Among those most avidly watching the future prospects for Barnes & Noble now that the mega-chain has put itself up for sale must number a good many publishing executives.  To put matters in perspective: for many trade publishers, Barnes & Noble could be roughly 20-30 percent of retail sales revenue.  At one point, it was the single largest customer for most trade publishers.  However, over the last few years, Barnes & Noble has watched its market share diminish while Amazon grew.  Deciding to follow in Amazon’s step of putting money into its own e-reader did not help matters.  In a matter of fact tone, one financial analyst is quoted in a Reuters article saying that Barnes and Noble is too big with too many employees and too many stores.

I’ve been pondering my ambivalent feelings about this news.  I am not necessarily a fan of the chain retailer, but I find it hard to complain too much without being a hypocrite.  In my many years of spending evenings examining front table displays, various category layouts and selections, I’ve found enough titles of interest to spend considerable dollars at the chain.

My complaints about Barnes & Noble in the past have not really been about the retail store experience so much as its overweening power in the industry.  At one point, the fiction category buyer at Barnes & Noble was named the most influential person in the book industry.  Yet, I don’t think that any one buyer should shape what the majority of Americans read.  The growth of Barnes & Noble with its predatory locations, meant to feed off the existing readership for an older independent bookstore right across the street or so forth, meant less variety and more of the same.  It’s hard to avoid such homogenizing effects when one buyer in each category is trying to decide for the whole nation, whether a store is located in mid-town New York or in a strip mall in North Carolina.

What we think of now as the big advance book is a result of the symbiotic relationship between publishing and national retail outlets such as Barnes & Noble, Borders, Costco (yes, Costco), Hudson News, and Amazon.  A focused retail launch with a few buyers combined with a publicity campaign also focused on national media became the breeding grounds for the mega-hit, the title whose raison d’etre is its ability to be sold in large numbers anywhere in America, irrespective of prose style, sentence structure, intellectual merit, or provocative ideas.

So I hesitate to defend Barnes & Noble against Amazon…yet, somehow, this behemoth’s falling sales seems a portent of doom for printed books.  Inasmuch as articles quote independent booksellers who crow at their own survival during Barnes & Noble’s less stellar moment, the battle between Barnes & Noble and independent bookstores seem less important now.  The fact is that Barnes & Noble has already helped bankrupted many independent booksellers and replaced such booksellers to be the only bookstore in small towns.  If Barnes & Noble continues closing bookstores, it will diminish the presence of brick and mortar bookstores (and therefore books) in everyday American life.