Dear Barnes & Noble: "You've Got Mail."
I read a blog on the Washington Post. It pretended to be a letter to Barnes & Noble. It pleaded with the firm not to close any more bookstores. The firm plans to close a third of them. The blog is posted here.
Here is my letter.
Dear Barnes & Noble.
I recently read that you plan to close a third of your stores over the next few years. I think you are making a big mistake. You should close all of them sometime over the next couple of months.
Let me explain why. Your marketing model is doomed. As sure as the small bookstore in You've Got Mail was doomed when the big superstore opened down the block, you are doomed because Amazon is better.
Amazon is not a little better. It is not marginally better. It is overwhelmingly better. You do not have a chance of surviving its competition by keeping large physical stores stocked with unsalable books on overloaded shelves. Your only possibility of surviving Amazon's competition is to get people to buy their books by using your Nook device. I think this marketing ploy will fail, but at least it has an outside possibility of working. You are quite correct in trying to persuade all of your existing store shoppers to switch to Nook. But that means they must stop coming into your stores.
Let me explain my situation. I like books. Over the years, I have bought maybe 14,000 of them. I keep them on bookshelves. They fill a large room. In the good old days, I would sometimes go to a Barnes & Noble store and buy a few books, usually cheap reprints that your company produced, or books in the "marked-down books" section. I rarely bought a retail book from you, because I buy bargains.
I used to shop at used book stores, because I would see a book and figure I would never see it again. So, I bought it. All this has changed with Amazon. Used books are online by the dozens per title, arranged from cheapest (my preference) to highest (which probably won't sell).
I can buy the books that I want, used, if they are in good condition, which the sellers say are: "good," "like new," "very good," and "acceptable." I pay a couple of dollars, plus $3.99 shipping. They are delivered to my door via UPS within a couple of days. I do not have to get into a car and drive to your store. I do not have to wander down your aisles, looking for the book I want. You do not sell many used books, and I buy mostly used books.
I do not care about new books. I care about books that I want to read. How do I know if I want to read a book? Usually, I want to see some book reviews first. So, I read Amazon reviews. Sometimes there are dozens of reviews. I read some five-star reviews, and I read a few of the one-star reviews. I want to see why people who hated a book hated it. Maybe I agree with them. Usually, I find that the people who write one-star reviews are blithering idiots, and the people who write five-star reviews are very thoughtful. So, I usually buy the book.
I want save time, which is my most precious resource. Amazon saves me time. I buy them at huge discounts, because I buy books used. Amazon saves me money. I buy them only after reading a few reviews, which is a much better use of my time than driving to your bookstore.
I do not pay for what I do not want, and what I do not want is a gigantic store which is 99% filled with books that I do not want. In other words, I do not pay for real estate that I do not use. Why should I? I do not have to anymore. I buy from Amazon.
Amazon also lists other books that are related to the book I am looking for. This means that I may find a couple of other books related to the topic. If I buy three used books for under $10 apiece, including shipping, that is about three times better than buying one new book from you for $29.95, plus local sales tax. I have less risk, because I read book reviews for all three books. I would rather spend time reading book reviews than driving to your store. It is a far better use of my time. And, when it is over, I will own three books instead of one. I am a book lover. I would rather own three used books than one new one, which I will mark up.
How can you possibly compete with this? Obviously, you cannot. You can no more compete with Amazon than the little mom-and-pop bookstore could compete with you two decades ago. Times have changed, and you will have to change, too. You will probably have to change in the same way that mom-and-pop bookstores changed. You will close the stores. You will change your business model. And, in all likelihood, you will still go the way of Borders.
I do not own a Nook, and I probably never will. I own an Amazon Kindle, and I hate it. I buy physical books online, because I read books in my lap. I read books that I can mark up.
You could probably convince me to read digital books, as long as I could use Evernote to store passages in the book that I am interested in preserving. So far, neither Kindle nor Nook allows me to do this easily. If I could retrieve a passage in a book, on a word-for-word basis, with the page number of the book as it appeared in the printed version, and this storage program also allowed me to use keywords to help my memory retrieve the passage, I would probably use a Kindle or a Nook. My memory is my problem. Anything that will enable me to make better use of my time in reading, which means better use of my failing memory, I would regard as a major breakthrough. I would change my reading habits to take advantage of this. But, so far, the only way I can do this easily is to read a PDF book online, using a mouse to help me extract a passage and post it on Evernote using its marvelous Clipper feature. This costs me nothing. Evernote is free. You can see instructional videos on this free service here: //www.garynorth.com/public/department154.cfm. This is a major digital breakthrough, and when digital books finally come to grips with the importance of this breakthrough, I will switch to digital books.
There is not much of a chance that you are going to get me to come into a Barnes & Noble store anytime soon. It was nice while it lasted, but it's all over.
So, let me congratulate you for your halfway-house decision. You are at least talking about shutting down a third of your bookstores. You should shut down all of them, and you should do it as soon as you have enough people buying books digitally to justify closing all physical doors. You are probably going to have to shut down the entire chain before Nook enables you to stay in business. I think you are going the way of the mom-and-pop stores that you bankrupted back when people still went to see Meg Ryan movies.
Keep up the good work. Keep closing those stores. Your customers are speaking: "Close these stores." They are speaking with their money. They are buying from Amazon. Listen to them. Soon. You are running out of time.