I can help you make some sense of those front tables. I am a former big-box bookstore employee who was in charge of those tables at my store. They are preset based off of directions from the corporate office. The best sellers are usually from the NYT best seller lists and we would receive stock based on those numbers. For the other displays, some are created by publishers paying extra to have their books have a prominent placement. The rest are decided by the corporate office and the stores receive a planogram for the month. There was some autonomy with the tables where we could select extra titles that we may have more quantity in stock, but for the most part the selection was out of our hands. Endcaps (the displays at the end of each aisle) were also preset from corporate. Also, the displays were regional. We would disregard several sections in the marketing planogram because we were not in that particular region. This can be why they may feel like they don’t make sense, because they are not really created by staff in the store you are in.
Generally, buyers will purchase the main collection for the stores based off of region. Booksellers at the store will be able to order some additional stock especially if there is a local interest. Stores like B&N are really more for general consumption, which is why you will see such a larger quantity of genre fiction and literature. The non-fiction is rarely deep (at least in the subjects I am looking for), but will at least get you started in a topic you are curious in.
For titles like the one you mentioned, you will not see those at many public libraries either (especially smaller systems). I looked up “Why Liberalism Failed” on WorldCat and only two university libraries in my state have it (thankfully one is near me so I may be able to go there and check it out J ). University press books are more likely to be purchased by community college and college/university libraries than public libraries.
Thanks,
Michelle
Michelle L. Chrzanowski, MLS
Content Management Analyst
NASA STI Program Support Services | LAMPS Contract
From: LibLicense-L Discussion Forum [mailto:[log in to unmask]
Date: Sun, 14 Jan 2018 16:45:14 -0700
I'm a book person, but I realized today that I haven't been in a Barnes and Noble in . . . six months? a year? So I stopped at the one in Tempe AZ, bustling on Sunday afternoon.
Of course I noticed that most of the store was taken up by merchandising and merchandise. It's a good thing that a quarter of the store is designed to get children reading, and not bad that there's a large DVD section. Lots of tables beckon me with deals and remainders and "must reads" (I could make no sense out of that table at all). I settled down to look for new releases and to check a few favorite sections.
Sections first: I counted shelves for "History", "Fiction and Literature", and then separately shelves for the other genres of fiction (Mystery, Romance, Manga, Graphic, Teen, Sci-FI, etc.). History was a bit masculine and presentist for my taste (1/3 US, 1/3 "War", 1/3 "World", heavily emphasizing politics, empires, statesmen), but for every one book on the history shelves, there were five on the rather less distressing "Fiction and Literature" shelves. (Jane Austen had a whole shelf, there were half a dozen well-chosen Nabokov titles, but no Proust.) But the surprise was that the *other* fiction shelves comprised twice as many volumes as the supposedly main section. So for every history book, there were five "Fiction and Literature", and ten more fiction of genre fiction.
And new releases? I know I'm idiosyncratic and old and crotchety, but nothing, and I mean nothing, appealed to me or spoke of itself as an interesting new book that a body should at least know *about*. Familiar brands, superficial topics, scandal, sensation, and the like. So I made a point of asking about one title, a new book by an old friend, Patrick Deneen, *Why Liberalism Failed*, just out from Yale Press, 200 pages, a very provocative and interesting argument about the way our 'conservatives' and 'liberals' all represent a modern liberal strain of political thought that has led us to inequality, populism, and worse. Not everybody's cup of tea, but a remarkable success for being taken up in the last couple of days separately by both David Brooks and Ross Douthat on the op-ed pages of the NY Times, so much so that the hardcover is out of stock on Amazon and listed as #214 best-selling overall there. Not only was it not in stock at B&N (in a state of the union where one might expect at least a few readers to find the title immediately agreeable), but it had never been in stock in print and at this moment isn't expected to be. They could get an e-version.
I draw no conclusions: just reporting.
Jim O'Donnell
Arizona State University