Remember just a couple of years ago when it was timely and hip to lament the loss of hundreds if not thousands of small, independent bookstores that were being crushed by the big box mega-purveyors like Barnes & Noble and Borders? Similar to the ire that Walmart tends to engender in some communities, the loss of long-established and local businesses that simply cannot compete with the purchasing power, time-proven strategies, and ruthless execution of many of the big chains, makes most of us want to root for the little guys. Well, at least we like to say we are rooting for the little guys, but once we got a taste of the massive in-store book selection, lower prices, on-premise cafes, and free wifi, well, like I said, we like to say we are rooting for the little guy.
It's a niche
Heck, there was even a big Hollywood feature film made not that long ago that starred Tom Hanks and his very B&N like giant forcing poor Meg Ryan's cuddly little bookstore on the corner out of business.
Fast forward only a few years and the retail book industry looks almost nothing at all like it did when Meg and Tom were flirting by email at night and trying to destroy each other's business by day. Borders is bankrupt, and Barnes & Noble too is likely in the early stages in a battle for its own survival, under increasing pressure primarily from Amazon.com and its Kindle ecosystem. B&N has been able to survive and compete this long where Borders could not, mainly due to its Nook e-reader, and its commitment and willingness to take at least some of the fight to Amazon.
But today for many book lovers, Barnes & Noble represents in some ways the last stand for not just a retail model, but for the idea of the printed book at all. If you think about the town where you live, if the closest B&N were to close ip shop, just exactly where would you shop for real, actual printed books? Forgetting for a moment that walking into a large B&N it might be actually hard to locate any books, as they are often obscured by the Nook demonstration area, the kids' toy section, the coffee shop, and the thousands of other things in a B&N that are not books. Where I live, there are two B&N's within about 10 miles, and I can't think of another place anywhere that sells real live printed books.
So for those that cling to the almost prosaic notion of browsing through the shelves, picking up and touching the books, paging through the images of a $125 coffee-table art book that no one ever would buy, if the B&N goes, well, all of that likely goes with it. Maybe something else would come to fill in that void, in the larger cities something probably would, but for many other places book buying would almost certainly become an 100% virtual proposition.
And that might not be a big issue at all, who knows. But for me the interesting thing is how through all this change and technological progress in e-commerce and e-readers that the massive, powerful, and formerly evil megastore like B&N has come full circle to represent all that used to be good and nostalgic about the book buying experience. B&N has gone from being the malicious, heartless competitor to the underdog that many people who love physical books are rooting for.
It's really hard to pull off that kind of corporate reputation transformation, even if you wanted to. Once evil, always evil is more typical. Although I suspect B&N would have been happy to continue laying waste to little shops all over the world, evil or not.
What do you think - would you care if there were no more physical bookstores?
Have a Great Weekend!