B&N reminds me of Sears. Sears was the catalog sales company for decades. But they couldn't understand that the internet was the new way to do catalog sales. They instead focused on their brick and mortar stores, discontinued their catalog, and never had a functional website. They could have killed Amazon while it was still only books and cds.
But of course that didn't happen. Instead Amazon became the online retailer and is even threatening Walmart.
Like you said BN and it's nook could have easily out paced the kindle. However large stagnant companies don't innovate and eventually fail or become niche market companies. Plus if you've been in a BN store recently they don't sell books, they're trying to put Spencer gifts put of business instead.
1) Sears cancelled their catalogue BEFORE the Internet. Their last catalogue went out in 1993. The Internet didn't explode w HTML and the Netscape browser until 1995. Their catalogue had been unprofitable for years before they pulled the plug so it "seemed" like a good idea at the time. The real problem was that every time they sent their catalogue to customers, they built their mailing list for direct marketing sales as well as the ability to use their customers' data both internally to identify and predict trends and externally. (Yes, a lot of junk mail was from Sears selling their list.)
2) Simultaneously, Sears tried to change their target market. Sears was known by MEN as the place to go for tools (Craftsman) and appliances. Instead, Sears changed their marketing to WOMEN with their "Softer Side of Sears" campaign emphasizing their clothing line. More women bought clothes in-store. Fewer men bought tools and appliances via mail order.
3) The nail in the coffin was when Sears bought K-Mart and both sank against Wal-Mart (cheap retail) and Amazon (online) together.
I had a B&N membership and still do, I think. I would have loved it if B&N had done this.
Interesting story. I have published two novels and both of them are for sale at B&N in Ebook and Paperback. B&N has already ordered paperbacks from the printers while Amazon has the Ebook, but hasn't ordered the paperbacks.
Great ideas, Bone - thought something similar back-in-the-day - but there was one stumbling block to it: The publishers. Sellers only have so much control over what they can sell / give away, and those greedy bastards on the publishing side were NEVER going to allow a 'two for one' option. They generally set the prices on ebooks, so without their involvement it never had a shot of taking off.
Once again, corporate publishers (be they of books, songs, or films) hinder genuine progress and artistic expansion in the name of obscene profits. The paradigm HAS to change, IMO...
I remember movies anywhere and I have a relative with an absolutely massive collection of Blue Rays and a huge digital library. But he is the only person I know who did this. Why do you think books would have done better than movies in this space?
While it seems like a simple request, but what you were really asking B&N to do is to invest billions in a cloud computing infrastructure to store every book they ever sold as well as give away the manpower of scanning the books into the cloud with never an extra penny of increased profit.
Cloud computing was not a thing or recognized concept back in the day. AWS stands as its own profit center for Amazon as well as being used internally.
The key power of Amazon's book business is Books-On-Demand. Writers upload their PDF manuscript to Amazon and offer the book to sell. The book is never printed until the sale is made. In this way, Amazon gets the digital for free from the author for the Kindle tie-in / customers get the physical book which no longer has physical storage limitations for Amazon. Win-Win.
What's "the quarterly"? What does "the quarterly" have to do with racing? Here in Indiana, we have the Indy 500. Road track folks hate oval races. Is this a tribal thing? It's happened before that the racer ahead is paying so close attention to the car directly behind him to prevent the pass that he ignores the guy behind him (his teammate) which is able to slide on by both of them.
What's obvious to you isn't obvious to everyone else. Kodak invented digital cameras ... then shelved it to preserve film sales. Blockbuster had the chance to buy RedBox and NetFlix ... and declined. Personally, I HATE the cloud. I store everything locally and would delete my Google Dropbox if I could. The cloud is a security / privacy disaster. Not only is this a difference in technology, but there's also a difference in visions of the world: technocratic vs libertarian. We were promised a libertarian utopia, but they're building a technocratic dystopia.
One issue is that the market was willing to give these new online companies a ton of cash they wouldn't give BN. I'm not saying BN couldn't have still won. But remember people were throwing gobs of money at Amazon that BN simply didn't have access to.
In fact I remember the day 1998-ish when Jeff Bezos became worth more personally than BN was worth as a company. I worked at a brokerage. Everyone in my office was laughing at the absudity but unable to deny the stock price. This is when Amazon only sold books and (I think) still had far less sales than BN.
B&N reminds me of Sears. Sears was the catalog sales company for decades. But they couldn't understand that the internet was the new way to do catalog sales. They instead focused on their brick and mortar stores, discontinued their catalog, and never had a functional website. They could have killed Amazon while it was still only books and cds.
But of course that didn't happen. Instead Amazon became the online retailer and is even threatening Walmart.
Like you said BN and it's nook could have easily out paced the kindle. However large stagnant companies don't innovate and eventually fail or become niche market companies. Plus if you've been in a BN store recently they don't sell books, they're trying to put Spencer gifts put of business instead.
1) Sears cancelled their catalogue BEFORE the Internet. Their last catalogue went out in 1993. The Internet didn't explode w HTML and the Netscape browser until 1995. Their catalogue had been unprofitable for years before they pulled the plug so it "seemed" like a good idea at the time. The real problem was that every time they sent their catalogue to customers, they built their mailing list for direct marketing sales as well as the ability to use their customers' data both internally to identify and predict trends and externally. (Yes, a lot of junk mail was from Sears selling their list.)
2) Simultaneously, Sears tried to change their target market. Sears was known by MEN as the place to go for tools (Craftsman) and appliances. Instead, Sears changed their marketing to WOMEN with their "Softer Side of Sears" campaign emphasizing their clothing line. More women bought clothes in-store. Fewer men bought tools and appliances via mail order.
3) The nail in the coffin was when Sears bought K-Mart and both sank against Wal-Mart (cheap retail) and Amazon (online) together.
I had a B&N membership and still do, I think. I would have loved it if B&N had done this.
Interesting story. I have published two novels and both of them are for sale at B&N in Ebook and Paperback. B&N has already ordered paperbacks from the printers while Amazon has the Ebook, but hasn't ordered the paperbacks.
Great ideas, Bone - thought something similar back-in-the-day - but there was one stumbling block to it: The publishers. Sellers only have so much control over what they can sell / give away, and those greedy bastards on the publishing side were NEVER going to allow a 'two for one' option. They generally set the prices on ebooks, so without their involvement it never had a shot of taking off.
Once again, corporate publishers (be they of books, songs, or films) hinder genuine progress and artistic expansion in the name of obscene profits. The paradigm HAS to change, IMO...
I remember movies anywhere and I have a relative with an absolutely massive collection of Blue Rays and a huge digital library. But he is the only person I know who did this. Why do you think books would have done better than movies in this space?
While it seems like a simple request, but what you were really asking B&N to do is to invest billions in a cloud computing infrastructure to store every book they ever sold as well as give away the manpower of scanning the books into the cloud with never an extra penny of increased profit.
Cloud computing was not a thing or recognized concept back in the day. AWS stands as its own profit center for Amazon as well as being used internally.
The key power of Amazon's book business is Books-On-Demand. Writers upload their PDF manuscript to Amazon and offer the book to sell. The book is never printed until the sale is made. In this way, Amazon gets the digital for free from the author for the Kindle tie-in / customers get the physical book which no longer has physical storage limitations for Amazon. Win-Win.
What's "the quarterly"? What does "the quarterly" have to do with racing? Here in Indiana, we have the Indy 500. Road track folks hate oval races. Is this a tribal thing? It's happened before that the racer ahead is paying so close attention to the car directly behind him to prevent the pass that he ignores the guy behind him (his teammate) which is able to slide on by both of them.
What's obvious to you isn't obvious to everyone else. Kodak invented digital cameras ... then shelved it to preserve film sales. Blockbuster had the chance to buy RedBox and NetFlix ... and declined. Personally, I HATE the cloud. I store everything locally and would delete my Google Dropbox if I could. The cloud is a security / privacy disaster. Not only is this a difference in technology, but there's also a difference in visions of the world: technocratic vs libertarian. We were promised a libertarian utopia, but they're building a technocratic dystopia.
One issue is that the market was willing to give these new online companies a ton of cash they wouldn't give BN. I'm not saying BN couldn't have still won. But remember people were throwing gobs of money at Amazon that BN simply didn't have access to.
In fact I remember the day 1998-ish when Jeff Bezos became worth more personally than BN was worth as a company. I worked at a brokerage. Everyone in my office was laughing at the absudity but unable to deny the stock price. This is when Amazon only sold books and (I think) still had far less sales than BN.