The future of Barnes & Noble

Some of you have been asking my opinion regarding new Barnes & Noble CEO James Daunt’s plan for the struggling book retailer.

Daunt plans to make B&N stores stripped-down versions of what they currently are. The model here is the airport bookstore on one hand, the local, neighborhood bookstore on the other.

In other words, small bookstores that carry about the same inventory as the book section of the nearest Walmart, Costco, or Kroger.

So why do you even need a bookstore, if Walmart already stocks about the same number of books? 

Daunt is British, and this might be a viable strategy for the British retail market, which is decades behind that of the United States.

It isn’t a winning strategy for the US, where Amazon dominates by virtue of its wide selection, low prices, and economies of scale.

Daunt clearly has no plan to compete with Amazon. He plans to compete with…small neighborhood bookstores that have already gone out of business in most of the U.S.

Forgive me if I’m underwhelmed.

‘Revolutionary Ghosts’ $0.99 sale: update

Thanks to everyone who purchased the book  yesterday.  I’ll leave it at 99 cents throughout today, and reset it to the usual ($3.99) price tomorrow.

Also, a reminder that the book is always free in Kindle Unlimited.

If you are not a member of Kindle Unlimited, check out the free trial.

The return of cassettes

Cassettes Are Back, and It’s Not About the Music

I wouldn’t have expected this one.

I remember cassettes well, of course. (I even owned a few 8-tracks, as they were being phased out, in the very early 1980s.)

There are a lot of things that I miss about the last century, but the hissing, easily tangled audiocassette is not one of them. (That and typewriter correction fluid.)

As the above-linked article states, the big selling point of the cassette was its distinction as the most portable audio format, under the technological constraints we faced in the 1980s. No one loved them for their sound, or their reliability.