Forum - View topicNEWS: Barnes & Noble Stocks Drop After Nook Profit Warning
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Altacia
Posts: 286 |
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^^; I love Barnes & Noble, I've never had a single issue with them that their Customer Service wasn't happy to fix. They even let me exchange items that I had ordered online in their physical stores when UPS damaged them... Would never ever compare BAM to Borders though, BAM is pretty much the bottom of the barrel to me. |
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katscradle
Posts: 469 |
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Ditto. Unless you email them. On the phone they're just fine. I've had issues with books I bought for my Nook and the ladies I spoke with sorted it out great. On the occasions I've emailed customer service I've ended up having to make time to call. Though it was funny to have a lady trying super hard to sell my husband the new Nook HD+ before it had even come out, or the store employees had seen and tried a model. The employees I've dealt with at the Nook counter are usually well versed. So it erodes the edge they have with "in person service" to be pushing a product few people have had experience with yet. Nook is superior in quality to Kindle in a lot of ways. But, Nook hasn't expanded to many countries either like Kindle. I'm going to be moving this year and I will probably have to end up buying a new tablet/e-reader. I think what hurts B&N in the U.S. market though with their tablet e-readers is the apps. Nook is Android based but, you have to buy through B&N and the selection is pitiful compared to the Android store (or the giant guerrilla Ipad). I sort of saw Nook sales declining since they'd already had stagnate numbers early last year before the new devices, plus B&N recently took away the discount for new Nooks their members had received previously. I hate to see B&N having trouble because Amazon is not a company I like. |
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GeorgeC
Posts: 795 |
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The downfall of the local bookstore is the result of a lot of greed and poor or nonexistent long-range planning. The national chains are on their way out because of the same strategies they used to destroy their competition.
(Don't worry, even Amazon.com has to be careful... I can't count on fingers and toes several times over on how many companies I've seen come and go during my lifetime. Many of these companies were giants and even more dominant than some of the big guys today are. Anybody can go the way of the dinosaur if they don't plan carefully and have decent leadership!) This is like the situation with photography. For the average person, being able to get instant digital photographs without having to buy and process wet film is a lot cheaper. On the other hand, you sacrifice some quality -- 35mm wet film is still higher rez and most consumer digital cameras still aren't as good as 35mm "wet film" cameras -- and it's helped destroy the wet film manufacturers. Ironically, Kodak created the first digital camera in the early 1970s but failed to capitalize on the technology and/or stop it from spreading and ultimately cannibalizing its creator! The same thing is bound to happen with bookstores now. The megastores like Border and B & N just got too big to pay their rent. They got locked into multi-year deals with landlords that were non-renegotiable (as far as I know) and they got too big and arrogant for their britches. Those sales on the best-sellers didn't help, either. They drove their smaller competition out of business but also took away money to pay the other bills. Ultimately, all that was left were second-hand/used bookstores, small mom and pop specialist/antiquarian shops, and much smaller store chains like Books-A-Million and Half Price Books. The book reader/Kindle/Nook/iPad/whatever-you-want-to-call-it is just another example of a technology that's great on paper for the consumer but lousy for an existing industry -- in this case publishing. In addition to diminished bookstore presence, several long-time magazines have stopped print publication altogether and those that have survived transitioned to web presence-only. Whether they can survive on pay-to-read web subscriptions alone is debatable (sort of doubtful) but websites look like they're going to be mainsource for information in the near-future. We've already seen the web become a primary source of information for many hobbyists. Can anyone name an anime publication that prints monthly in the US anymore??? Most of what I see at B & N and Micro Center are British anime mags. I don't know that there is an American anime mag left! Protoculture Addicts never published frequently enough to have much presence in the States and I think the last "Otaku" American mag must have bit the dust recently. It's been many, many years since Viz gave up on Animerica, too. |
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