Wednesday, August 31, 2011

Barnes and Noble proclaims with great joy: "We're obsolete!"

In times of extreme change, people are willing to admit things that ordinarily they would deny.

DC Comics head honcho's are being interviewed all over the place, and are admitting -- even emphasizing -- that sales are so bad and trends so dire, they HAD to make drastic changes.

Which is an interesting marketing plan.

Apparently, the 2.99 price didn't increase sales, but they maintain that sales might have been even worse without the change. They admit that the characters were getting tired, and they just needed the ability to tell the stories they wanted, without being hobbled by continuity.

Event Fatigue? They just say that the events weren't good enough, not that there is anything wrong with events. And they kind of brush off the "Not enough Kid's comics" questions. (Which, they rightly should. It's a non-starter, much like asking why people don't buy comics despite the movies.)



Meanwhile, over at Barnes and Noble, they're trumpeting the huge increase in digital sales.

But what caught my attention was that sales of book/ books in existing stores only declined by
1.6%

Hardly a dire drop. Especially considering that all the efforts have been put into digital sales. If they had put the same amount of money, time, and space into book/books, chances are those sales would have been higher too.

You know, instead of having a kiosk facing the front doors that proclaims: "We're obsolete!!!"

3 comments:

H. Bruce Miller said...

I don't think B&N is proclaiming it's obsolete; it's just moving into another phase of the book business. Companies that stick with their old technologies and business models when new and better (well, in some ways better) ones come along don't survive very long.

Anonymous said...

I would like to point out, the SCAM is now about valuation.

Recently huffington-post was bought for $300M, a website that steals content with essentially no value added. So that is the model.

Making physical stuff is out, what is in is aggregating people aka facebook et-al ...

Then storing physical data about that real person, and what he reads and where he goes, that is the GOLDMINE of today, that is bought by NSA, CIA, and media/marketing, and despotic governments worldwide.

There is no fortune in physical book or comic books, B&N would be better off following the huffington model, and selling out for the CEO walking as a rich man.

Long term of course there is nothing, everyone will be an electronic slave in a virtual prison with law enforcement monitoring all movement 24/7, 7/11 and walmart will be able to JIT order any product before you enter based on behavior, the HOLY-GRAIL of todays fascism & mercantilism.

editor said...

Duncan:

All of the Nate Heller books by Max Allan Collins are being re-released in new editions. You get em, I'll buy em. All of em.

Jim Cornelius