Barnes and Noble to close many stores

[RichardX]

Just reading that B&N is closing about 1/3 of their stores. They claim the electronic books sales are hurting them! That's a bit hard to understand since they sell them and presumably profit from those sales. My local B&N is so crowded on the weekends that you can barely find a place to park. This sounds more like putting people out of work to sqeeze the profits out of the company and move to entirely on-line sales. Simply making more money (i.e. greed) rather than going out of business.

[Todash]

Agreed. Crappy rationale. It's not e-books--e-books should actually be quite profitable as they don't take up storage or display space, have no printing costs, and cannot be ruined by natural disasters, fires, etc., and thus do not need to be insured--but I bet they are seeing more profits from online sales that aren't dinged by brick-and-mortar overhead ... but saying that would mean admitting to unrestrained greed. (http://www.stephenking.com/forums/newreply.php?p=563502&noquote=1)

[Shasta]

That makes me very sad. I LOVE B&N way too much. They need to stop pushing the Nook so dang hard.

[Ebdim9th]

I'm counting on a pirater's relative laziness to not want to scan an entire library or what have you to pass free pdf copies around online. It happens, but not nearly so much as with other media. But now with the increase in ebooks that roadblock is being much more rapidly removed....

[king family fan]

I find this sad. I love the good ole printed, published hands on books.

[GNTLGNT]

...yep, this doth suck with gusto...

[mstay]

I find this sad. I love the good ole printed, published hands on books.

Me too. :sad: I have a kindle and I like it but there is nothing like cracking open a real book!