Nook Failure, Lack of Foot Traffic Could Spell Doom For Barnes & Noble 330
tripleevenfall sends in a story at Yahoo Finance forecasting the end of Barnes & Noble. Quoting:
"The last nationwide book retailer may be writing its final chapter. Barnes & Noble's latest quarterly results show a 7.4% drop in revenues and a $122 million loss for the fourth-quarter of its fiscal year. B&N's disastrous focus on making Nook e-Readers is weighing heavily on the chain's operations. A 17% drop in Nook revenues and stunning $475 million loss for the device division in 2013 are hobbling the company's ability to keep its stores afloat. B&N appears to be cannibalizing itself with branded tablets and cross-platform e-reader applications, which render the stores increasingly irrelevant."
Comment removed (Score:3, Interesting)
this makes me sad (Score:1, Interesting)
This is my favorite retail store. I own nook devices, I buy paperbacks and magazines in stores, my children beg me to take them to the bookstore (meaning Barnes and Noble, there are really no others nearby), and I'm even planning to release a novel through their nook publishing division.
All the recent stories of them going under make me very very sad.
Re: Two words (Score:3, Interesting)
I'd argue "book publishers" charging as much for ebooks as much as printed, bound and delivered books.
My response to draconian pricing/behavior from MAFIAA was to stop buying. The same is happening with ebooks.
E-book monopoly (Score:3, Interesting)
Barnes & Noble closed the profitable store her (Score:5, Interesting)
(Reston VA), In part due to contract dispute with the mall owner. But they could have moved into a nice Borders store location about 5 miles away in Sterling VA. Instead, they pointed me to their store in Tyson's Corner, which costs me $5 in tolls and puts me in the middle of a traffic mess. I felt sorry for the Reston store employees and the managers who did a good job with our local store, handing one my B&N Readers Card. I said, "Send this to Corporate. Tell them to look up how much I've spent -in this store- over the last 15 years. Tell them that 95% of that business is going to Amazon, because I will not drive to Tysons and B&N offers me no alternative."
I really miss browsing in a paper bookstore, Amazon does not offer the same experience (their suggestions aren't as useful for me as they think they are...) The loss of B&N will be significant for consumers, I think. But I'm mostly through the 5 stages of mourning for them.
It's not JUST the Nook (Score:5, Interesting)
B&N has been somewhat schizophrenic about eBooks from the beginning, trying desperately to keep up with Amazon on one hand and yet not cannibalize their precious treeware stores. As a result, they've managed to fail at both goals.
Worse yet, they managed to buy, and then ignore, everything Fictionwise could have taught them about marketing eBooks and doing it right. I was a loyal (and VERY happy) Fictionwise customer for a decade. FW did three things that were absolutely priceless in marketing eBooks to me.
1. FW let you request email notifications when a new book by a particular author you were interested in was available. Naturally, as soon as I got such a notification...
B&N is still doing the old "These are the books WE want to sell you." routine with "push" emails and "new now" notices for books I couldn't care less about.
2. FW (and Books on Board) had a shopping cart for eBooks. Fictionwise had both "buy all of these at once" and "download them all in a ZIP file." My record buy was something like 25 books in one day when one of my favorite authors had all of his stuff released (finally) to eBook format. Fewer obstacles to purchase == more purchases. You'd think an experienced retailer would figure that out.
B&N: "Click once for each book" crud that both Amazon and B&N impose on readers. The day Paulo Coelho's books were put on sale at $1/each, I had to click "buy" and "confirm" eleven times, and when it came time to balance my credit card account... (cue loud curses)
3. If you went to an author's page at FW (e.g. Poul Anderson), you got a "show me only books by this author I don't own" and "buy everything that's showing" buttons. See my note about "fewer obstacles" above.
B&N: MISSING IN ACTION
4. FW frequently offered the ability to buy eBooks at listed price and get an equal amount in store credit. Result: I frequently took advantage of the offer, got best-sellers at full list, and then used the credits to buy more eBooks. From my standpoint, I got the best-sellers for free, and then used the credits to "buy out" other authors I wanted everything they did.
B&N: MISSING IN ACTION
It is a shame that B&N bought the major ebook retailer who knew how to do it right and then ignored everything they had done in order to cripple their eBook store as a doomed effort to force people to walk into their bricks-and-mortar.
Think of it as evolution in action.
Nook Failure = Limited tablet market (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:E-book monopoly (Score:4, Interesting)
Even on Slashdot, not enough people seem to be concerned about Amazon getting a monopoly on e-books.
Probably because Amazon don't have one. They own far less of the e-book market now than they did a couple of years ago, and B&N's share has been falling in that time.
I sell e-books through various stores, and Apple and Kobo account for about as many sales as Amazon. B&N sells pretty much none.
Re:I thought it was a toy store (Score:5, Interesting)
How would the LOTR fans feel if you told them that sorry, book one was not available at that location, but book two and three were in stock?
To be fair, that may not be B&N's fault. If you read author blogs on the web, you'll find a number saying 'my book series died because by the time I finished book 4 the publisher had let book 1 go out of print and wouldn't reprint it, so sales were dismal. Who's going to start reading a series where the first book is unavailable?'
Publishing and book selling seems to be a completely brain-dead industry.
Re:Two words (Score:4, Interesting)
You are talking about Standard Oil as if you are reciting a well learned poem. Standard Oil became as big as it did from 1969 to 1911 by finding ways to bring prices down for the end consumer from about 70 cents to about 5 cents in that time period. In that same time period, Rockefeller became one of the richest people in history, much wealthier then the pygmies of billionaires that exist today. The company was growing and increasing its business at a staggering pace and it was innovating to achieve that. Anything, from buying up forests to build their own barrels (and lowering new empty barrel costs by over 80%), to figuring out how to load and unload their products faster on the railroads, to finding ways to be more efficient in railroad delivery, to ensure that the train cars will not be riding empty and thus lowering costs of operating trains and getting discounts because of that, to building up more and more productive capacity.
Saying that a company was a monopoly, when in fact it was broken apart because people just could not compete with its efficiencies to the point that the prices for oil products have NEVER gone down since the moment Standard Oil was broken up.... who exactly got the profits of breaking up that efficient economy of scale but the people that wanted a piece of the pie at the EXPENSE of the consumer and got the politicians to provide it to them.
This was a disgrace then and it is a disgrace now, government is not authorised to distort the markets like that.
In rememberance of the Antiquarium (Score:5, Interesting)
You all know there's a used bookstore in your town. Go give them some business.
I grew up in Omaha. Downtown there was a used bookstore with more character than was probably healthy. It had more books then it knew what to to do with, a healthy set of extraneous stairs, an honor system for coffee, and a set of couches in front with a constant crowd. I think the regulars manned the register when the workers were busy.
But it didn't make too much money and they couldn't make rent. They tried selling records in the basement and some sort of art gallary on the upper levels, but that didn't pan out. So it closed up. And Omaha lost something important that day.
Now, apparently, a small town about 20 minutes gained something eventually, because the owner bought a building, moved his books there, and is still doing business. I'll have to find out if it has the same magic.
But anyway, just a reminder to support your local church of the literate.
Re:I go into the bookstore (Score:5, Interesting)
Get a MicroSD card and install Cyanogenmod on it. The Nook can dual-boot to the uSD card without any sort of modding or rooting. I do it and switch between the B&N version of Android and Cyanogenmod depending on what I want to do.
**This is with a Nook Color. I don't know if the newer tablets can do it.