Barnes & Noble was just sold...

[Ben Staad]

If that was directed at me I never received a Spotify deal or offer. I could access the portion of my library that MS still held a license to on their service. However none of my library could be downloaded. It was a streaming only service. I did not utilize that offer.

Did you take the Spotify deal?? I did and have been pretty happy, I was able to carry over my purchased music. The Zune was a wild wacky ride. Thankfully both of mine still work.

[Martin]

If selling toys, figures and other trinkets helps Barnes & Noble continue to sell books I am all for them! The store near just recently got rid of the Horror section, moving the horror books into Fiction. They appear to have expanded Sci-Fi with the space. As much as I liked having a dedicated Horror section I will accept this change as well, hoping it increases sales and allows them to stay open.

While there are far fewer of them I am fortunate that the Portland area still has a some small independent book stores.

[Tommy]

Now I'll expose my nerdity even more. B&N has the cheapest POP Funko Figures I can find in stores and also the hard plastic POP protectors are the cheapest in store at B&N for some reason. It's strange because I have noticed that some of the other toys (my store is nearly half toys at this point) are way over priced but not the POP Funko stuff. I'll definitely miss those cheap POP prices if B&N goes away.

[Sock Monkey]

In my mind B&N really only needs to do a couple of things to be successful on the retail front again. The main thing is that they need to remember that they are a bookstore. My biggest problem is that every time I'm in one there's less and less books and more junk. Ditching the seating and coffee shops will solve their "library" problem. They also maybe need to scale back the number of stores they have. One of the things that I think makes Books-A-Million successful is that they have fairly few store and their stores tend to be on the smaller side of things. I also think they need to stop trying to compete with Amazon on the web store side of things. That's a fight they can't win and all the money they invest there is essentially just wasted.

Agreed on multiple areas. First, nobody can "Out Amazon" Amazon. To try to fight that battle is a losing proposition. Since "Customer Service" is non-existent with big online retailers, the ONLY way to compete is to undercut their prices which most companies can't afford to do. I also agree with getting rid of all the miscellaneous crap stuff and focus more on books. My local B&N carries a lot of games and POP! figures and whatnot. I don't mind the CD/DVD section (they're pretty much the only place in town I can pick up Criterion blurays so I appreciate that), but give me more books please.

Also, I would really appreciate it if they'd give us a Horror section. It might not be a big money-maker, but I've always hated that the genre just gets lumped in under FICTION.

[Tommy]

I loved all my local bookstores. We actually had two in the mall when I was growing up and a few other near by. I hated it when B&N came and shut them all down. I remember being in a mall after not going there for years (decades?) and asked if there was a bookstore in there and they said, yeah the B&N across the street. I deserved that. But I did miss B. Dalton and Walden and some other locals that went bye bye.

Now, every Sunday, I usually stop at B&N since it's the only bookstore in town now and if that goes, my Sundays will be much bleaker.

[Dan Hocker]

I was never a B&N fan. When they came into Richmond they really killed off the independent book trade. It's never recovered in my opinion.

B&N was late to my area as well. Borders beat them there by several years. We never had much of an independent book store scene though. Borders and B&N and really Amazon killed off all the small mall book chains though.

[mhatchett]

I was never a B&N fan. When they came into Richmond they really killed off the independent book trade. It's never recovered in my opinion.

[Dan Hocker]

I agree that B&N needs to stock more and downgrade the Tchotchke's.

I do hope Dan is wrong about CD's. My last car we bought didn't have a CD player. We put one in it. I also do not buy digital music. I buy CD's and load them digitally.

The main reason for this is that I had a massive amount of purchased music through Zune/Microsoft that was essentially stolen from me. When Zune went away, and my Zune broke, I found out that much of the purchased music and media was not under license anymore and that I had no access to it. At a conservative estimate I had over $1K of media lost.

It's unfortunate, but CD's are basically a dead media already and DVD's / Blu-Ray's are headed in the same direction. Unlike records there's no quality argument to be made about format, as the digital stuff you buy is the same fidelity that is on a CD. But when they stop putting them in cars you know that's when the media is on it's way out. It was the same with pretty much every form of music media before that (except records). I've always found the key to digital music is to have the files in more than one place. Then again I stopped buying music like 10 years ago. I'm generally happy with the "radio" functionality of the streaming services.

This trend of things as a service is really where we're headed. It all started with software (I blame Adobe), but it's spread from that into music, video, video games. It's really very unfortunate, there will probably come a point in the future where you don't really own these things anymore, you're just renting the license to consume it. Which sucks, but it's the direction we're headed.

[mhatchett]

Did you take the Spotify deal?? I did and have been pretty happy, I was able to carry over my purchased music. The Zune was a wild wacky ride. Thankfully both of mine still work.

[Ben Staad]

I agree that B&N needs to stock more and downgrade the Tchotchke's.

I do hope Dan is wrong about CD's. My last car we bought didn't have a CD player. We put one in it. I also do not buy digital music. I buy CD's and load them digitally.

The main reason for this is that I had a massive amount of purchased music through Zune/Microsoft that was essentially stolen from me. When Zune went away, and my Zune broke, I found out that much of the purchased music and media was not under license anymore and that I had no access to it. At a conservative estimate I had over $1K of media lost.

[Martin]

The story I read indicated that the CEO would head up both chains and be located in New York. I would imagine that is indicative of the companies going to a common operation model.

[Dan Hocker]

https://www.cnbc.com/2019/06/07/elli...3-million.html

To be accurate, it was bought by a hedge fund that owns Waterstones (and now B&N). Typically “hedge fund” and “bankruptcy” are too often partnered in headlines, but we’ll see...

True, but putting Waterstones' CEO in charge doesn't seem like a move they'd make if they where planning to gut it. I also saw that they're taking B&N private. Which is really interesting.

[Dan Hocker]

If they reimagine B&N in the Waterstones mold -- a revamped model of true bookstores that has been praised and successful in the UK -- then it will likely be a successful union. If they try to just tweak it without the vision of an overhaul of business-as-usual, I have every reason to believe that B&N will continue its progressive, protracted downward slide into irrelevancy and bankruptcy. What Waterstones' motives are for the buy are unknown right now, of course, but time will tell.

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In my mind B&N really only needs to do a couple of things to be successful on the retail front again. The main thing is that they need to remember that they are a bookstore. My biggest problem is that every time I'm in one there's less and less books and more junk. Ditching the seating and coffee shops will solve their "library" problem. They also maybe need to scale back the number of stores they have. One of the things that I think makes Books-A-Million successful is that they have fairly few store and their stores tend to be on the smaller side of things. I also think they need to stop trying to compete with Amazon on the web store side of things. That's a fight they can't win and all the money they invest there is essentially just wasted.

[RonClinton]

https://www.cnbc.com/2019/06/07/elli...3-million.html

To be accurate, it was bought by a hedge fund that owns Waterstones (and now B&N). Typically “hedge fund” and “bankruptcy” are too often partnered in headlines, but we’ll see...

[WebInterceptor]

Back on the B&N subject though I really hope they sort out the Nook line and maybe redo the back end for loading products on their store. It's one of the worst interfaces I've had to deal with. It used to be so clean and simple and just worked, but they overhauled it a couple of years ago and completely ruined it by trying to give it more "functionality" that no one asked for.

I just hope they don't shut down the stores.. people have more and more started using it as a library than buying any books, and so many unethical people damage the books. I feel the only reason these days i personally go are to see new releases. I do see them hosting lot of activities for kids these days.. Anyways, book stores are hard to operate, more losses incurred than profits.