The Shatzkin Files
The future for books in retail stores is not unified; it’s dispersed. To the extent that there continue to be bookstores (and although shelf space in them will continue to decline inexorably, they’ll also be around for years to come), the bookstores will increasingly be more about books for reading and less about books for using. Much of the slack can be picked up by merchants of other things, but there are challenges.
The one piece of good news from Barnes & Noble’s most recent reporting was that their stores are still throwing off cash. We don’t know how much of the margin they’re reporting comes from books as opposed to NOOKs or toys and games. But it is definitely good news that the stores, which publishers still depend heavily on for sales as well as “discovery” are apparently still healthy.
Unfortunately, it would be a surprise if things stayed that way for very long. The share of book sales that are migrating to the Internet keeps growing. Amazon’s print book sales keep going up (more slowly, of course, but everybody else’s are going down) and sales of ebooks keep rising as more and more people get the digital habit. Amazon gets 60% or more of those sales through the Kindle platform.
The term “showrooming” is becoming familiar to people in the book business to describe the retailer’s role in the consumer’s new tendency to use stores to shop but the Internet to buy. Part of what drives this effect is Amazon’s well-earned reputation for heavy discounting — it seems just about every book at Amazon sells for less than the publisher’s suggested retail and most books in stores sell at the price the publisher printed on the book. (It was actually instructive in a recent NY Times piece decrying the reduction of discounting at Amazon to see that even academic books with very limited audiences were being sold at some discount from the publishers’ suggested price.)
With handheld devices that can check Amazon (or any other online) prices now ubiquitous, capitalizing on showrooming isn’t surprising consumer behavior, but it keeps bookstore retailers from “capturing all the value they create” as their own revenue.
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The one piece of good news from Barnes & Noble’s most recent reporting was that their stores are still throwing off cash. We don’t know how much of the margin they’re reporting comes from books as opposed to NOOKs or toys and games. But it is definitely good news that the stores, which publishers still depend heavily on for sales as well as “discovery” are apparently still healthy.
Unfortunately, it would be a surprise if things stayed that way for very long. The share of book sales that are migrating to the Internet keeps growing. Amazon’s print book sales keep going up (more slowly, of course, but everybody else’s are going down) and sales of ebooks keep rising as more and more people get the digital habit. Amazon gets 60% or more of those sales through the Kindle platform.
The term “showrooming” is becoming familiar to people in the book business to describe the retailer’s role in the consumer’s new tendency to use stores to shop but the Internet to buy. Part of what drives this effect is Amazon’s well-earned reputation for heavy discounting — it seems just about every book at Amazon sells for less than the publisher’s suggested retail and most books in stores sell at the price the publisher printed on the book. (It was actually instructive in a recent NY Times piece decrying the reduction of discounting at Amazon to see that even academic books with very limited audiences were being sold at some discount from the publishers’ suggested price.)
With handheld devices that can check Amazon (or any other online) prices now ubiquitous, capitalizing on showrooming isn’t surprising consumer behavior, but it keeps bookstore retailers from “capturing all the value they create” as their own revenue.
More
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