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Barnes & Noble Founder Wants to Take Retail Division Private
The times haven't been the kindest to B&N: retail sales are down and the Kindle is outselling the Nook. Joining Best Buy and Dell, B&N might be going private. From the article: "Barnes & Noble’s largest shareholder, Leonard Riggio, made an offer Monday to buy out the struggling company and take it private ... Essentially, it would split the company in two: one half would be Riggio’s private brick-and-mortar stores and related assets, the other the publicly-traded Nook and college bookstore management division."
Public companies are getting abused on the stock market so bad being private means they can actually run the business properly without having to worry about squeezing to make every Q more profitable according to analyst projections and "expected" profits.
Apple should do the same but having 1bn outstanding shares at $400 a piece means even their whopping $130bn in the bank wont even save them from the onslaught.
It seems like the trend to buy and sell everyone online continues to gain steam. Many stores from Blockbuster to Best Buy, from computer resellers to water purification systems... it seems like if you can get away with not having to touch or interact with the product in person before making a buying decision, that's what people are doing. In droves. One of the few retail areas not significantly affected has been women's clothing. Men, being of somewhat more predictable shapes and sizes, can buy jeans and such online, but women have no such luck. Even here, however, basics like bras, tank tops, t-shirts, shoes, etc., are being displaced by online sales.
It does not surprise me that books are on the list of things people don't need to go to a bookstore to purchase -- most books are purchased based on the recommendation of friends, word of mouth, or reviewers (which, surprise -- print media is giving way to online media...). This is not a good time to be a retail book seller... Barnes and Noble will soon be displaced by Walmart and their ilk; Stores that only sell books won't be around for much longer if they're publicly traded... they'll just be broken up and sold off piece by piece, their valuable commercial real estate being repurposed and the stock thrown out in massive going out of business sales, or simply deposited in a dumpster.
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
If B&N want to improve their chances of success in the online/eBook market, they really need to sort out their PubIt side of matters. Currently unless you're in the US, or have gone through the extensive red-tape to obtain a US business cred, you are not permitted to get on board with directly publishing via PubIt. Conversely, Amazon and Kobo both allow international publishers to work directly through them.
While small publishers outside of the "Big 6" don't contribute a lot financially, as individuals there are however many many thousands of us, and a lot of our potential readers do have Nook units.
TLDR; B&N (PubIt) needs to be open for international publishers.
B&N is a company that valiantly strived to make the transition from bricks-and-mortar to the Internet, just as we are constantly chiding outmoded companies like Kodak for failing to do (or the RIAA for actively fighting, when it comes to music). By releasing the Nook line of e-readers, B&N took a leap into leading the transition of print publication away from paper. I for one bought a Nook for my daughter a couple years ago, and she reads on it all the time. Yet still they are gradually falling by the wayside, like all the other big booksellers that pre-date the Internet. For all we blame top management for failing to make the transition, re-inventing a running company seems to be all but impossible.
It's not just that, but the Nook and the brick and mortar stores have at least _some_ synergy together. The one thing Amazon doesn't have is a physical storefront where you can go browse books. I will on occasion go to B&N, browse through the shelves until i find a book i like, and then buy the ebook on my Nook if the price isn't too bad. There are definitely ways that B&N could work on encouraging that relationship.
They could add a cheap camera to the Nook tablet (at least i don't think it has one already?) so you could scan the barcode of a book and have it take you straight to that page on the B&N site so you could purchase it right away without having to do a search. Maybe they could start stocking "preview" versions of books, a thin thing with the first 20 or so pages of a book so you could sample it and then scan the barcode if you liked it. That would let them pack a lot of books into limited shelf space and maybe eliminate the problem where you find something that looks interesting, but it turns out to be the third book in the series and they don't have the first two in the store.
But if you split the two companies then you've got a brick & mortar store that's going to struggle alone in the same market that Borders failed in, and an online store and ebook device that will be going up against Amazon and the Kindle alone with no clear competitive advantage. (Aside from geeks like me who like _slightly_ less DRM and companies that haven't gone insane with patenting everything that moves.)
This Space Intentionally Left Blank
One of the news bits omitted from TFAs but included in the BBC article is this:
The firm plans to shut a third of its stores by the end of the year.
and
Barnes & Noble was originally a New York bookstore, which Mr Riggio bought out the branding rights to in the 1970s, before building out a successful US-wide chain.
Keeping a giant money losing company going would seem to be hopeless. I would expect that Riggio would reduce B&N's presence to only a few stores that he is sure can survive. Essentially save the company he started by sacrificing the behemoth that it has become.
Nobody caught this but what I see is he's simply doing a land grab. All of the real property (stores and such) is worth quite a bit of money and he wants it all for pennies on the dollar. If he's successful, those physical locations can then be sold off for 10-100x what he paid out to take the company private. Very nice profit for him.
Mod me up/Mod me down: I wont frown as I've no crown
Horse shit. It's not just "MBA"s and such making these decisions. It's everybody. Every Joe Blow who buys a stock or a mutual fund is interested in one thing: return. Let's not pretend that average people investing for their retirement are interested in making less money for the sake of, say, treating employees well or making ethical business decisions. The problem is the whole system of public companies in the US. Corporations have all of the rights of actual people, with none of the liabilities, and the owners of said public companies (every stock/fund holder) are completely and entirely divorced from anything the company does other than earn profit.
I don't respond to AC's.
When the music industry switched to digital distribution, I was quiet for I wanted to download music.
When the games industry switched to digital distribution, I was quiet for I wanted to download games.
When the book industry switched to digital distribution, I despaired for I did not want digital books.
Not having grown up consuming book content on computers, but playing games and music on them, many of us are caught in the absurdity of supporting digital in many forms and rejecting it in others. Those younger than us will have fewer qualms as they learn to consume all content digitally.
I guess I'll just go ahead an complete my transition to grumpy old man with a hearty "You kids get off my lawn!"
Warning: Teh poster of this messaeg is lysdexic
But they are thinking about transitioning away from building Nooks too:
Barnes & Noble Weighs Its E-Reader Investment
That's because Costco pays fucking dividends so people who own the stock make a share of the profits.
Ah, investing money in a company to make a cut of the actual profits of the company, an insanely novel idea of corporate ownership that might just catch on one of these days. (It is the 1300s, right? I think my computer's clock is wrong.)
If corporations are people, aren't stockholders guilty of slavery?
What fuels "going private" are two things - low interest rates, and that interest paid by companies is deductible. "Going private" really means "leveraged buyout".
Companies can pay for their capital through dividends to stockholders through stock buybacks which push up the stock price (or compensate for dilution through stock options), or by paying interest. Only the first is taxable.
Tax policy and "quantitative easing" (i.e. central banks lending money at very low rates) fuel leveraged buyouts. Without those factors, "going private" would be a very rare event.
The last three times I was in a B&N, I couldn't find the book I was looking for. Oh, they could order it, of course. The hell is the point of that? I can order it, through my Magical Intertubes.
It's not just bookstores, however: I've been disappointed in every category of store you can think of; failing to find the products I seek.
There's little sense in wasting time, gas and aggravation. The savings in all three more than make up for the slight delay and cost of shipping.
FYI, The founder of Costco (Jim Sinegal) retired as CEO in January 2012. Although he remains on the board of directors, the reigns have been passed to another insider Craig Jelinek...
Lest you think Costco is all about bucking Wall Street, you should know that they borrowed (yes borrowed) $3.5Billion (with a 'B') to pay out a special dividend to shareholders ahead of the tax increase that is scheduled to take place this year. This typical short term Wall Street manuever no doubt just transfered almost a billion or so from the US treasury to Costco shareholders (and probably didn't do much to help the employees or customers who as taxpayers will be forced to help fund this manuever).
That's actually the only reason we got some of my elderly relatives a Nook rather than a Kindle. Their eyesight isn't very good, and ebook readers are a nice way of reading reading books with zoomable text, with much better selection than traditionally available in large-print dead-tree books. But they aren't very skilled with technology either, so feel much more comfortable having a local store they can go to to buy the books, where someone loads them onto the device, rather than having to DIY it over the internet.
If the Nooks don't continue to be connected to the brick-and-mortar stores, it loses that advantage. Perhaps it's too niche to matter, though. Alternately, perhaps they'll keep up some kind of cross-service agreement even if the company is split.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
Paying as much or more for ephemeral e-books than physical hardcover editions is a scam, no matter whose e-reader you use. But I love my Nook --- it's a perfect platform carrying around a load of free books (from, e.g., Project Gutenberg, or my own reference compilations) to read on long trips. Battery life is great, screen quality is nice (better than the lowest grades of pulp paperbacks, though with room for improvement compared to a quality printing). I've got the silly WiFi "store" turned off, since I never intend to fork over extortion fees for overpriced, DRM'd novels.