Category: Books

Yes readers love it but Barnes and Noble pushed it. The author, Dan Brown, was largely unknown in the world of publishing. But Doubleday distributed a remarkable 5000 advance reader and review copies. Internal readers in Barnes and Noble loved the story and the bookseller was on board. Advance orders from the store upped the print run from an initial 60,000 to 230,000 copies. Some Barnes and Noble stores hired greeters to tell customers about the novel. The book debuted at number one on The New York Times bestseller list and has held strong ever since.

And why should Barnes and Noble care? Competitive pressures are forcing them to promote their products to greater degree. The company faces low price competition from discounters such as Costco. If your bookstore can’t compete on price, it has to emphasize quality dimensions, such as being a source for new and hot book ideas.

The usual story suggests that price competition prevents the more expensive retailer from offering ancillary services. You could speak to the stereo salesman at the good shop but buy at the cheap shop. But the cheaper the per unit value, the more likely a store can profit from offering bundled services. It is not worth your while to hear about The da Vinci Code in Barnes and Noble and then drive to Wal-Mart to buy it. In other words, expect more concerts at your local book superstore. And expect book superstores to take a growing role in shaping consumer taste.

I read the book and was repulsed, though I will admit to finishing it, for reasons of research obviously.

There are now 6.1 million copies of The da Vinci Code in print, the title is slated to become the fastest-selling non-Harry Potter book ever, surpassing Bridges of Madison County.

Some of the above information is drawn from the March 8 issue of Fortune.

Borders Books and Music is tapping into one of the retail industry’s few remaining new frontiers – underserved urban neighborhoods – with stores in Detroit and Chicago…

Of the two projects, the Detroit store is probably the bigger gamble, if only because of the general absence of retail activity of any kind in the downtown area.

“Retail is lacking in downtown Detroit,” said Charles Maday, the chief executive of Exclusive Realty, a Detroit commercial brokerage firm. “All the retailers left. It’s the only major city that doesn’t have even a hardware store.”

A walk around the downtown area confirms that. It is impossible to buy even a T-shirt in downtown Detroit, let alone necessities like groceries or furniture.

Here is the full article. It is hard to believe there was a time when it was debated whether book superstores are a good thing.

The cynical will note that the project developer is receiving a tax break from the city.

On Wednesday, the Agence France Presse news service reported that author Phil Marso has published (on paper) an antismoking novella for teenagers called “Pa Sage a Taba” (Not Wise to Smoke), composed in the jambalaya of abbreviations, slang, and neologisms that teens worldwide use to send each other text messages online and via cellphone. In English, for example, 2moro is “tomorrow” and YYSSW is “Yeah, yeah, sure, sure, whatever.” So in Marso’s book, when a detective asks the villain, “6 j t’aspRge d’O 2 kologne histoar 2 partaG le odeurs ke tu me fe subir?”, what he’s actually saying (in translation) is, “What if I spray you with cologne so you can share the smells you make me suffer?” A glossary of terms is included.

Marso, who admits that his book may “annoy the guardians of the French language,” says he wrote the book as a public service announcement.

Here is the original link. The constraint, of course, is that you wish to send and receive information as rapidly as possible, given your limited typing or punching speed. If you are interested, why not try some Shakespeare?

“Luv Loks Nt Wiv T iis
Bt wiv T Mnd”

Translation: “Love looks not with the eyes
But with the mind,”

William Shakespeare

Or this one?

“2 b or nt 2 b, thts de qn”

r v upset now? I think it’s pretty neat. And to keep you busy, here is a short glossary, TMMV stands for “Your Mileage May Vary,” which refers to different luck, POS stands for “Parents Over Shoulder,” B4N.

Here is a left-wing list. Here is a National Review list, with Hayek and Robert Conquest near the top. Here are two Random House lists. The critics elevate Henry Adams, William James, and Booker T. Washington. The readers favor Ayn Rand, L. Ron Hubbard, and John Lott. The readers’ list has all kind of libertarian books, including David Boaz and Tibor Machan. Thanks to the ever-interesting www.politicaltheory.info for the link. All of the lists make for fun browsing, especially once you start thinking about the contrasts.

Judith Chevalier and Dina Mayzlin have studied the impact of consumer reviews of books on word of mouth and subsequent sales, here is their NBER working paper, here is another draft. They find the following:

1. Most consumer reviews of books on Amazon.com and Barnesandnoble.com are very positive.

2. The reviews at Amazon are longer and more extensive. They are also more critical on average.

3. Better reviews on one site boost relative sales. The use of two sites gives us a controlled experiment to determine that word of mouth does indeed help authors rather than being a mere side effect of higher sales.

4. A bad review hurts you more than a good review helps you.

5. It remains to be seen whether allowing consumer reviews increases aggregate sales or simply shifts around sales to more suitable titles. Even a shifting affect, however, may increase consumer loyalty to the on-line site. If you know that Amazon helps you discover good books, you may be more likely to buy from Amazon.

My advice: I don’t put much stock in how favorable the Amazon reviews are, whether I am buying books, movies, or music. (I am most likely to buy music from Amazon.) This well-known example is one reason to distrust the reviews, although I think bad taste is more common than masquerades. Instead I look at how many reviews have been generated. I take this as a kind of sufficient statistic for how much passion the item has generated. Since I am at the tails of just about any distribution of taste, and since most cultural products disappoint in any case, look for something that creates a spark in people. I then see some chance of finding a product that I truly love. This advice will sometimes steer you wrong, but a little added intelligence will allow you to make the necessary adjustments.

By the way, there is now a whole blog, www.corante.com/many on how collaborative web enterprises shape society. Clay Shirky writes for it regularly, it is highly recommended.

Thanks to Eric Crampton for the pointer to the article.

Vadim Volkov’s “Violent Entrepreneurs” has an interesting discussion of protection rackets in the Russian economy. An interesting point is that Russian business and oranized crime have become symbiotic. Once a gang provides “protection” to a business, the gang considers the business their “turf” and becomes dependent on the income from the business. Eventually, gangsters come to guarantee transactions of the businesses they protect, a sort of underwriter that facilitates business. Volkov points out that a later wave of ex-army “protectors” came to provide a more legitimate, institutionalized form of protection against these earlier gangsters, which in turn opens the door for the reclaiming of the Russian state’s monopoly over violence. Robert Cottrell has a nice discussion in his New York Review of Books essay.