From the Financial Post:
Indigo Books and Music is expanding into the competitive U.S. market at a time when many retailers are scaling back on square footage.
The Toronto-based company, which has managed to mitigate the effects of Amazon on its core categories over the last decade, will open its first store next summer in New Jersey.
“We are going to open three to five stores over two years and test the market response to the concept,” chief executive officer Heather Reisman told a conference call with analysts and investors on Thursday. “We will definitely open a couple before making any commitments (to further growth plans).”
Link to the rest at the Financial Post and thanks to Nate at The Digital Reader for the tip.
Any connection to HP Indigo, the press of choice for POD printing? I know some people have kicked around the idea of in-store POD but I’ve never seen anything come of it. Unless these folks are doing it. Are they?
Even as they’re pumping out more and more total books each year, the publishers are obviously unaware that space for books is decreasing little by little at the same time. Indigo is moving into the US not to sell books, but to hawk toys, and lifestyle and general merchandise.
Oh, the publishing establishment is well aware of their shelf space losses. They certainly whine about it enough.
They’re just unwilling to spend even one red cent to preserve their distribution channels.
(Witness their unwillingness to help independents in any way.)
They just keep dreaming about somebody else risking their money to save them.
Once upon a time B&N considered expanding into Canada but Indigo mustered a portion of their political influence to…dissuade them.
Given another year or two, they might be a candidate to buy B&N’s carcass.
Why buy it? What is there to buy, really, that Indigo doesn’t already have? Logistics? It’s probably cheaper to expand their own. Real Estate? As B&N abandons stores, just move into them, assuming they are suitable, and if they are not then Indigo isn’t saddled with a lease they don’t want. Otherwise I’m sure the landlords would be happy to have them. Branding? I don’t imagine that’s worth a whole screaming lot. It certainly doesn’t seem to be doing much for B&N at the moment. Nook? Indigo has Kobo, which frankly looks like it has more staying power than the Nook.
B&N doesn’t own their real estate, they don’t own their inventory, their human capital can’t make money and their web IP isn’t worth the price of a cup of coffee. I can see Indigo trying to buy Nook accounts, and that’s about it.
Their website isn’t just worthless — it’s actually losing them customers (and publishers).
I just put out a book for someone, publication date 10/31. Ingram got it to B&N on 10/30, where it was marked as available for pre-order (so far, so good).
Today, 11/3, the print book is still marked as available for pre-order, publication date 10/31. This is a hands-off situation for me — put it up in Ingram, B&N offers it automatically (but does it wrong).
On the Nook side, they currently have a replace-epub-file bug so bad that they have an official workaround to fool the system into taking an epub file as a replacement for a bogus edited manuscript, since the normal process only works intermittently.
Image if you are a first-time indie publisher on that platform.
I didn’t say they’d be paying much.
But…
Infrastructure:
B&N has it’s own independent book distribution system and warehouses. Probably worth more than the total company’s paper value.
Contracts:
Canadian and US contracts are separate and distinct. Often different publishers involved for the same title. Better to buy existing contracts than negotiate new ones.
Business climate:
US cultural products aren’t shielded from competition like in Canada.
Indigo’s experience and influence won’t travel easily.
More importantly, Amazon won’t be as handicapped. Starting from scratch puts Indigo behind Amazon online and in B&M –
deployments.
It’s not a terribly good idea to start with but starting from scratch would be even worse.
Sub-headline in OP – “The retailer said it saw double-digit growth in the general merchandise business and particularly strong sales in its toy and lifestyle categories”