Posted on 08/28/2015 4:39:39 AM PDT by lowbridge
It’s the final chapter for Barnes & Noble in Queens, as the bookstore is shuttering its remaining location in The Bay Terrace shopping center in Bayside.
A representative from Barnes & Noble declined to reveal the official closing date or who is expected to take over the property but did admit that the property owner declined to renew the company’s lease.
“With Bayside, when our lease came back up for renewal the property owner notified us that they chose a tenant who was willing to pay rents far in excess of what we were willing to pay,” said David Deason, vice president of Barnes & Noble development. “The Queens community is extremely important to us and as a result we are aggressively looking at new locations and expect to have a new store there in the future.”
(Excerpt) Read more at queenscourier.com ...
That means most titles can't survive long enough to have a lot of Amazon sales, which means they get remaindered after a while, which means no more royalties.
The market is shifting. Authors who can sell at $.99 or $1.99 and have a big marketing foundation are going to be successful. Otherwise, your name better be O'Reilly or Limbaugh or Hannity or Hillary (yeah, the hag sold over 1m copies of her first book).
My sympathy is pretty low for book store chains that habitually hide books by conservative authors.
We do shop at Barnes and Noble and my wife has an educator’s discount, so that makes up for a lot of the markup. I try to stay away from bookstores in general, because they are the one place I overspend. Screens cannot compete with the sensory experience of a good read, whether it’s a seventy’s science fiction paperback or a leather-bound heirloom quality classic.
I really love bookstores, though I must admit I prefer used bookstores. I am addicted to the smell and revel with the sense of being surrounded by undiscovered treasures, but, most of all, I simply love not having to read through every book to see if it’s filled with perversion.
How easy it will be for the takeover when there will not be any books to burn. Just hack and delete.
I agree.
Some of the B&N stores are bigger than most small-town public libraries. Their size helped them compete with stores like Waldenbooks & Borders (both defunct), but is a liability against Amazon.
Sadly, I think they’ll eventually disappear too.
My guess is the neighborhood is gentrifying and increasing rents pitted against declining sales and margins make it a non-starter from a business perspective.
And I've read books I've found on-line at Amazon that no book store would ever carry. Some authors are just as good, if not better than the paper-published authors. I'd have never found them without Amazon.
yeah, the hag sold over 1m copies of her first book
Are you sure the books sold? I heard that was the # of copies on the initial print run.
I'm one of those people who needs to wander, check unlikely topics, hold the book and glance through it to get a feel for it.
I do agree that Amazon has given many authors a place to share their accomplishments with others. For some of us, though? There's nothing like the experience of reading a real paper and print book!
You sound exactly like my son. He’s an avid reader, likes B&N, but REALLY likes the used/half-price book stores. Always has.
Speaking of the smell of bookstores. We grew up with a Bookmobile. To this day, I can remember the smell (of nothing but books!), inside that bus. Comforting and exhilarating, at the same time ;)
Right there with you. Before I was married with kids my typical Saturday morning was the gym for a couple hours then the local B&N. I would be there for at least 3 hours. Drinking coffee and browsing. I always bought a couple of books feeling it was uncouth not to.
There’s one left about 10 miles from where I live now. I don’t like taking my kids there though as all they want to do is look at the toys. Not relaxing anymore. I love my local library too but their no coffee and no cell phone rules are annoying...
A well-put post.
We are probably closer to the same age, though you look much younger than I. ;)
I remember the Bookmobiles as well, and I was on a first-name basis with the librarian way back when many local libraries still bore the Carnegie moniker. She often saved the new releases for me though I was too shy to ever ask.
Quite a different world. Today, I generally escort my children in the monolithic homeless shelters that now bear the name library and try to protect them from the aggressive SJWs who replaced our genteel librarians. It’s weird sometimes how words change over time.
They sold. It’s on Bookscan, which really is hard to “fix.” A Hilleryite would have to go into hundreds and hundreds of stores, buy out their stock, come back after the store reordered, rinse, repeat probably 100 times per store.
I just ordered college texts from BN College store online. Frustrating process to order books and checkout. In fact I was not sure if my order completed (no confirmation) so I ordered on AMZ. Books arrived in 2 days from AMZ. Three weeks later BN books arrive ! Shocked!
Sure, you can still have a hit book that catches on, but if it takes months to build, by then the publisher will have remaindered your book, and even when there is initial demand (say, 500 copies in a week) they aren't going to turn the press back on.
Then there is the matter of advances. Authors who have a good reputation for sales are given advances on their next book; the advance determines the print run; but if the order at the convention doesn't live up to that print run, then the author is held in low regard by the press. I know how this works, having been through it. I had a phenomenally (by industry standards) good selling book---but the publisher, based on their own expectations, printed DOUBLE that number. The publisher considers it a flop, even though it's my second highest selling book ever.
I get your point though on e-books (which still only make up between 10-15% of most book sales). I love e-books because I make about $1 more per e-book than I do hard/paper. But the industry yet isn't driven at all by Amazon. It's still driven by the orders at the convention and B&N is the single largest source of orders.
I don’t feel sorry for B&N at all. This is just free market evolution at work.
And remember that B&N didn’t feel sorry for all of the local mom and pop bookstores and newstands destroyed when it was gaining rather than losing market share.
Also, Amazon has a program to self-publish books in e-book form without the complications of needing to physically do a print run of books. That has actually resulted in many smaller time authors going this way.
The thing that has really drive e-book sales in recent years is the increasing size of cellphone displays. With cellphones now sporting 5 to 6 inch (diagonal) touchscreens, they now become viable e-book readers; I've seen a lot of owners of the Apple iPhone 6+ and Samsung Galaxy Note phablet phones reading e-books.
I didn't say that it did. I simply stated that I would have never found the authors I currently enjoy reading without Amazon.
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