If you buy a CD, you could easily rip it to mp3s without paying extra royalty or fees; or if you buy mp3 direct from iTunes store or Amazon, you could burn them to CDs without extra charge either. However, if you buy a hard cover, and then later you want to read it on your iPad or kindle, you have to pony extra hard cold cash from $9.99 to $12.99 -- $12.99 thanks to apple. Why is that? I like books especially good hard covers that with a good jacket design, good bindings, and with good paper. They are an art in it themselves. I don't mind spend extra money for them but I also like the convenience of ebook. But I don't want to pay the full price again.
So here comes the first suggestion for barnes and noble to goto the mattresses for. They should negotiate a deal with publishers, with which a user would be given a voucher for $1.99 more they could get the digit version if they buy the physical book, be it hard cover or paper mass. Maybe they could charge $2.99 if the physical book is paper mass. Readers would cheer the deal and support barnes and noble in a big way.
Second they could do more promotion in their store such as give away their membership for free, from time to time, offer a discount on the Starbucks coffee, arrange more author signing opportunity, and more kids activity cause kids activity bring the parent to the store as well. They should also design more ads to display in the local store to emphasize the contribution they do to the local community.
The whole purpose of places like Starbucks is for people with no decision-making ability whatsoever to make six decisions just to buy one cup of coffee. Short, tall, light, dark, caf, decaf, low-fat, non-fat, etc. So people who don't know what the hell they're doing or who on earth they are can, for only $2.95, get not just a cup of coffee but an absolutely defining sense of self: Tall. Decaf. Cappuccino. -- From You've Got Mail by Joe Fox
1 comment:
I think you are a minority here. Their business model does not work anymore. Digital copy have taken the place of physical prints. Books, magazines and newspapers prints are a thing of the past.
I think people only want physical prints for reference manuals or classics. They don't want a hard copy of today's novels. Book binding is a long lost art done by hand and is replaced with machines.
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