YouSaid · the spoken record

James Daunt

lines on the record: 75
first: 2023-03-16
most recent: 2023-03-16
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“I'm sure they will sell it for the absolute maximum they can. To becoming a public company again. We have a really solid and robust business that's growing. One of the real excitements here is actually just how few bookstores there are in the United States and how many communities used to have bookstores and now no longer do, how effectively booksellers folded in the face of Amazon and thought the game was up and they thought Amazon was just throwing them online and then they thought Nook was the end of it. And it simply wasn't true. There was a collapse of morale. And now that we got our confidence back, we can grow again. And that's extremely exciting.”
2023-03-16 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · ‘The Goliath is Amazon’: after 100 years, Barnes & Noble wants to go back to its indie roots · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So I think for a well run bookstore, the future is extremely bright. And 100 years' time, people are going to be reading books. We've seen off Kindle, we'll see off audio, we'll see off all the other things. Not because those things are bad, but because actually all they do is encourage more engagement with real books and therefore the sale of more real books. What we need to make sure is that nothing corrupts our world, that there isn't a monopolistic lurch towards Amazon or some other thing where somebody dominates the world of books and doesn't respect the physical book.”
2023-03-16 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · ‘The Goliath is Amazon’: after 100 years, Barnes & Noble wants to go back to its indie roots · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Think it's hopefully a very persistent change. I certainly think it gives one strengths that would otherwise not exist. What you really have to do is lock in a culture which holds these values central to it and everything that pivots around those values. I think that is what booksellers want. And I think if you ensure that your central direction doesn't come corrupted in any way and holds to the same values, then yes, you've got something extremely powerful and enduring. And I also think that bookstores are sort of almost uniquely strong within the retail spectrum because they appeal to such a broad diversity of communities, as I say, every single age group. They are social spaces and therefore they're effectively inu and protected from all of the sort of fashion trends which so afflict other people.”
2023-03-16 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · ‘The Goliath is Amazon’: after 100 years, Barnes & Noble wants to go back to its indie roots · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's run entirely independently. And in fact, since I've joined, we've invested in new devices and got a couple more that are coming down the track. All I've said is if we do anything, let's do it really well. And therefore we just launched the audio subscription business and as I say invested in a whole new family of NOx. And I think that's if you're big enough to be able to make those investments, then just do it really well. And if it encourages sort of a broader engagement with Vancouver Noble and with reading, then that's a very positive thing.”
2023-03-16 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · ‘The Goliath is Amazon’: after 100 years, Barnes & Noble wants to go back to its indie roots · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think customers expect them, and so we have them. I think we do them perfectly well. It's just a different form of reading. Again, reading's good and ultimately, if you read on your nook, if you read on your Kindle, you're probably going to end up buying more books. And there may be very good reasons why you want to read on those devices. You've run out of space in your bookstore. You need the font. You need the backlighting, whatever it is. There are reasons. We are in the business of encouraging reading and engagement with books and the thoughts that are attached to them. So that's why we have audio and that's why we have Nook. They're an adjunct and a support to what is the core of our proposition, which is the physical bookstore.”
2023-03-16 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · ‘The Goliath is Amazon’: after 100 years, Barnes & Noble wants to go back to its indie roots · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No, I mean, no, not as a principle any more than, you know, if there's an audiobook that's being read by a bot that's made to sound like George Clooney. I mean, that's sort of kind of whatever it is. But we would nonetheless want to judge books. And you've got celebrity books, you've got humor books, you've got this book and that book. But the core of what we sell is narrative fiction and narrative non-fiction to which we ascribe a value judgment. It's either well written or it's not. It's well published or it's not. It's well edited or it's not. As a physical product, it's been beautifully designed and typeset and the cover art and all the rest. We judge all of those things and put only the best in front of our customers. That is the job of a bookseller.”
2023-03-16 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · ‘The Goliath is Amazon’: after 100 years, Barnes & Noble wants to go back to its indie roots · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I suppose that sort of takes back to what is the purpose of a bookstore, and a bookstore is somewhere that curates. I mean, even a large, the largest of the Buns& Noble has a fraction of the books that are published, from reputable publishers, let alone from all of the nonsense of self-publishing. Not all self-publishing is nonsense, by the way, but a dramatic amount of it is. And these AI sort of bot driven. Books will be that if you want to indulge in and waste your time reading those books then by all means hop onto Amazon and the world is your oyster but that's not what we do we curate and our job is to ideally marry the customer with a really good next book and if we can make that a book they wouldn't otherwise have thought of so much the better”
2023-03-16 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · ‘The Goliath is Amazon’: after 100 years, Barnes & Noble wants to go back to its indie roots · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Stores, and I think we can stand by what is being published. Remember, there is a gatekeeper before us, which is the publisher, although one doesn't see that debate. But the reality is that we sell books that are being published by major and reputable publishers. If there is a book that is self-published, I would be regarding that with dramatically more scrutiny than I would something that comes from scholastic, for example. And generally we would hold that those need to be stocked and made available across the country, but they just need to be curated sensitively and not represented to be something that they aren't.”
2023-03-16 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · ‘The Goliath is Amazon’: after 100 years, Barnes & Noble wants to go back to its indie roots · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Think we have to be constructive and part of the debate, but I think we believe that we should generally stock as broad a range of books as we can. And I haven't myself come across anything within that sphere, which has caused me to say, no, this is unacceptable and we would not have it as we would something like Holocaust denial. We would not have that in our stores. But if the local community is objecting to a particular book, I'll be saying, well, there's nothing obliging you either to read or buy this book. And as long as we are curating it, sensibly, we're not presenting it to be one thing or another, as long as we are acting responsibly.”
2023-03-16 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · ‘The Goliath is Amazon’: after 100 years, Barnes & Noble wants to go back to its indie roots · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Line of what is acceptable. This comes back to my point about America and the First Amendment this moment. The government speech regulations are on the rise in this country for some unfathomable reason, and mostly it's we're going to change lines of what's acceptable. And if I had to point that fervor at something and say this is where it's reached the hottest pitch, it's YA literature, right, where it's targeted towards a younger audience, but obviously that younger audience is going through a number of changes in their lives. There's often frank depictions of sexuality in these books and parents find them, they lose their minds. That's possibly a place for schools and school boards to be involved. That's possibly a place for libraries to be involved. But that is where bookstores and book talk and social media is at its highest. Is that a thing that you think about? Okay, we need to make sure that we're constructively part of this debate and we have some ideals here. Or is it?”
2023-03-16 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · ‘The Goliath is Amazon’: after 100 years, Barnes & Noble wants to go back to its indie roots · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We haven't got to a point where something at that extreme has been felt reasonable by anybody working for us. And I think we're extremely fortunate. I think the booksellers are not extreme people. I mean, we are very thoughtful and considered otherwise. Why on earth are you in bookselling? But do I think that all of these conversations are easy and a lot of the debates? No, that they are not at all easy. And as I say, not in this particular case, but in others, you can find yourself with quite a difficult judgment as to which side of the line you fall. But again, I think that has to be done through debate rather than anything that's dictated centrally. The only things that we do dictate centrally is to remove the really egregious. And that I have no difficulty in doing at all if there's something utterly unexpected.”
2023-03-16 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · ‘The Goliath is Amazon’: after 100 years, Barnes & Noble wants to go back to its indie roots · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“To make this much more specific. You constructed a system in which lots of young people get to manage the stores across the country. If one of your 800 stores says, you know what, we've talked about it, we're just not comfortable with whatever JK Rowling said on Twitter this week, we're pulling the Harry Potter books. That's a decision they would have to tell you about. And then you would have some conversation. Is there a world in which the Harry Potter books get pulled from the shelves? Or is it we're going to kindly bring you back to reality?”
2023-03-16 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · ‘The Goliath is Amazon’: after 100 years, Barnes & Noble wants to go back to its indie roots · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Campaigning and denying the voice to one side or other of any debate that's going on. But this is, as you say, this is a really difficult terrain for us. And when you are decentralized, that requires an awful lot of conversation because you will get a particular store or individuals within a store with very, very passionate views. And our job then centrally is to discuss those and talk it through. And as with most things, diplomacy and talking and thought and some level of kindness and understanding on both sides will generally get to a decent outcome.”
2023-03-16 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · ‘The Goliath is Amazon’: after 100 years, Barnes & Noble wants to go back to its indie roots · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Than if you are just your own single indie bookseller, and obviously, if you've just got one store and you're sitting wherever you are, you can do whatever you like. But equally, even in that case, you will be held to account by your customers. And I think there is a general accepted view that booksellers shouldn't be”
2023-03-16 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · ‘The Goliath is Amazon’: after 100 years, Barnes & Noble wants to go back to its indie roots · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, the author is entitled to her own opinion and she has an opinion which she's articulates. But I do not believe that we should ever be boycotting individuals' books within our stores because of our own personal perceptions of their opinions, be they on the right or the left or whichever side of whichever debate it is that's going on. And that is extremely important that booksellers hold themselves true to that if they are And there is more pressure on a national bookseller and a national bookseller with the size of stores that we have.”
2023-03-16 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · ‘The Goliath is Amazon’: after 100 years, Barnes & Noble wants to go back to its indie roots · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Is not horrible for our business. I think that authors will have their own personal opinions and that should not cause us to boycott their books in any way. It is important that we offer the books from the right of the political spectrum, from the left of the political spectrum, but equally on both sides of the gender debates, ethnic debates, Black Lives Matter.”
2023-03-16 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · ‘The Goliath is Amazon’: after 100 years, Barnes & Noble wants to go back to its indie roots · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I picked Marks and Engels because it's sort of like the silliest one. A good bookstore should have all of those authors on the shelf, and it's what they do. You walked right into JK Rowling, right? This is the one that I think is the hottest button it is across, I think, even more treacherous to navigate in the UK. What is your stance there? Is it we're just going to let the bookstore owners do what they want or is it this is horrible for our business if we don't sell Harry Potter?”
2023-03-16 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · ‘The Goliath is Amazon’: after 100 years, Barnes & Noble wants to go back to its indie roots · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No, it is something we leave up to them, but that doesn't mean that we just can't have discussions over it. And we do have discussions constant. And I think that should be a healthy and respectful debate. But if somebody was to say, I'm not going to sell JK Rowling anymore because I disapprove of her views, we would have a sensible and grown up debate as to whether that's a reasonable thing to do. And I think we've so far navigated those in a intelligent and grown-up way.”
2023-03-16 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · ‘The Goliath is Amazon’: after 100 years, Barnes & Noble wants to go back to its indie roots · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“My email inbox feels the pressure of the culture wars for sure and they rage across political diversity, gender identity and all of the other issues. I think our job is to navigate those as sensibly and professionally as we possibly can. But yes, it is absolutely part of our world.”
2023-03-16 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · ‘The Goliath is Amazon’: after 100 years, Barnes & Noble wants to go back to its indie roots · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Is something that I and my colleagues are held to account for. We try not to make mistakes. Occasionally we do. But I think bookstores generally are places which promote diversity of thought and proper and good values.”
2023-03-16 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · ‘The Goliath is Amazon’: after 100 years, Barnes & Noble wants to go back to its indie roots · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Think it does blow back. I think generally most booksellers are sensible people, and I think that most booksellers passionately believe in freedoms of speech and all of the sort of positive things around that. So I think we stand sort of fair and square alongside librarians and will always try and champion the widest diversity of opinions. That is not to say also that we should ban the other side. I mean, we are a place that should carry everything. But we do seek to exclude from our stores things that are beyond an acceptable level if it's racist, anti-Semitic, if it's pedophilia, if it's absolutely egregious in all of these different ways, then those books have no part in our bookstore and we don't have them. It is a delicate balance as to sometimes as to where that line should be drawn. And I think that, again, is something that I suppose at the end of the day.”
2023-03-16 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · ‘The Goliath is Amazon’: after 100 years, Barnes & Noble wants to go back to its indie roots · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That would be sort of completely counter to my ethos, which is to encourage the stores to be doing that and encouraging the stores to be brave and just get on with things. And of course we'll make mistakes, in which case when we make mistakes, we'll apologize if they're egregious mistakes. And it's not just TikTok. It's the kids who do that side of it. But we do all the other social media platforms. And that covers the spectrum of society because that is the extraordinary thing about a bookstore. It's almost unique and I would actually claim is unique amongst retailers is that we appeal to every single age. Kids love us. A baby in a stroller loves being in a bookstore all the way to the oldest citizen. Everybody's got a place and a different way of engaging with a bookstore. And very few of that. And that translates into the various social media platforms. But we have to do it authentically and we have to do it locally.”
2023-03-16 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · ‘The Goliath is Amazon’: after 100 years, Barnes & Noble wants to go back to its indie roots · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Is an interesting one, and I think it's down to the peculiar nature of books where it is the creativity, it's the author who actually has all of the power. And whereas if you're selling shoes or you're running a stationary selling company or whatever it is, it's the manufacturer who you need the retailer who can go and say, well, if I'm not going to sell your eraser, I'm going to sell somebody else's or pencil sharpener or whatever it is. In books, it lies with the author and publishers ultimately control the author.”
2023-03-16 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · ‘The Goliath is Amazon’: after 100 years, Barnes & Noble wants to go back to its indie roots · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And that's very difficult for independence to do anything more than be what the vast majority of independents are, which is a single store. The number of independents with more than one store is extremely small. The number of independents who are growing is minuscule. So this is why you need the big guy in there. Otherwise, you're just not going to have enough bookstores. Now, why is it that the retailer holds the stick in almost every other sector, but it's the manufacturer which holds the stick in the world of books?”
2023-03-16 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · ‘The Goliath is Amazon’: after 100 years, Barnes & Noble wants to go back to its indie roots · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, and it is possible that there could have been a world in which there would have been far more independent booksellers and properly run, properly invested independents out there that could have given something close to the coverage that Barnes& Noble now gives. But the reality is that one of the things that you need from scale, and I know this as an independent bookseller, is very, very difficult to expand as an independent, the capital that's required to open up a bookstore. The huge levels of investment in stock as well as the premises, the inherent lack of profitability in our industry always has been, and it's the same in every single country in the world, where the vast bulk of the profits of the business are captured by the manufacturer, the publisher and the author. And the retailer is sort of operating on these very, very thin margins.”
2023-03-16 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · ‘The Goliath is Amazon’: after 100 years, Barnes & Noble wants to go back to its indie roots · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You need physical bookshops to have proper discovery, and I think physical bookshops have, they are the things that I love and which are sort of my vocational commitment. So if I understood the question right, are they necessary”
2023-03-16 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · ‘The Goliath is Amazon’: after 100 years, Barnes & Noble wants to go back to its indie roots · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There's a split there with Amazon, right? Amazon is this centralized, extremely efficient distribution funnel. As you said, they're not good at anything other than sort of demand or intent-based purchasing. You show up. You know, you want Amazon will get it to you oftentimes by the next day. Then there's what you're talking about, which is the retail endpoint, the experience of being in a bookstore, people chatting the workers telling you what to read, recommendations, the sort of curated table that is not pay for play. If you were to start Barnes& Noble over again, Would you need the retail endpoints or would you build the sort of efficient distribution chain that is allowing not only in this moment your retail endpoints to exist, but also independent bookshops to suggest that plug into it?”
2023-03-16 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · ‘The Goliath is Amazon’: after 100 years, Barnes & Noble wants to go back to its indie roots · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But it also equally means there are more books on people's bookshelves in homes, there are more homes where book ownership is an established norm. And with that, ultimately will come a more prosperous time for us as booksellers. And we should never resent what the other guy is doing. By the way, have utmost respect for Amazon. I think they do a completely brilliant job and particularly good at democratizing books. If you want a book and you don't have access to a bookstore, Amazon will get it to you. They've driven down the price of books. They've made it really competitive. And they forced bookstores out of their complacency to become really good places that justify their existence. So I think all of that is very positive.”
2023-03-16 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · ‘The Goliath is Amazon’: after 100 years, Barnes & Noble wants to go back to its indie roots · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Though, I mean, personally, I don't see it that way. I think the more reading there is going on in the community, the better it is ultimately for us that if you're true to what you do and are constantly promoting books, and by the way, much as I love bookstores and booksellers, we sit in the second rung beneath public librarians and public libraries. They're the true heroes of our industry. And they don't sell a single book. They're sitting in there doling them out for free. But what we do is encourage this engagement with books. And it does mean the remote.”
2023-03-16 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · ‘The Goliath is Amazon’: after 100 years, Barnes & Noble wants to go back to its indie roots · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There's a bit of attention there. It might be a healthy one. It might be a constructive one. That you're saying, okay, we employ all the kids on Saturday mornings and after school. They're on book talk. Book talk has become a sensational discovery method for books, for book communities. We're feeding it with our own employees. We're receiving the early part of the return of the discovery. There's internal chatter inside of our company to accelerate the momentum of sales. And then the big box retailers capture the bulk of the market share. That seems like a tension. It might be exactly where you want to sit, but that seems like a tension he could point at and say, we should get more of that.”
2023-03-16 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · ‘The Goliath is Amazon’: after 100 years, Barnes & Noble wants to go back to its indie roots · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Then ordering the books, but these are of new authors Bonnie Garmus, who is our book of the year this year, voted for by booksellers, was an absolutely massive bestseller for Barnes& Noble. But our market share stayed much where it is thirty-ish percent of the market because everybody else sold it as well. But she's an author that I think without the efforts of the Barnes and Noble booksellers would not have had this astonishing success. It's inconceivable that she would have done it.”
2023-03-16 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · ‘The Goliath is Amazon’: after 100 years, Barnes & Noble wants to go back to its indie roots · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“On and on. There are people on that who died many, many decades ago and they're under a trademark. There is very little new coming through. That's what booksellers do. And now Banson Noble, I think, is becoming very, very powerful in that. And the reason we do it is because although we don't do anything centrally, nonetheless, we are a single company and there's a lot of chat between booksellers. There's lots of calls of we've read this, we've been successful with this has anybody looked at this. And that creates a sudden momentum around books which otherwise would have been quite out of sight, I think, really for the industry as a whole. And then if Bonsonoble does that, Amazon sells a ton of them at that point because then Kendall gets going, as you say, audible gets going, the big box guys, the Walnuts and the Costco's and so on, they start.”
2023-03-16 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · ‘The Goliath is Amazon’: after 100 years, Barnes & Noble wants to go back to its indie roots · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Whereas a bookstore is precisely the place that does that, where you pick up the book that you never thought you would want to read, might read, could even think about reading by an author you've never heard of until that moment when you pick up the book or when a bookseller says, look at that, or read that when you next come in, or that I love that, or whatever it is, all those small little recommendations that are personal and are able to attach themselves to books that otherwise have nothing going for them at all. Amazon is terrible at discovery. And I think publishers are slowly realizing that actually if you want to move beyond the brand names of the past, you're going to need to find a way to promote them. And I would point to the bestseller charts when I joined Barnes& Noble. And every single book on that is something you've heard of. It's James Patterson times three, four. It's McConnelly. It's John Grisham.”
2023-03-16 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · ‘The Goliath is Amazon’: after 100 years, Barnes & Noble wants to go back to its indie roots · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I would slightly challenge that Amazon is a very effective bookseller. I think it's a hugely efficient fulfiller of whatever you want to buy, but you have to know what you want to buy. And they are extremely efficient about putting in front of customers the brand name authors, the brand name new books. By brand name, I mean from the really established authors. They do it through the pre-orders. But they are not effective at discovery. They are really terrible as a place in which they can put in front of you the book that you never thought you'd want to read where you have no reason to read. You've got no tether to it at all.”
2023-03-16 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · ‘The Goliath is Amazon’: after 100 years, Barnes & Noble wants to go back to its indie roots · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The background of this entire conversation has been Amazon and the necessary scale of a company like Barnes Noble to compete with Amazon dominates, right? Amazon shows up to a publisher, says we're going to order all of the books you can print and Amazon is very pay to play. They operate one of the largest advertising marketplaces in the entire industry and will make sure that you sell a lot of them. They have the Kindle system. They can make sure that the books are promoted on the Kindles when the Kindles are turned off. They just have a huge amount of efficiency. The publishers can go to and just participate in. When we're describing a decentralized Barnes& Noble, it seems like you need to have the scale to go have the publisher conversations and say, we operate this many hundred stores, we move this many books, we have a construction team that goes around refurbishing the stores. There's all these things where the scale provides you with the operating leverage that cost efficiency, all the things. Where's the”
2023-03-16 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · ‘The Goliath is Amazon’: after 100 years, Barnes & Noble wants to go back to its indie roots · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's the ones having the Saturday jobs, the after-score jobs in the stores generally, where they're very alert to it. And because we just leave them to get on with it, I think it's driven a massive part of our success. So I think we were very lucky to have, or the good fortune to have liberated the stores at precisely the moment when it was most powerful for them to be able to adapt quickly and seamlessly to whatever was going on in their local community. It's worked brilliantly for us.”
2023-03-16 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · ‘The Goliath is Amazon’: after 100 years, Barnes & Noble wants to go back to its indie roots · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's happening at the local level, and I think we like looking at book talk and TikTok and saying, oh, you know, it's amazing. Madeleine Miller is becoming this massive song of Achilles is this huge success. And obviously for a narrative, that's what we need to do. But the actual way the book talk works is at a local level. Innumerable numbers, a book talk communities that are swirling around promoting different books all the time. And actually what it is in different parts of the country. And I would say 600 times, we've got roughly 600 stores, 600 different communities interacting with BookTalk in their own special way. Occasionally that will all sort of come across and a few books will become massive sellers, but that's the froth. What's really going underneath is lots and lots of kids just getting excited about books themselves and it's moving very, very fast. Because we employ quite a lot of those kids ourselves.”
2023-03-16 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · ‘The Goliath is Amazon’: after 100 years, Barnes & Noble wants to go back to its indie roots · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You're describing as something that has a much more local feel to it, right? Where the local bookstores get to look at their communities, look at who their customers are, adjust the store to them. Then there's just a basic marketing level here, which is you have to go tell the local community that this bookstore reflects your interest. You have to get them to show up and walk in the door. And that's all happening in parallel to things like the Prince Harry book, which are national, international unifying phenomena. that's happening in parallel to things like book talk, which is people on TikTok talking about books sort of flattening the discourse around the country. What's the tension there? Do you see that tension? Do you have a centralized buyer that's saying, all right, this is blowing up on TikTok all of the stores are going to need to have this book and making that decision? Or is that happening still at the local level?”
2023-03-16 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · ‘The Goliath is Amazon’: after 100 years, Barnes & Noble wants to go back to its indie roots · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That you will walk into, they won't have it front and center, and it didn't cost them a dime. What has also allowed us to do is bring forward the books at each individual store likes. And so we have much more sort of unpredictability around what becomes bestsellers.”
2023-03-16 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · ‘The Goliath is Amazon’: after 100 years, Barnes & Noble wants to go back to its indie roots · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Significant part of the store was sold to publishers for a very, very large amount of money. The trouble with that is that obviously by definition means you have the same bookstores everywhere and by definition you're taking away the curation of the stores from the booksellers. It is being agreed in exchange for money, in offices in New York City. And we had to end that and end it completely as we did. I mean, just literally hadn't taken a cent either at Waterston's or Barnz and Obama from the day I joined and that completely then changes the nature of bookselling and allowed one to tell our bookstores, you know, you're free now. You do whatever you like. And for publishers, actually some of it was great because they no longer had to pay and the good book still gets put everywhere up front because Prince Harry's book at the moment there isn't a single water since all Barnes are no”
2023-03-16 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · ‘The Goliath is Amazon’: after 100 years, Barnes & Noble wants to go back to its indie roots · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Where we had things called co op and promo fees, which were amounts of money which were paid really for the placement of books. And that would either be that you took a certain number of books, in which case dollars were attached to that. And then in particular that they would be placed in particular parts of the store everywhere. And that was extremely attractive to publishers who take enormous risks with books. They pay these upfront amounts for when they buy books. And then they need to be sure they're going to sell them if they want to mitigate that risk. And one of the key ways to mitigate the risk is to pay the chain bookstore to put it in the front of the store or actually even to put it in the best seller lists. And I would, we would charge an amount of money to be number one, two, three, four, five, obviously in descending order, more money to be put on the front table. Front of the front table is different amount of money to back of the front table and so on.”
2023-03-16 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · ‘The Goliath is Amazon’: after 100 years, Barnes & Noble wants to go back to its indie roots · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“One big decision you made in taking both water stones and now Barnes Noble was to get rid of what were called the publisher co-op fees where the publishers actually could quite a stake in the success of the bookstores, but they took a bunch of control in return. Explain what that was specifically to the audience knows and then why it chose to undo it.”
2023-03-16 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · ‘The Goliath is Amazon’: after 100 years, Barnes & Noble wants to go back to its indie roots · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You always make sure that it's going to work in the medium and long term. Nothing is done for short-term expediency. And you should, I think, test it always for is this what we want for us in the medium and long term? Or is it right for my booksellers? Because lots of decisions cannot be. But if you absolutely, and I have a great advantage of having spent 25 odd years as a bookseller, a shop floor bookseller, so I do understand what it's like to work in a bookstore. If you make it right for the booksellers, then that will almost certainly be right for the customers because happy booksellers with customers. And is it fair? And everything you do should be fair. how you're paying people, how you're promoting people, how you're changing people's jobs and the like. Are you happy to stick that on the notice board?”
2023-03-16 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · ‘The Goliath is Amazon’: after 100 years, Barnes & Noble wants to go back to its indie roots · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think the centralized part, yes, not the cultural relevance. I think we have a huge plot to play in promoting positively promoting education and reading and engagement with cultural issues. But I think we should always reflect the communities in which we are. And when you do decentralize that to the individual stores, you get something much healthier than when it was directed from New York City, that's for sure.”
2023-03-16 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · ‘The Goliath is Amazon’: after 100 years, Barnes & Noble wants to go back to its indie roots · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“This was the criticism of Barnes Noble at its sort of peak, right? That it was imposing a white middle class cultural hegemony on the United States because it would drop in, it would kill your local booksellers, and then whatever books it wanted would become the books. Is that something you're actively trying to do? Like I'm just talking to you now. Yes, the private equity company wants to make a lot of money. I still want to talk about that part. But it seems like a big part of your vision here is to undo the centralized cultural relevance of Barnes& Noble.”
2023-03-16 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · ‘The Goliath is Amazon’: after 100 years, Barnes & Noble wants to go back to its indie roots · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Certainly more equal, and I think we do track it and we track gender pay and also obviously diversity as well, which is something that has also bedeviled bookselling and publishing generally. We have always typically been very white middle class. There's something there around the attractiveness of bookselling as a career and how that's very accepted in the traditionally more sort of white middle class educated parts of society and more aspirational parts of society look on it, particularly the poor pay within our industry as something that they don't really want part of. Again, how we broaden ourselves and broaden ourselves out of an educated elite, which is where we've tended to concentrate.”
2023-03-16 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · ‘The Goliath is Amazon’: after 100 years, Barnes & Noble wants to go back to its indie roots · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Think book selling always has, but we've always had this sort of very peculiar dichotomy of having a very masculine leadership at the same time as having initially a very equal workforce and actually one that probably tilts towards the feminine.”
2023-03-16 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · ‘The Goliath is Amazon’: after 100 years, Barnes & Noble wants to go back to its indie roots · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think in traditional retail businesses tend to be quite masculine and certainly sort of very hierarchical structures are often dominated by men, particularly men of a certain age and obviously this is not a greenhouse in which as a late 50 year old male I can really start slinging rocks around in but when you flatten organizations and go have a lot more young people working in a much more collaborative way you tend to end up with a structure which is very equal in terms of the balance and I think more cooperative for that which is if you were predominantly masculine that is to feminize it”
2023-03-16 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · ‘The Goliath is Amazon’: after 100 years, Barnes & Noble wants to go back to its indie roots · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I'm just one of these sort of orbiting circles which sort of overlap with others. And you do need somebody in the middle, and that is, if I play any role, which is to constantly articulate that this is what we're doing to banish hierarchy. Because I think hierarchy is the thing that constantly undermines us. Because with hierarchy, there comes a lot of ego and a lot of desire either to take the praise and benefit for whatever is being done, to offload the cause for anything that is going wrong rather than collectively dealing with things. So I think that's, it's changing that ethos. And we've changed from being a very masculine company to being one that's probably much more feminine now. And I don't know whether that's partly in reflection of that sort of flattening of the organizational structure.”
2023-03-16 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · ‘The Goliath is Amazon’: after 100 years, Barnes & Noble wants to go back to its indie roots · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I'm very unhouse trained as a corporate person. I had my own business for a very, very long time, and I still run this one in the same way that I do my own. And I have a lot of people who I speak to. Lot but fairly informally, and I think it's all about conversation, constant engagement, and I think everything, everybody's overlapping. I see our org chart is not some sort of hierarchical structure. I think it's something much more like a solar system.”
2023-03-16 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · ‘The Goliath is Amazon’: after 100 years, Barnes & Noble wants to go back to its indie roots · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT