I imagine Barnes & Noble could become a much more interesting place just by letting any staff member who wants to have free reign over their own end cap. The least common denominator, barely-more-interesting-than-what-Amazon's-adventures-with-linear-algebra-can-manage spreads that they place on their end caps right now aren't doing it for anyone.

This is true for you and other discerning readers. A lot of people just want the new Jack Reacher. I doubt there is enough volume or profitability here but who knows.

Interestingly, the only department to actually make money in B&N in the last few years, is the board game section. I think this is how they win. Being more of a general edutainment destination and focusing on kids stuff. 6 page kids picture books cost $7. Parents and grandparents will drop lots on "smart" toys and gifts for kids. I'd be all in on this, expanding with more play area and story times making it a fun place to visit. They already smartly dropped CDs as they have to ability to compete there except maybe to have new releases at the register as an impulse purchases but streaming mostly killed that.

> This is true for you and other discerning readers. A lot of people just want the new Jack Reacher.

I don't know what the experience is in the US, but in the UK, Waterstones' insight has been that it's not worth competing for those customers. They'll just buy the new Jack Reacher from a supermarket or, at best, WH Smiths (the stationery store). To be price-competitive with the supermarkets, you have to discount so heavily that you'll lose money on every sale anyway.

Waterstones have targeted the discerning reader and are doing well at it. This appears to be an attempt to replicate Waterstones in the US.

Our local B&N does book readings for kids a couple times a week. I imagine most do. This drives a lot of kids & parents in. The kids play with a train & do arts & crafts afterwards. Everyone gets a coupon for Starbucks & they typically either have a treat or buy a book before they leave.

In a lot of ways B&N is like an additional public library where you can buy the books & games or just browse. I think that's what makes it different than Amazon. I also think that's their closer competition.

Very interesting point about board games. Thanks.

I worked at Starbucks in Store Planning while they were trying to figure out how to makes their stores be a "third place" (early 1990s). Small stages for unplugged sets. Fire places. Big tables for study groups.

I'm just a computer guy, but I always felt Starbuck's merchandising strategy sabotaged those efforts.

WotC had great success for a short while as board gaming host, destination. Mox, the largest I know of today, seems to be successful. https://www.moxboardinghouse.com

I would love to see Barnes & Noble pivoting to become a third place. Especially something kid friendly. (My kid was super into Pokemon.)

Basically a public library vibe with a cafe, that also sells some stuff, located in a mall.

Way back in the day, this was ultimately why my high school friends and I went from frequenting Barnes & Noble to frequenting Borders. B&N had the overall nicer environment and a better book selection, but Borders had a halfway decent café. That made going there a better social event: We could grab a table and some coffees and sit around and chat. Anyone who wanted to spend a while browsing the books could do so without feeling hurried by the people who didn't, because they had somewhere reasonable to sit and hang out.

It's a bit like that with my favorite indie bookstore, too. It's a haul for me to get there, but still occasionally schlep myself over there when I have an afternoon to myself, because I enjoy the experience of buying a new book and then sitting down to start reading it over a glass of wine in their café.

B&N could be that now, but they would need to spruce up their café. As it is, it's like an airport coffee shop, only even more unpleasant.

I'm not sure this model scales if you have all the rental, staffing, and admin costs of a giant bookshop next to your cafe.

Indies can make it work because their costs are relatively small, and if they're good local people get attached to them.

Waterstones in the UK can just about make it work, because they choose not-too-large middle class locations and design their interiors to match.

B&N don't seem to have understood the appeal of a cozy vibe. The stores always feel like a book warehouse that's trying to impress you with its sheer scale rather than somewhere you can chill on your own terms.

So it's hard to imagine the same model working for a big corporate paying for big box/mall floor space.

Interesting. I bought two games there this past Christmas. They had them- Scrabble, which I went there to get, and some board game based on the movie Jaws that I had never heard of. So I impulse-bought a board game there, and I'm not a board-game guy.

There is only one physical bookstore I go to anymore, and it's for exactly the same reason. The walls are positively stuffed with books. Nothing can beat Amazon for speedy search. If I know exactly what I want, that's where I'm going. But that feeling of browsing around and coming home with a bag full of books you'd never have thought of, or of hanging out in a community of readers, is not replicable online. I think both curation/browsing and creating hangouts (really good coffee or whatever) are ways physical stores can still compete.

I believe that selection is the reason why Danish book stores struggle. They try to present the same best sellers as the super markets, I assume because it's a safe bet.

At the same time I'm pretty much forced to buy from Amazon and buy books in English, because only the most popular books are translated, and primarily fiction. I don't get the impression that the bookstore really care to sell a larger selection of books, just more copies for the same 20 best sellers.

Not just as “safe bet” - margins are higher on new hardbacks.

I wish we were more like the UK.. there the hardcover, trade and paperback editions all ship at the same time unlike here where you might have to wait a year for the paperback.

I'm in the UK and I don't think that's generally true. You usually have to wait quite a while for the paperback to be released after the hardback is out. Sometimes a year. A pain sometimes but usually something I don't mind living with, as I am never short of things to read. And if the book is good, I might buy the hardback.

I've never known it to be true. The industry staggers the editions - i.e. makes readers wait - precisely because there are much bigger margins on hardbacks and trade paperbacks, so they sell first to the enthusiasts and fans who must have the latest X now, and/or want a collectable.

should have checked my facts. :-)

For me, no formal metric can capture what I get out of buying books at an independent book shop. I feel like I'm trading with an old currency, only the books I own and buy are a reflection of my own character, or even soul.

When I lend or trade a book with a friend, it's a transaction using those same fragments of our souls and we grow slightly closer. We now have a shared experience in those books and each understand each other's view of the world a little better.

Reading might be a largely solitary experience, but the passing of a book from one pair of hands to another achieves a communication far beyond reading a review or even a personal recommendation. Somehow the mass of the book itself carries with it a greater weight to the recommendation.

One main perk of amazon or online is the reviews. Now I don't just go by review alone (I have read some 3/5 books that I really enjoyed), but they definitely put more weight on my decision than looking at covers or spine of books.

Maybe, Amazon is better at it than you may think, and you are in fact, judging books by their cover.

I hate that phrase because it's completely wrong. The cover (including the title) is absolutely a decent tell of the subject and quality of a book. It's not perfect, but it's the only thing to go by.

Along the same lines, app icons are a fantastic way of judging whether an app is worth downloading from the the play store. Crappy icons pretty much always indicate a crappy app, in my experience, and can immediately be rejected. A polished icon doesn't necessarily mean the app is good though, just that it's worth taking a closer look at.