Recognizing competition from digital competitors Amazon and Apple, bookseller Barnes & Noble has announced it will close 1/3 of its stores at a rate of 20 stores a year for the next decade. This hardly comes as a surprise as tablets and e-readers like the Apple iPad and Amazon’s Kindle Fire become increasingly ubiquitous, and digital continues to encroach on print markets. The strategy is expected to increase demand for Barnes & Noble’s Nook e-readers, which saw shrinking sales last quarter.
Tag: books
Best of ’09: How social media can save books
From our 2009 best-of the IPG Lab blog series:
Social media has infiltrated the hemispheres of today’s society by embedding itself into the framework of business interactions, personal relationships, mobile distractions, television and other elements that shape our culture. While some situations and technologies adapt quickly to the transparency and hyper-connectedness of social media, other avenues take time to get used to the idea. One such avenue is books.
The publishing industry in general is threatened by the disruptive advancements that social media generates because it changes the structure of writing from a speech to a discussion. But, this doesn’t have to be a negative attribute – this could be what actually saves the publishing industry from a meager future on the new media sidelines. Read more.
