This might possibly be the best thing I have ever read about the fate of bookstores. Please read this letter to Barnes & Noble from Alexandra Petri.
Here’s just a taste…
I think it is time we staged an intervention. You say you are closing athird of your physical bookstores over the next decade, all while admitting they are not unprofitable? Please listen to yourself.
I am saying this on behalf of all your friends: the Publishing Industry, Book-Lovers Everywhere and — well, pretty much everyone but Amazon.com. We gathered this weekend and decided it was time we spoke up. We lost Borders. We cannot bear to lose you too.
We have been watching you for some time. You are the last hope of the brick-and-mortar bookstore, and at first we were optimistic. We love these places, with the pictures of Great Authors fraternizing on the walls. We attend readings there. We drink coffee there. We go to brick-and-mortar bookstores to do just about everything other than buy an e-reader. This is why your approach, lately, is so worrisome.
Your Nook e-readers are not bad devices, but that is hardly the point. Every week I get another e-mail from Barnes & Nobles beseeching me to buy a Nook. You have reached the point where you are offering me $30 worth of gift certificates. And every time I walk into the store, a voice comes over the loudspeaker beseeching me to buy a Nook in the most piteous tone. Look, I do not come to Barnes & Noble every weekend and purchase several volumes because I am laboring under the misapprehension that Nooks do not exist. I show up and buy because I like physical books. I don’t understand why you are working so hard to discourage this. I understand, in theory, that it is far cheaper to sell books that require no shipping and restocking. But we do not want to buy that sort of book from you. Amazon has more of them, for cheaper. Besides, if I wanted to buy a Nook, I would already have bought a Kindle.
Continue reading here…
