Barnes & Noble For Sale

Barnes & Noble put themselves up for sale yesterday. This is sad news but not really a big surprise. Ten years ago all of the news surrounding B&N had to do with them eliminating smaller independent bookstores. Now the market has turned against them.

It has all of the advantages of scale. The retailer even began flirting with e-books with its Nook, though the Amazon Kindle and Apple iPad provide fierce competition in that sphere. The company that once put small bookstores out of business through its novelty of scale might fall pretty to other innovations by failing to stay at the cusp of what's next.

When I was trying to decide on buying an e-reader, one of the things that moved me away from the Nook was my lack of confidence in B&N. I'm pretty sure that Amazon will still be around ten years ago. I'm not even a little bit confident that B&N will be.
Part of this is that people are simply more confident in online shopping than they used to be. Amazon has taken almost all of my money that B&N might otherwise have had. Some of this is convenience, but a big part of it is price. Even when I worked there, it seemed like too many items were simply overpriced. It seemed like they wanted to charge more even if that meant fewer items sold. They often seemed just on the wrong side of the demand curve.
I'll be sad if they go but nowadays I get my bookstore fix at the used bookstores. I think this is probably true of lots of people.