There is good news and bad news for stores if it does. We also don’t know if the split we see between books of narrative reading and other books will continue. There is no comparable subtraction of competition available in the future.Īnd while the migration to digital, as measured by what we can glean about what percentage of the publishers’ sales are ebooks, has slowed, we don’t know if that’s temporary. That took something like 400 big competitor locations out of the market. Is that realistic?Īmong the developments of the last five years has been the shuttering of Borders. That calculates to net closings at about triple the recent rate. The second one is “how likely is Klipper’s forecast to be right?” They had a net reduction of 5% of the stores in the past five years and he’s suggesting a further 30% reduction over the next ten. Even if BN.com keeps some of that business away from, it doesn’t help support a physical store of B&N’s or anybody else’s. Every time a store closes, online purchasing becomes the more convenient option left for some of its customers. Anecdata and intuition suggest that sales of print in stores have fallen more than that. Trachtenberg reports that sales of print books (as reported by BookScan) have declined 22% since 2008. But publishers know that shelf space at B&N has contracted considerably more than that, as space in the stores that used to be devoted to books now merchandises NOOK devices and a variety of non-book items. That’s a five percent reduction in locations. The piece reports that B&N peaked with 726 stores in 2008, which means a net reduction of 37 stores in the past five years. The first one is to please tell me how much shelf space for books will diminish, not just how many stores will be closed. That question jumps past what I think are the first two questions the WSJ story begs. On Tuesday, I got a call from a reporter who started out by asking me, in effect, “how will publishers manage with 200 fewer B&N stores in 10 years?” The college stores are, along with the NOOK device, BN.com, and the ebook business, part of “NOOK Media” which took recent investment stakes from Microsoft and Pearson.Īs usual, Cader’s overview is a helpful summation of the facts. In addition, the chain operates 674 college stores. Trachtenberg reports that the chain had 689 locations operating as of January 23. Klipper was quoted as saying that “in 10 years”, the chain would have “450 to 500 stores”. Klipper suggested only a gentle acceleration of what has been the pace of contraction for the past couple of years far into the future. On Monday, the Wall Street Journal published a story by Jeffrey Trachtenberg quoting Barnes & Noble’s retail group CEO Mitch Klipper on the company’s plans for shrinking its store footprint over the next decade.
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