Barnes & Noble forgets it has an online business

by Libby Sternberg

First came the digital revolution with Amazon leading the charge. No longer did readers have to browse bricks and mortar bookstores looking for a specific read. Amazon brought it to their fingertips.

Then Amazon pushed the revolution farther still when they realized their customer base included writers and not just readers. The bookselling behemoth reached out to writers, making it easy for authors to self-publish and reach readers on their own without a publisher middleman, and offering them royalty deals no publisher would ever dream of handing over to a lowly scribe.

But what about print? Authors love the feel and smell of a print book. Amazon had that covered, too. Through their CreateSpace services, authors can easily upload their manuscripts, even design a cover (or contract with Amazon's services for one) and, voila, within an amazingly short period of time--nothing at all close to the year-long wait most authors face from signing a publishing contract through til actual publication--a print book is in the writer's hand.

These innovations have also made it much easier for small publishers, such as Istoria, to get up and running, securing a boutique position in the publishing marketplace.

Amazon's innovations have been applauded by everyone in the industry.

Uh, no, scratch that. Actually, several of the Big Six (make that Big Five now) publishers allegedly colluded with Apple to keep ebook prices higher than Amazon wanted. In the ensuing legal battle, Amazon was treated like the Big Bad Evil Corporation Out to Destroy All that Is Good and Holy about Books (BBECODAIGHB, for short).

Speaking of BBECODAIGHB's, though, one of them used to be Borders.. Remember Borders--the Big Box bookstore everyone loathed for quite some time, seeing in it portents of the End of Bookselling as we know it? Funny how that attitude changed when Borders went belly up. Then, everyone was mourning the loss of this bookselling giant.

Now the only bookselling giant on the block is Barnes & Noble. B&N got into the digital field with the Nook (see this post about a marketing opportunity the Nook missed), but they've not embraced the other parts of the digital revolution as nimbly as Amazon.

And the latest news from the B&N front is this: they're limiting Simon & Schuster titles in their store because the publisher won't dance to their tune on ebook discounting and "costs associated with in-store promotions," according to a Wall Street Journal article today.  In-store promotions, by the way, include publishers paying for where books are displayed. Don't assume when you go in a bookstore that the managers and staff choose which books go on the tables that catch your eye. Publishers pay for that in-store real estate.

Anyway, according to the article, B&N "worries that consumers use its stores as 'showrooms' to find titles that they then order online at a discounted price."

Sure would be helpful if B&N also had an online business, too, wouldn't it? Then customers who can't find books in their stores could order a book through the B&N online service. They could have a short and snappy URL, too. Oh, something like, maybe, www.BN.com? Just sayin'....



The cheese stands alone

Sarcasm aside, if Barnes & Noble is worried about losing customers to online retailers who can offer discounts, why doesn't B&N beat those etailers to the punch? When you walk in the door to a Barnes & Noble store, you should be walking in the door to their entire inventory, whether it's in the physical store or online.

Okay, for free, B&N, here are some ideas:

In every store, vigorously promote this slogan: Can't find it on our store shelves? Buy it on our eshelves! 

And then place computer screens around the store -- how about at the end of every other bookshelf?  And next to those screens (which are only linked to the BN.com website, of course) place coupons with discount codes for various genres. Mix it up, changing the discounts from week to week. It will draw folks in to see what kind of deal they can get the next time they come in. Even if some folks think they can get a better deal elsewhere, there is nothing like taking care of a purchase when you're thinking of it.

Barnes & Noble now stands virtually alone as the one bricks-and-mortar Big Box bookstore in the U.S. That's a tremendous advantage. They should stop sniping at publishers and competitors and start thinking about how they can use their advantage to attract customers to their physical and online stores.
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Libby Sternberg is a novelist and editor-in-chief of Istoria Books.
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Nook misses its niche

by Libby Sternberg

The news in the publishing world is that Barnes & Noble's tablet/e-reader, the Nook, didn't fare so well sales-wise this past year.

According to an article in the Wall Street Journal last Friday, "Nook revenue plunged 26 % to $316 million for the fiscal third quarter ended Jan. 26 and the segment posted a larger loss." 

While Nook languishes, profits have improved at its retail stores business. In other words, folks might not be buying Nooks, but they are buying books.

A day before the negative Nook news appeared, another story circulated: B&N's former owner and now chairman and largest shareholder, Leonard Riggio, wants to buy the company's retail assets. This means the Nook side of the business would likely be separated from the general retail side.

This represents something of an about-face for Mr. Riggio, who introduced the new B&N CEO William Lynch three years ago by saying the chain needed to be "more than a retail bookseller." Mr. Lynch had come from a tech background, and, according to news reports, spent "almost all of his time" on the digital side of B&N's business.

Now it appears that time was ill-spent. Nook never managed to capture the e-reading public's fancy in the same way the Kindle has, or even the way the iPad and its newest iteration, the iPad mini, has.

Why not? The Nook is a solid e-reading device. Although I'm in the Kindle camp, a close relative has a Nook tablet, a gift she received about a year ago. She checks her email on it and surfs the web when traveling. And, oh, yeah, she can read books on it, too.

She's not a techie--neither am I--so I have no first-person analysis of the relative advantages and disadvantages of Nook vs. Kindle vs. iPad (another close relative owns one of the latter--and asked for a Kindle as a gift within a few months after discovering that reading ebooks on an iPad in bright sunlight is a bear).

Therein, however, lies an advantage for the Nook that has never been exploited, certainly not in any promotions I've seen. If anything, after seeing a Nook ad, it's hard to remember if it was for Nook or Kindle.

The advantage for my relative with the Nook was this--she's no techie, as noted above, so when she went to set up the device, she immediately hit the brick wall of tech blah-blah-blah, the usernames, the passwords, the configure-this and download-that. She has little patience for all that. So, she took herself and her Nook to the nearest Barnes & Noble store where a real-live person cheerfully helped her set it up. A real live person--not a name at the end of an email or a voice on the other end of a phone! She loved this aspect of owning a Nook. Amazon's customer service might be good, but nothing beats talking to someone face-to-face.

So, my question is: how did Nook miss this promotional niche? They certainly used up a bunch of precious store real estate on Nook displays. Why didn't they market the fact that while Amazon's Kindle does everything a Nook does, Nook has real people to talk to when you have questions, problems or even suggestions. People who happen to be in their...stores. Smiling at you. Waiting to talk. And, you might buy some print books while you're there.

That seems to me a tremendous marketing advantage Barnes & Noble never even mentioned, let alone exploited.

Mr. Lynch might have missed the proverbial forest for the trees. He didn't see the vast opportunity Nook had to attract non-techies (the majority of folks who probably use these devices) to his product.

But who am I to suggest what captains of industry should do? Just a lowly editor who likes to occasionally mouth off on what's wrong with this business or that one.

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Libby Sternberg is editor-in-chief of Istoria Books. She is also an author.

MiniReads

by Hannah Sternberg

I've recently been in the habit of reading poetry on the Metro. My commute is about twenty minutes of training bracketed by ten-minute walks. The first walk jogs my brain awake; the second walk I usually spend running into things while furiously scanning my BlackBerry to discover what I'm already missing at work; and the Metro ride in between is a brief moment of every day when I cannot walk, and am cut off from all cell signals--I have no choice but to read. Not that I would choose anything else for that moment.

At work, I'm immured in policy papers and current affairs books. At home in the evening, I play a desperate game of catch-up among piles of history books ("I always wanted to know more about that..."). But the Metro ride, I've turned into a moment of reflection, a brief pause on information-gathering just as it's a brief pause on walking and telecommunication. It started with the Spoon River Anthology by Edgar Lee Masters; I determined to read it through, as I'd promised I'd lend it to a friend when I was done. Now Walt Whitman soothes my longing for lilacs. Maybe this spring will bring the antidote to my frequent complaint, "I wish I'd read more Keats..."

It also made me realize that ePublishing is a unique opportunity to bring out new works in shorter formats, whether they're poems, short stories or novellas. The little guys often get short shrift in the publishing world. Poetry has been consigned to the university presses and back corners of bookstores, and short stories are often anthologized generically, with successful single-author collections only issuing from previously well-known writers of full-length novels. Novellas are rare; I secretly suspect publishers think people will feel ripped off if they pay trade paperback prices for a tiny book.

Short works are among my major inspirations as a writer. The poetry of E E Cummings floated me through the first draft of my first novel. More recently, the short stories of John Cheever and the novellas of J. D. Salinger electrify my imagination and my intellect. There's nothing small about the content of these small works. But would they have been published today, outside of the most academically pretentious presses, those that see the value of a work in its uniqueness of form, rather than its beauty, power or insight? Would today's publishers have turned them away on the basis of length alone? There's no way of knowing, but when's the last time you saw a new novella on the table at the front of the bookstore?

At Istoria, I hope to seek out new examples of the beauty, storytelling and insight possible in short forms, especially the novella, the prose poem and the story collection. If you're querying a work of this kind, be sure to follow our submission guidelines, but feel free to put "Attn Hannah" in the subject line if you think it's a work I'd be particularly interested in. I look forward to exploring your short fiction offerings!

Friends of Fiction

by Hannah Sternberg

"I never read fiction anymore. The last time I read a novel, I was in school."

I hear that from a lot of my friends. I'm sure you do too. We're all busy, and with the internet enabling many of us to work from home, work increasingly encroaches on precious reading time. On top of that, many of us spend our free time reading to improve our professional position, keep up with current events, or pursue an interest in that topic we wish we'd taken a class on when we'd had the chance. I work in media and public policy, and I confess that I've devoted large amounts of my supposedly-free time to catching up on the latest news analysis on the day's hot story, or hunkering down with weighty history or philosophy books to fill in the context of situations I'm less familiar with.

Don't get me wrong. I love to learn--my heart goes pitter patter when my eyes scan Amazon's history recommendations. I have a bad habit of collecting foreign language dictionaries (so far, my most unusual is a lexicon of ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics). And with the complete works of Aristotle available, free of charge and instantaneously on my Kindle--don't get me started.

But I've noticed another current in some of my friends' remarks. "I don't have time for fiction. There's too much to learn." "I just don't find fiction as interesting as stuff that actually happened." "My class discussions just ruined fiction-reading for me."

I'd counter them by saying, You just aren't reading the right fiction.

I find a lot of people get fed up with the tired offerings of so many of the major publishers that are just trying to piggyback on someone else's trendy concept. Others find too much pretension and too little insight in the current "upmarket" or literary fiction offerings. Still others were so weary of their professors' over-analysis that they forgot how simply moving a good story can be.

To these, I'd say: reading nothing but nonfiction is like reading only the news reports without touching the analysis or opinion. You'll learn a lot, but you'll be missing a critical element: the debate, the contextualization, the connections. Fiction is like an editorial on the human condition. And, like a good editorial, good fiction combines top-of-the-line reporting (observation of the world) with thought-provoking insight. Just as much can be learned from reading good fiction as can be learned from reading history, philosophy, and a truckload of self-help books combined.

Giving my Kindle a click-through now, I find, in various states of partial completion: Thomas Paine; George Eliot; Alexis de Tocqueville; Jane Austen; the Old Testament; Aristotle; a short story collection by David Foster Wallace; J. R. R. Tolkein; my mom, Libby Sternberg's mysery novel, Death is the Cool Night; and a practical guide to daily life with Asperger's Syndrome (research for a novel).

I can say earnestly that I've learned from all of these books, not just the nonfiction ones. Sure, plenty of fiction is mindless escapism. But a good yarn can--and should--be both entertaining and (brace yourself for an over-used word) enlightening. Excitement and insight don't have to be mutually exclusive.

I suppose this is part of the philosophy that inspired me and my parents to start up Istoria--to show readers once again that there's more to fiction than tired genre-mongering or pretentious wheezing. If you long for our kind of fiction too, keep your eyes on Istoria Books. And if you're just as passionate as we are about writing that kind of fiction, don't leave without taking a look at our submission guidelines.

Kindle Peering

I confess.

I'm a book spy.

What avid reader isn't? When I'm on the Metro, though I may be squashed so tightly I can't free a hand to fish out my book and hold it in front of me (or, at least, not without elbowing a few little old ladies in the face, a price other riders have found worth paying), I can still take pleasure looking down the car at those privileged to sit, and peer over their shoulders to see what they're reading. I can invent games, awarding points for the number of Stieg Larssons in attendance. My heart always jumps a little when I see one of my abiding loves, like Jane Eyre. Some people read their morning prayers on the Metro, in English, Arabic or Hebrew. In my non-Istoria job, I work in media and public relations--and in Washington, DC, it's always interesting to see what paper or magazine someone chooses to read.

Once, when I was a teenager and my family took a trip to the beach together, my mom (Istoria co-founder Libby Sternberg) beckoned to me conspiratorially. She whispered to me, "I really want to find out what that woman over there is reading. Just walk by and see if you can see the cover." For us, book-spying was a fun beach activity, like volleyball or boogie-boarding. I mean, all those people, all those books! Think of all the quirky things people decide to read on the beach when they finally cut loose from the work world and get down to what really entertains them. Book-watching is just a subset of people-watching. That day, after making several unsuccessful, nonchalant circuits around the other family, I finally walked up to the woman my mom had pointed out and asked, "What are you reading? My mom and I are dying to know." She answered with an enormous smile.

Book-spying can bring people together. If the mp3-player revolution isolated people in public places, encapsulating them in the bubble of their earbuds, book-spying gives us the chance to learn something about each other again. In the movie 500 Days of Summer, Zoe Dechanel's character talks about the seredipity of meeting the man she fell in love with: "What if I hadn't gone to that coffee shop that day? What if I hadn't been reading Dorian Gray, or he hadn't noticed?"

Kindle-bashers and other critics of eReaders claim that eReaders will do to book-spying what mp3 players did to music-listeners in public places: isolate us further, deny the opportunity for that glimpse into someone else's tastes before meeting them. These critics clearly have little dexterity. eReaders may not display a cover on the outside of the device to show the world what you're reading, but a surreptitious glance can often reveal the title on the screen's header. I have happily been both the agent and subject of Kindle-peering. I've even struck up Metro conversations as a result of Kindle-peering. In fact, Kindle-peering adds an extra layer of challenge that many veteran book-spies will find intriguing. After all, any amateur bookspy can snatch a glance at a paperback cover held up for the world to see. Finding out what that cute girl in the coffee shop is reading on her Kindle might involve actually buying her a drink and talking to her.

Post a comment here and tell your favorite book-spying or Kindle-peering story. Be sure to leave your email address, and you'll get a free coupon for one download from Istoria Books!