rfmcdonald | [LINK] "Will Barnes And Noble Save Itself By Selling Alcohol?" (Reply)

io9's Andrew Liptak notes that American bookstore Barnes & Noble may be interested in selling alcoholic beverages, the better to attract customers and events.

Barnes and Noble is starting to do what a number of smaller booksellers have long realized: it’s not just a destination to get a book off the bookshelf: bookstores are increasingly becoming event locations, sporting a wide range of author signings or other similar types of activities for book lovers.

Alcohol and books have been paired up before: there’s Books & Brews, a brewery and bookstore in Indianapolis, and certainly more than a couple book clubs with beer out there. Barnes and Noble already has some infrastructure set up in their 647 stores with their cafes: adding on beer and wine wouldn’t be a huge step for them.

This probably won’t be a silver bullet for the company, but it is a good, incremental move that could help stave off closure. Getting people in the door and engaging with authors and the shelves is a good step, but the company has deeper issues that they’ll have to solve: namely, by focusing more completely on books, rather than the other things that they’ve brought in to the store in the last decade. Borders, which closed several years ago, had similar issues: and as they struggled to find a way to make ends meet, they looked to things like games and toys, rather than the product that should have defined them.