Selasa, 07 Mei 2013

The End of Borders and the Future of Books??

many experts predict the future books will not be sold, following an article in Businessweek will describe the current condition of the book.
In September, just days before Borders Group met its end, one of the chain’s last retail holdouts, in the Nashville suburb of Brentwood, Tenn., was being liquidated, with prices slashed by 90 percent. It was difficult in the stark surroundings not to think of a battle waged and lost, of the armies of Kindle owners and e-book peddlars off celebrating victory while all around lay the carnage—two copies of a Paul Reiser memoir, the suspect Greg Mortensen book Stones into Schools, a still-brimming manga section. A couple of professional scavengers picked over the DVDs, cataloging them with their own scanners. Empty shelves were being stacked in the store’s growing hollows and themselves tagged with prices ranging from $25 to $50. The defeat felt so stunning because it seemed so nearly complete, not just for Borders but also for bookselling in general. A two-story Borders in Nashville proper, about 10 miles north, had shut its doors four months earlier. In November 2010, a 30,000-square-foot outlet of a bookstore chain called Davis-Kidd Booksellers, in business in the city for 30 years, had closed as well. With the shuttering of the Brentwood Borders, there wasn’t a store within 22 miles of Nashville that specialized in new books.

Nashville might seem like an archetype of the death-of-the-bookstore-everywhere narrative, but its story turns out to be different. The cashier who checked me out at the Brentwood store, Nancy DeVille, had transferred from the Nashville location when it closed, and she said both outlets were constantly packed with regulars drawn to the sight, feel, and smell of books. David Beddow, a supervisor at the Nashville store from 2005 to 2008, remembered costumed crowds snaking around the corner for the release of the latest Harry Potter. He said revenue there had actually increased during his tenure, from $5.5 million to around $7 million a year.

Despite rising online book sales and digital downloads and the Great Recession, bookstores in the area were profitable—right up until they closed. Even Davis-Kidd, locally owned until the Joseph-Beth Booksellers chain purchased it in 1997, had been solvent, undone not by the collapse of the local market but by the bankruptcy of the parent company. (The local Barnes & Noble, at the Opry Mills mall, was closed after a 2010 flood.) Nashville lost its bookstores not because people there had abandoned physical books and retailers. For the most part, it lost them remotely, at the corporate level.

Nashville’s story is not unique. When Borders declared bankruptcy in February, more than 200 of its 400 outlets were still “highly profitable,” says its final chief executive officer, Mike Edwards. There’s no question that the book industry is in flux, with digital sales last year making up about $900 million of the $28 billion-a-year market and increasing fast. But a sizable portion of the book business is still taking place in actual stores. Barnes & Noble (BKS), the nation’s largest book retailer, hasn’t been forced to close its 700 locations. Thus, it wasn’t Amazon (AMZN) —or Amazon alone—that sank Borders. “When there’s a massive transition in an industry, the strong players make it through to the other side,” explains David A. Schick, a retail analyst who covers booksellers for Stifel Nicolaus Equity Research (SF). “What gets caught up in the change are the weaker players.”

For the past decade and a half, Borders seems to have been in the business of making mistakes. Consider the company’s efforts to develop an online presence. Amazon was launched in 1995, and Barnes & Noble responded with its own website two years later. It took Borders another year to get started online, and the venture quickly lost tens of millions of dollars. In 2001, Borders made a deal with Amazon to run all of its online business—a partnership, in retrospect, that comes across as tragically shortsighted. Danielle Fox, an equity analyst then covering Borders for J.P. Morgan, says many investors were actually excited about the idea of outsourcing Borders’s online sales to Amazon, which they believed would allow the physical retailer to focus on running physical stores. Amazingly, Borders wouldn’t end the Amazon deal and launch its own website until 2008.

Borders managed to be on the wrong end of several upheavals. It invested heavily in CDs and DVDs just as music and movies were going digital; in 2006, nearly a fifth of all Borders revenue came from music sales. And though this would be the company’s last year of profitability, it continued to expand, building huge stores of 25,000 and 30,000 square feet right into the Internet boom. Sales per square foot in its superstores plummeted from an average of $261 in 1997 to $173 by 2009. Borders even purchased a stationery company, Paperchase, in 2004, as handwritten correspondence withered. And then there’s the company’s entry into digital books: If you didn’t know Borders had an e-reader called Kobo, you’re not alone.

Borders’s demise, though, has as much to do with real estate as any metaphysical market shift. During the superstore boom of the 1990s, Barnes & Noble paid close attention to where it put its outlets, which were usually in prime locations. Many of the profitable Borders stores were also centrally located, but numerous industry observers characterized the company as grasping for growth. It had a policy of picking “B locations,” says Fox, and trying to turn these sites into “A economics.” Leases on its stores were also “unproductively long,” adds CEO Edwards. As the company’s fortunes turned, it was difficult for Borders to buy its way out of leases that still had seven and eight years remaining on them.

Analysts predict that Barnes & Noble will have to shrink the number and size of its stores, and it hasn’t tried to gobble up many of the vacated Borders locations—70 percent of which, Barnes & Noble says, were within five miles of one of its outlets. (Barnes & Noble did purchase the remainder of Borders’s Web business.) But so far Barnes & Noble is holding on to its stores, focusing on e-books and filling its outlets with high-profit-margin nonbook items, such as educational toys and games.

The one thing Borders did have going for it was its huge selection, yet even that wasn’t worth as much as the company thought. An average Borders superstore stocked around 140,000 titles at immense cost, but if a customer craves selection, no store can compete with the long tail of the Internet. Maybe more crucially for Borders, the assortment of titles that provided the key to its identity didn’t give it a competitive edge over Barnes & Noble. Mark Evans, a director of merchandising strategy and analytics at Borders until 2009, says that the company surveyed customers to understand why Barnes & Noble, with its slimmer selection, continued to clobber them in terms of year-over-year growth, average sales per store, and even the number of books sold at each location. “Customers didn’t notice our larger assortment of books,” Evans laments. “They didn’t care.”

The Borders story began in Ann Arbor, where Louis and Tom Borders opened their first store in 1971. Students at the University of Michigan, the brothers developed a then-revolutionary system to track sales and inventory; for years Borders executives called it the company’s “secret sauce.” Their “Book Inventory System” could oversee the flow of a huge number of titles broken into thousands of different subject categories across multiple stores. By evaluating sales data, the system could understand local tastes and predict demand in specific communities. Initially, the brothers hoped to sell the program to independent stores across the country, but bookshop owners proved resistant, asserting that they—and not some punch-card computer—intimately understood their clientele. Instead, Borders opened additional stores, first in suburban Detroit, Atlanta, and Indianapolis, ultimately forcing out many of those reluctant independents. By the 1990s it had stores all over the country, and together with Barnes & Noble controlled 40 percent of the bookselling market.

Early on, Borders offered the knowledge and the feel of the independents, with distinctive architecture, comfy chairs, reading nooks, and such. The stores carefully screened and trained employees, paying them relatively well and offering health benefits and a generous monthly merchandise credit, among other perks. For many years and in many communities, a Borders was the only place a reader could find certain literary journals, books from academic presses, and new fiction and nonfiction from authors who weren’t bestsellers.

From 1999 onward, though, Borders was headed by six different CEOs, none of whom stayed long enough to make the company work. In 2008, Borders launched 14 “concept stores,” as part of what it called “a new shopping experience.” Customers were expected to travel to these massive stores to use download stations for books and music, which just isn’t how e-commerce works. Edwards says that by the time he became CEO in 2010, Borders had already lost “the founders’ DNA, why the company was successful in the first place.” He blames the 1992 acquisition by Kmart—which he feels ran Borders like a general merchandising company—and a three-year stock buyback that began in 2005 and cost the company $600 million. (Kmart spun off the bookseller in 1995, when Borders went public.) No contacted analysts thought there was anything improper in the stock buyback—online sales had seemed to plateau at the time, and the company had generated more money than it did in each of the preceding five years. But the book industry runs on an ancient credit system, with booksellers at any moment indebted to publishers for more than the value of the books on their shelves. (At the time of its bankruptcy, Borders owed Hachette $36.9 million, Simon & Schuster $33.8 million, Random House $33.5 million, and HarperCollins $25.8 million, to name just a few of its publishing creditors.) In arrears and undercapitalized even in good times, Borders lost with the stock buyback the slim buffer it had. Edwards says the company was too saddled with debt to navigate properly. It had no capital to invest in online retailing or to separate its good stores from its bad ones.

Maybe most stunning is how Borders proved incapable of upgrading the systems and processes it had pioneered. In 1992, Borders merged with Waldenbooks. For years afterward, the two chains continued to run separately, each with its own system for ordering books, monitoring inventory, and restocking shelves. The grand effort to unify the two operations, called Common Systems, never happened. Mark Evans, who oversaw a team trying to function within these conflicting networks, says Borders simply couldn’t design the necessary operating system. What eventually was implemented, after millions of dollars and countless hours, Evans calls “worse than useless. It destroyed the Walden chain.” He had previously worked at the discount chain Bookstop when Barnes & Noble acquired it in 1991. While Bookstop was much smaller than Walden, Evans says a successful consolidation of operations occurred almost immediately. So much for Borders’s secret sauce.

In Nashville, retailers are springing up to fill the bookstore void. In November, Vanderbilt moved its university bookstore into the 27,000 square feet formerly occupied by Borders. Just a mile away, BookMan BookWoman, a used bookstore, has started stocking new titles, mostly New York Times bestsellers or books by local authors.

Novelist and local resident Ann Patchett, author of Bel Canto and State of Wonder, will open a bookstore in Nashville in November. Called Parnassus, after the Greek mountain that is the mythological home of poetry and learning, Patchett’s store will be a 10th the size of the average Borders. “I want to do it brilliantly at 2,500 square feet,” she says, “not struggle in something the size of Macy’s.” Like many others in Nashville, she was waiting for someone to do something about the city’s bookstore drought. Eventually she took it upon herself to act. People have thanked her while she’s out walking the dog. “They say they get it, that they’ll be there,” Patchett says. “There’s something about the whole trajectory here—we know we lost something valuable, and so there’s been an incredible amount of support for what seems like a second chance.”

Small independents such as Parnassus may actually stand to gain the most from Borders’s passing. Plenty of shoppers don’t want to give a digital download to a niece for her birthday and often don’t think far enough ahead to order a book through Amazon for an upcoming trip. Many simply like the experience of going to a bookstore. Jeff Green, president of Jeff Green Partners, a retail-consulting firm based in Phoenix, believes bookstores of around 2,500 square feet offer a perfectly viable—if only modestly profitable—business model. John Rubin runs Above the Treeline, an Ann Arbor–based company that provides sales and inventory analytics as well as digital catalogs to booksellers. According to point-of-sale data he’s compiled, business at locally owned stores has, in fact, held steady in recent years. And while advances in technology have certainly made hardcover books a bit passé, they have also enabled small stores to operate far more efficiently. “It’s the only retail industry I can think of that will go full circle, back to the way it originally was,” says Green. “From the small-village bookstore to the big-box retailer and then back again. That doesn’t ever happen in retail.”

Patchett pointed out that this cycle has contributed to Parnassus in a real and somewhat poetic way. Her partner in the venture, Karen Hayes, a former sales representative at Random House, traveled the South in the past months buying up bookshelves from the Borders that were going out of business. Says Patchett: “We’re building our store from the bones of the superstores.”

Austen is a Bloomberg Businessweek contributor.

Minggu, 07 April 2013

Karapan Sapi Tanpa Kekerasan

Karapan Sapi Tanpa Kekerasan“. Yang di sebut sebagai kembalinya Karapan Sapi pada tradisi awal Karapan Sapi yang tidak menyiksa Sapi.
Umumnya kita ketahui disetiap perlombaan Karapan Sapi, dua pasangan sapi selalu mendapatkan “Siksaan” fisik dari sang pemilik maupun dari “tokang tongkok” (joki). Siksaan berupa dilumurinya badan sapi dengan aneka macam cairan panas (seperti Air Cabai, Balsem, dan Spirtus) serta penggunaan Rekeng (alat pemukul dengan paku) yang digunakan saat sedang memacu Sapi.

Dan semua model penyiksaan tersebut, sebenarnya tidak ada diawal kelahiran Karapan Sapi itu sendiri. Setdiaknya begitulah yang disampaikan salah satu tokoh Karapan Sapi asal Bangkalan, yang menyelenggarakan kegaitan Karapan Sapi Tanpa Kekerasan di Pulau Sapudi waktu itu.

Tokoh Karapan Sapi yang telah puluhan tahun melestarikan budaya Karapan Sapi tersebut bahkan mengungkapkan tidak ada perbedaan mencolok antara Karapan Sapi dengan Kekerasan dan Karapan Sapi Tanpa Kekerasan, selain penyiksaaan terhadap Sapi itu sendiri. Dan sepanjang pengamatan saya selama 2 hari di Pulau Sapudi, memang tidak ada perbedaan sama sekali. Setiap pasangan sapi yang dilombakan bergerak dengan cepat dan Saling Kejar sama halnya dengan Karapan Sapi yang masih menggunakan Rekeng dan Menyiksa Sapi

Sabtu, 16 Februari 2013

Hanafing : “Lini Tengah PMU Bagus, Lini Belakang Masih Lemah”


Bangkalan – Mungkin sedikit yang tahu, saat laga home Persepam Madura United (PMU) melawan Persiram Raja Ampat kamis kemarin (14/02), Hanafing ikut hadir menonton di Stadion Gelora Bangkalan (SGB). Laki-laki yang sempat mengasuh Bangkalan Selection bulan desember kemarin ini bersama beberapa panpel pertandingan. Ia berdiri di dekat tribun VIP.
Hanafing mengaku dirinya memang menyempatkan hadir ke SGB untuk melihat langsung laga home PMU. Apalagi, saat ini di skuad PMU ada dua pemain yang pernah menjadi anak asuhnya. Yakni Kristian Edelmund (eks PSIM) dan Ali Khadafi (eks PSM Makassar). Hanafing memang pernah menukangi PSM saat kompetisi musim 2009-2010. Sementara di PSIM, ia menjadi pelatih musim kemarin divisi utama 2012.
“Dua-duanya (Edelmund dan Khadafi) adalah anak saya waktu di PSIM dan PSM. Secara kualitas keduanya bagus”,komentar Hanafing tentang Edelmund dan Khadafi yang kini masuk dalam skuad inti PMU. Hanafing memang mengetahui betul karakter dan kualitas Edelmund maupun Khadafi.
Ia juga mengaku, saat ini memang belum melatih klub lagi. Eks pemain Timnas Indonesia ini lebih banyak beraktifitas sebagai coach instructor atau instruktur pelatih. Bahkan bulan oktober kemarin, pelatih berlisensi A AFC ini, menjadi instruktur di Laos. “Itu kegiatan saya sekarang. Sehari-harinya ya saya di Surabaya bersama keluarga”,tuturnya.
Sayang dia enggan memberi penilaian terkait gaya permaian PMU secara keseluruhan. Menurutnya, dia kurang pantas menilai kinerja pelatih lain. “Janganlah. Tidak enak menilai kinerja pelatih lain. Daniel Rukito itu juga sahabat karib saya”,elaknya seraya tersenyum.
Namun dia sempat memberi argument sedikit tentang lini belakang PMU saat melawan Persiram kemarin. Menurut Hanafing, pertahanan PMU masih keropos dan mudah ditembus lawan. “Beruntung striker Persiram nomer 99 (Daryoush) itu tidak memiliki skill memadai. Dia hanya mengandalkan tinggi badan saja”,ujarnya tentang Daryoush, pemain asing Persiram asal Iran yang kemarin mencetak gol lewat sundulan tersebut.
Eks pemain Persebaya dan Mitra Surabaya di era Ligina tahun 1990-an ini, memang sempat mengarsiteki Bangkalan Selection. Ia ditunjuk menjadi pelatih tim tersebut guna menjalani turnamen segitiga bersama PMU dan Gresik United bulan desember lalu. Hebatnya, Bangkalan Selection sebagai klub amatir saat itu menjadi juara turnamen

Jumat, 18 November 2011

Ayo Ramaikan Madura di Twitter

Kami dari liputanmadura.com mengundang rekan-rekan semu yang asli dari madura untuk bersama-sama menuliskan #madura disetiap twit yang kita kirim :-). Ayo kapan lagi madura.

TKI Asal Pamekasan di kabarkan Tewas di Malaysia

Pamekasan, Madura. Seorang Tenaga Kerja Indonesia (TKI) asal Pamekasan, Madura tewas tertabrak mobil di tempat kerjanya di Arab Saudi. TKI naas ini bernama Sittiyah (43), warga Dusun Paninggin, Desa Pademawu Barat, Kecamatan Pademawu, Pamekasan.

Dikabarkan, Sittiyah meninggal tiga hari lalu, dalam sebuah kecelakaan lalu lintas di tempat kerjanya di Riyadh, Arab Saudi. Menurut familinya, Baihaki, TKW ini berangkat ke Arab Saudi sejak 18 bulan lalu melalui Perusahaan Jasa Tenaga Kerja Indonesia (PJTKI) PT Bagues Bersaudara di Jakarta.

TKI yang ditinggal mati saudaranya Abd Fani 4 tahun lalu ini, mengalami kecelakaan saat hendak berbelanja di depan rumah majikannya. "Informasinya Sittiyah ini menyeberang jalan dengan tiba-tiba, tanpa memperhatikan kendaraan yang melintas di jalan itu," ucap Baihaki.

Pihak keluarga korban mengaku belum mengetahui kapan jenazah Sittiyah ini dipulangkan ke Indonesia. "Kabar terakhir yang kami terima masih menunggu 10 hari lagi, karena berkas administrasinya masih diurus," ucap Baihaki, Jumat (18/11/2011).

Kabar kematian TKI Sittiyah ini baru diterima pihak keluarga pada Jumat sekitar pukul 02.30 WIB dini hari dari perjusahaan jasa tenaga kerja yang memberangkatkannya. "Informasinya Sittiyah ini sudah menerima gaji 4 kali senilai Rp3,5 juta," ujarnya.

Kasus TKI asal Pamekasan yang meninggal dunia di tempat kerjanya di Arab Saudi ini merupakan kali kedua sepanjang 2011 ini. Pada Juli lalu, TKI bernama Ismail asal Desa Pakong, Kecamatan Pakong juga meninggal dunia di Arab Saudi, karena kecelakaan kerja. Namun, jenazah TKI bernama Ismail yang meninggal dunia akibat kecelakaan kerja itu tidak dipulangkan ke kampung halamannya melainkan dikebumikan di Arab Saudi.

Kepala Dinsosnakertrans Pamekasan Akmalul Firdaus mengaku, akan mengurus kelengkapan administrasi TKI meninggal dunia ini kepada PJTKI yang memberangkatkannya untuk mendapatkan santunan.


Sumber: Kompas

Kamis, 17 November 2011

BNI Segera Turunkan Suku Bunga Kredit

PT Bank Negara Indonesia (BNI) akan segera menurunkan suku bunga kredit mengikuti penurunan BI rate yang sejak Oktober lalu sudah turun 0,75 persen menjadi 6,00 persen.

"Suku bunga kredit pasti akan disesuaikan turun, karena dengan BI rate turun maka biaya dana juga turun. Besarannya sekitar 0,25 persen sampai 0,50 persen," kata Direktur BNI Adi Setianto di Jakarta, Kamis.

Adi mengatakan, penurunan suku bunga kredit akan dilakukan sekitar 3-4 bulan mendatang menunggu beberapa kredit besar yang jatuh tempo, sehingga penyesuaian bisa dilakukan dengan mudah.

Menurutnya, suku bunga kredit di BNI trennya sejak beberapa waktu lalu sudah menurun, dengan terus melakukan efisiensi operasional seperti memperbanyak transaksi e-chanel dengan internet, SMS, dan memperbanyak fitur pembayaran di ATM sehingga mengurangi biaya overhead.

Mengenai keluhan BI, bahwa net interest margin (NIM) bank yang masih tetap tinggi rata-rata 6,07 persen, sehingga suku bunga kredit sulit turun, Adi mengatakan hal itu juga terkait model perbankan di Indonesia yang masih tradisional.

"Nasabah kita masih membutuhkan kantor bank untuk bertransaksi dan itu menambah biaya overhead, selain itu pendapatan feebase masih kecil dan tidak bisa menutupi biaya operasional," katanya.

Untuk tahun depan, dalam Rencana Bisnis Bank (RBB) 2012 yang akan diajukan ke BI Desember mendatang, BNI akan menyampaikan rencana penurunan suku bunga kredit itu dengan beberapa langkah efisiensi yang akan dilakukan seperti dengan memperbanyak transaksi e-chanel.

Bank Indonesia akan mengeluarkan benchmark atau patokan terbaik di tiga komponen suku bunga pinjaman untuk memaksa perbankan menurunkan suku bunga pinjaman yang selisihnya masih sangat tinggi dibanding suku bunga tabungan.

Sebelumnya, Direktur Direktorat Riset Ekonomi dan Kebijakan Moneter BI Perry Warjiyo mengatakan, selisih atau spread suku bunga perbankan di Indonesia sangat tinggi yaitu rata-rata 6,07 persen pada September lalu yang membuat suku bunga pinjaman sulit diturunkan.

"Spread suku bunga perbankan masih terlalu tinggi. Kita akan coba menurunkannya dengan membuat benchmark pada komponen suku bunga pinjaman yaitu di overhead cost, profit margin dan risk premium," kata Perry seperti dikutip Antara.

Menurutnya, dari empat komponen suku bunga pinjaman yang harus diumumkan bank dalam Suku Bunga Dasar Kredit (SBDK), selama ini hanya komponen biaya dana sebesar 6,5 persen (rata-rata) yang sudah mengalami penurunan dalam beberapa tahun ini, sehingga BI tidak akan memberikan patokan terbaik untuk menurunkan komponen ini.

Namun untuk biaya overhead, yang saat ini rata-rata sebesar 2,9 persen, justru mengalami peningkatan sejak 2001 yang rata-rata sebesar dua persen. Begitu pula mengenai profit margin yang rata-rata 1,7 persen mengalami kenaikan dibanding sebelumnya sekitar 1,5 persen, dan komponen risk premium yang saat ini rata-rata 1,3 persen, atau naik dari posisi sebelumnya 1,1 persen. (tk)

Warung Amboina, Selera Madura

Susasan Di dalam Warung
Menu Andalan

Warung AMBOINA

Para penikmat kuliner Madura, saat ini kita akan membicarakan sebuah warung makan yang "terkenal" di Bangkalan selain Warung Bebek Sinjay. Nama warung ini "Amboina", entah kenapa namanya seperti itu namun yang jelas menu yang ditawarkan "Nyaman Onggu" :-). Dengan harga yang relatif murah dan lokasi yang cukup mudah diakses "Warung Amboina" wajib anda kunjungi.

bagian luar
Lokasi Warung Amboina sendiri terletak di sebelah utara masjid agung Bangkalan kurang lebih 20 meter sebelum lampu merah. Menu andalannya Nasi Petis dan Nasi Campur selain itu ada Nasi Rawon dan Soto.

Tower E-KTP Patah, Proses Perekaman Sempat Terhenti

Tower pengiriman data e-KTP di Kecamatan Pasean, Kabupaten Pamekasan, Jawa Timur, Rabu (16/11), roboh.

Tiang pemancar itu menimpa atap salah satu ruang di komplek Kantor Kecamatan Pasean hingga sebagian gentingnya hancur.

Peristiwa yang sempat membuat panik warga yang tengah antre perekaman e-KTP itu juga sempat membuat proses perekaman KTP online itu terhenti.

Menurut warga, tiang pemancar setinggi 7 meter itu tiba-tiba patah dan roboh menimpa atap ruang yang ditempati Unit Pengelola Kegiatan (UPK) Program Nasional Pemberdayaan Masyarakat (PNPM).

"Tidak ada angin ataupun hujan. Tower itu tiba-tiba roboh hingga kami yang tengah antre perekaman KTP sempat panik," kata Iskandar, di Pasean