In an effort of sell the most number of copies of the latest Harry Potter saga, B&N slashed its Harry prices 40%…that, plus a few store closings, resulted in disappointing sales for this quarter.
It follows logically that if Barnes and Noble lost sales the same quarter that the best-selling book of the year was released, independent bookstores are in ever deepening trouble. That plus the results of our current poll (though it’s not entirely scientific) make the future of local bookstores even more doubtful.
Story from Yahoo News .
Discount Harry
Orignally, I was lured by the 40% discount of both Borders and Barnes & Noble. But just before placing my order (for my kids, naturally) I learned of a local book chain, Harry W. Schwartz, offering a Harry release party in conjunction with the library. The discount was “only” 30% but I didn’t mind paying the little bit extra (even on a librarians pay scale it wasn’t much more) to patronize a local company.
Bookstore Economics
Reading the story from Reuters, B&N actually had an increase in sales. It wasn’t quite as much as Wall Street had expected, so the quarterly earnings were bad news. But sales were still up 4.3% for the quarter — and only 2/3 of that increase was from Harry.
Independent bookstores, which weren’t discounting as deeply, probably got more profit from smaller numbers of sales of HP — and hopefully their customers, as did B&N’s, bought additional book at the same time.