From: "Jim O'Donnell" <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Fri, 28 Nov 2014 15:32:44 -0500

Liblicense readers know my amateur counting habits.  Today a report
from two recent visits to Barnes and Noble -- one store in Clarendon
VA (a DC suburb in a mall-let shared with an Apple Store, Chicos,
Container Store, etc.), and one in Milford CT (in a strip mall with
Walmart, a block from a larger but not high end indoor mall).

I wandered both stores trying to estimate floor space and came up with
the same count in both places:  40% of these B&N stores' floor space
is devoted to what I would call books -- things in hard or soft covers
with words in them, for people to read.  The children's section of
both stores has grown remarkably, as also the toys and games sections,
while magazines, Nooks, DVDs, gifts, and the coffee bar fill out the
space.  I do count as books things like self-help and remaindered gift
books and B&N imprints of various kinds.  Once upon a time a bookstore
"superstore" (B&N or Borders) boasted of carrying 150,000 volumes.
That number is way, way smaller now, and I wonder how far they are
from carrying a line roughly equal to that of an old Waldenbooks or B.
Dalton.

One way in which the slimming down of stock happens is by thinning
out the supply of older and classic authors.  In fiction and
literature today in CT, there was one volume of Waugh, two Updike
novels and two volumes of short stories, four Nabokov novels and the
volume of his short stories, no Proust, a respectable collection of
Hemingway, and four novels of Faulkner.  In the glory days of the
bookstore superstores, I liked to say that I was confident I could
always pick up a copy of the next "classic" (broadly defined) title I
wanted to read.  Now, I have to transfer that confidence to Amazon
or other web-based sellers.

Jim O'Donnell