those conditions, and it leads to hiring people who don't really have any specific book knowledge.
So who killed paper reading? Technology certainly helped. But Amazon and greedy publisher houses setting ridiculous prices and emphasizing a very small group of authors (with B&N's help) led to a really dysfunctional brick and mortar model. There is a core minority group of readers who insist on physical books. But their numbers are shrinking. Unfortunately, so is B&N's time under this sun.
washingtonpost.com/local/serious-reading-takes-a-hit-from-online-scanning-and-skimming-researchers-say/2014/04/06/088028d2-b5d2-11e3-b899-20667de76985_story.html