Book biz.

It's flatly incredible how the book business has changed since 1980, despite the fact that readers are readers and still like the same things -- good stories well told, interesting histories, popular science, funny stuff, puzzles and games, and so on, bound within the confines of two covers. But oh how the scene has changed. 

Can it change back at all? 

In 1980, there were still plenty of independent booksellers, as well as thriving chains like Waldenbooks, Paperback Booksmith, and growing chains like Books-A-Million, Borders, and Barnes & Noble. The chains grew quickly, and soon were wiping the floor with the locals. In 1998's You've Got Mail, a Barnes & Noble stand-in called Fox & Sons Books was the ominous presence set to destroy Meg Ryan's little bookshop. 

Thirteen years later, Waldenbooks and Borders were dead and Barnes & Noble was fighting for its life, all because of a little startup in the 1990s called Amazon, which originally sold nothing but books. It seemed like in short order the brick-and-mortar bookstore would be a thing of the past.

Yesterday I read an interesting article that showed that Barnes & Noble is making a comeback. Ted Gioia, the Honest Broker, writes on Substack that 

Barnes & Noble is flourishing. After a long decline, the company is profitable and growing again—and last week announced plans to open 30 new stores. In some instances, they are taking over locations where Amazon tried (and failed) to operate bookstores.

That's exceptionally surprising, especially in the post-pandemic order-everything-online world. My wife barely goes to stores anymore, and she's not alone. Barnes & Noble seemed particularly doomed. It didn't discount as well as Amazon; also, one couldn't bundle buys from groceries and clothing and auto supplies and toys and hardware into a book order for free shipping as at Amazon. B&N has an e-reader, the Nook, like Amazon's Kindle, but the Nook was nowhere near as popular (although often considered a superior device). And yet Barnes & Noble is on the comeback trail? 

Gioia says that the secret is this: the new CEO of Barnes & Noble, James Daunt, loves books, and loves bookstores. He thinks book lovers love bookstores, too. But he did not like what he saw at Barnes & Nobles's stores, and set out to fix them. They were dull; they forced certain books in the faces of readers because of deals with publishers; they ran crap coffeeshops that were money-losers; they sold all kinds of non-book toys and things that didn't really help the bottom line. Most of all, he wanted the individual stores to sell the books that sold, not the ones that the home office said to push. To make decisions for the readers, not the suppliers. 

If you have any love for books or the book business, read the article. 

I have a couple of quibbles with the author, though, but not ones that argue his findings. First, I would note that it was not a thoughtless decision in the 1990s to open cafés in bookstores; for the first time ever, Americans were hanging around coffeeshops as if it was something good to do on one's spare time, so why not have them in to buy the reading material there? (It didn't last, though -- we're back to let's-caffeine-up-and blow, and Starbucks stores are dumps, and other coffee chains are failing.) 

Also, there is a problem with giving the employees in stores complete control over book sales, as has been seen elsewhere, and for some time -- they don't always bother with the books people want (such as, military or conservative political or history books) but rather forcibly promote the ones they think people should be reading. In other words, instead of a tin-pot dictator at the home office, you have little speech-silencing dictators in the stores themselves, who really don't care how much money is not made, as long as (for instance) that damn Jordan Peterson never sees the light of day again. Why should they? They don't own the store and they don't get a commission. So if a bunch of books from Regnery get "damaged in shipping" and have to be sent back at the publisher's dime, well, whoopsie! Don't have what you want in stock? Hey, you should be reading Ta-Nehisi Coates anyway.

And yet, Daunt's plan is almost magical in a way, because it relies on the last thing most business people genuinely consider anymore:

. . . I almost hate to say it, because the lesson is so simple.

If you want to sell music, you must love those songs. If you want to succeed in journalism, you must love those newspapers. If you want to succeed in movies, you must love the cinema. 

But this kind of love is rare nowadays. I often see record labels promote new artists for all sorts of gimmicky reasons—even labels I once trusted such as Deutsche Grammophon or Concord. I’ve come to doubt whether the people in charge really love the music.

Maybe they once did, but at some point they lost faith in the redemptive power of songs. That’s the only explanation I can give for what they’re doing. Instead they put their faith in something else—maybe a brand licensing deal, or a fashion line tie-in, or a human interest story. Or maybe they just decided that money talks, and began making creative decisions based on discounted cash flow projections.

Books-A-Million is still sticking with the old B&N type marketing, but they've always relied on volume and discounting over experience and culture. It will be interesting to see which proves more successful in the long run -- but I'd back Daunt.

When you hear from people in finance, it's about crunching the numbers, rounds of fund-raising, influencers, disruptors, and creative destruction, not being in love with the business and what's on sale. It's how they plan to get rich in five or ten years, not how they plan to have a thriving business. It's why publishers hardly have backlists anymore, or really anything but a swirling mass of barely promoted books with a few heavily promoted titles keeping the works afloat. It's amazing anyone in the book business has survived to this point with this business plan. The movie business is the same way, though -- cookie-cutter blockbusters and a bunch of homework that wins trophies but no one wants to watch. We see how well that model is working now.

Maybe what we need is more love and less numbers. Because, and I hate to break it to the smart money guys, everything is failing anyway, and the rest looks like houses of cards. Stop trying to be the smartest dweeb in the room, and start being actual human beings again.