Conventional wisdom in the business world is that brick-and-mortar retail (and brick-and-mortar books in particular) is a declining business, because it can’t compete effectively with online stores. So I’m really skeptical of whether this business is financial viable to survive without continuous infusions of external cash, let alone with enough slack to do things that aren’t profit motivated.
What that means practice is you haven’t actually pinned the cost down to the right order of magnitude. Neither of the business sales you mentioned is comparable; B&N is an online store and an eReader brand, Books-A-Million was sold in 2014 and since then appears to have diversified into a lot of other businesses. More importantly, the main cost isn’t the sale price, it’s taking responsibility for the operational losses. This doesn’t tell me what order of magnitude that cost will be.
Building a publisher could be a thing, but owning this retail chain is strictly negative for that. You definitely aren’t getting the relevant trademarks out of the deal and will not be able to publish under the brand, ever, unless you separately buy the trademarks from the 2007 buyer, and if you’re going that route you’re shopping for a publishing house not a bookstore chain.
(Copy-pasted from pre-publication comments on a Google Docs doc)
Conventional wisdom in the business world is that brick-and-mortar retail (and brick-and-mortar books in particular) is a declining business, because it can’t compete effectively with online stores. So I’m really skeptical of whether this business is financial viable to survive without continuous infusions of external cash, let alone with enough slack to do things that aren’t profit motivated.
What that means practice is you haven’t actually pinned the cost down to the right order of magnitude. Neither of the business sales you mentioned is comparable; B&N is an online store and an eReader brand, Books-A-Million was sold in 2014 and since then appears to have diversified into a lot of other businesses. More importantly, the main cost isn’t the sale price, it’s taking responsibility for the operational losses. This doesn’t tell me what order of magnitude that cost will be.
Building a publisher could be a thing, but owning this retail chain is strictly negative for that. You definitely aren’t getting the relevant trademarks out of the deal and will not be able to publish under the brand, ever, unless you separately buy the trademarks from the 2007 buyer, and if you’re going that route you’re shopping for a publishing house not a bookstore chain.
(Copy-pasted from pre-publication comments on a Google Docs doc)
Good point the operating losses could add up to arbitrarily high amounts.
Not being able to publish under the brand also seems like maybe a deal breaker.