Chairs. B&N has comfy chairs where I can peruse a pile of books. Borders doesnt. But Amazon won for us. We live 40 miles from either so my GF gets everything from Amazon or other Internet sites. Even though I work not far from both, free 2 day delivery has won me over for anything other than the occasional mass market paperback.
You could use John Dvorak's trick--buy all your Amazon items through an affiliate link for an affiliate you own. If you purchase enough, your affiliate rewards will cover your Amazon Prime membership.
I tried this a long time ago -- maybe 10-12 years back, not long after they first introduced the affiliate program -- and got a friendly but pointed letter from Amazon to knock it off. Have they changed the rules?
It's the same Amazon account for Associates and purchases... It's quite simple to match up. You may able to sneak around with different email and mailing addresses, but you still have cookies to deal with.
Yeah, all the Borders I go to have nice chairs and a decent atmosphere; the only BN that's anywhere near me doesn't have much to sit on and feels like a two-story version of a mall bookstore.
Walmart actually has a large book section, but a small variety. Vampire romance, cooking, religion, diet, self-help, and pseudoscience relating to dietary supplements and the like. Also, a huge number of useless magazines.
Hrmm. Thinking of the impulse-buy tabloids in the checkout aisles, I wonder what would happen if they were to put a magazine of substance, a literary magazine or accessible scientific journal of some sort, amidst those tabloids. If one out of every thousand people who bought a tabloid instead opted for the better books, what would be the long-term gain of society?
If I were a dictator, I would require such experiments.
For what it's worth, I don't subscribe to any magazines, but I'll frequently impulse-buy an Economist, Atlantic Monthly, or Scientific American at the airport, or if I find myself near a decent newsstand.
I asked because I wanted to gauge value of store placement. Walmart does a ton of research on where to place their stores and was just curious. People have ditched mom and pop stores for Walmart. Little book stores struggle because of selection as well.
There's an independent bookstore not two miles from my house. It's been in business at least twenty years (that's as long as I've been aware of it) but they might have some advantages that other bookstores don't.
1. It caters to the nearby university by selling text books.
2. It also sells used and rare books. It's not uncommon to see books from the late 1800s/early 1900s on the shelf.
3. It's large and well lit (no chairs though; nor is there a cafe; nor is there free Wifi---it's just shelves and shelves of books).
4. It's in a city known for its wealth (Boca Raton, Fl).
I don't see it going away any time soon, but I do fear what will happen once the original owners are no longer there.
I think that kind of is the future of retail books, a relatively small selection of mainstream books which they can buy in bulk for cheap and they sell well.
