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Nook Failure, Lack of Foot Traffic Could Spell Doom For Barnes & Noble
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."
On my way to the Starbucks in the back
Microsoft just invested $1 billion into B&N.
How much longer are the shareholders going to let monkey boy run things? A lot longer I hope ;)
Mod me down, my New Earth Global Warmingist friends!
The summary seems to attack B&N for trying to adapt to changing times rather than sticking their head in the sand. Even if it was ultimately futile, I don't think it was boneheaded.
Didn't you get the memo?
http://i.imgur.com/az9FCjh.jpg
turn it into a pr0n focused device and rebrand it as "the nookie"
how many pairs of boxer shorts should you own?
The last time I walked into one of their stores it seemed more like a toy store. Most of it was toys, puzzles, and games. It wasn't what I was expecting at all.
Yes people are reading paper books a LOT less. Every person I know has a Kindle or an iPad or like me and my wife, Nexus 7's. Paper books are great, don't get me wrong but when my mother in law even has an iPad for reading you know the death of paper books is on the horizon.
I was a bitter clinger to paper books. I graduated with an English degree and love literature. Too me paper books were sacred. Now I can't stand the thought of dealing with a paper book, storing it, watching it yellow on my shelf or having to fight with the binding while trying to read and holding the cover back. My Nexus 7 is the perfect experience. I can get books from multiple retailers on a single device while sitting in bed. I have Google Books, Kindle, Nook, Kobo and many others on my device and I shop around for prices.
Couple this with Calibre and I can manage my library any way I see fit, convert between formats and store them locally or in the cloud as I see fit.
Didn't you get the memo?
http://i.imgur.com/az9FCjh.jpg
Funny and not goatse.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
'Amazon' and 'antitrust'.
It is not illegal to dominate a sector, nor is it even illegal to have a monopoly. It is only illegal to use your dominant position to engage in anti-competitive practices. Standard Oil was notorious for this. Microsoft also used their OS dominance to muscle in and crush competitors in office applications and browsers. I haven't see Amazon doing anything like that. Their competitors are just a click away.
Actually, thanks to Amazon's "one-click" patent, competitors are now forced to be no less than two clicks away or they're going to get a cease-and-desist from Amazon.
"Somebody has to do something. It's just incredibly pathetic it has to be us."
--- Jerry Garcia
(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.
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.
It doesn't help that most of the store is devoted to all kinds of crap like toys, cards, god books, and astrology.
Some of the God books are good, such as "Where God Went Wrong," "Some More of God's Greatest Mistakes," "Who Is This God Person, Anyway?," and "Well, That Just About Wraps It Up For God."
-- This and all my posts are in the public domain. I am a lawyer. I am not your lawyer, and this is not legal advice.
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.
You can't handle the truth.
I graduated with an English degree and love literature. Too me paper books were sacred.
You can't make this stuff up, folks.
They eyestrain worry is overstated.
No. Wrong. Ebooks didn't get started because of ipads, the ipad screen is the same as a laptop screen. If it were that easy to read books on a laptop screen nobody would have needed to invent ereaders. Whether or not ipad fans like it, the simple reality is that you can't read books or even lengthy texts as easily from a luminescent monitor as from an e-ink display. Mod me down all you like, claim otherwise based on anecdote, but you didn't have people selling their book collections when laptops became common. End of story.
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.
That is just two, er .. ah .. to ... I mean too funny!
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
He's actually a pretty terrible author who's been getting by on name recognition and PR. Have you actually read the Old Testament? Utter repetitive dreck and the main character is a bloodthirsty sociopathic asshole who'll kill people for burning the wrong incense.
Hail Eris, full of mischief...
E pluribus sanguinem
"the simple reality is that you can't read books or even lengthy texts as easily from a luminescent monitor as from an e-ink display."
Simply not true. I can, and do, and your wishing won't stop me.
"but you didn't have people selling their book collections when laptops became common"
That's a form factor thing, not a backlit screen thing.
eink/epaper is great. I happen to prefer the flexibility of an LCD. Neither preference should get you all hot n' bothered, because it's just that: A preference. For /my/ use case, an LCD is superior. For /your/ use case, do whatever the hell you want. It'll be OK.
Why yes, I AM a rocket scientist!
Ya think it might have been a joke? The poster decrying how nobody reads and the commenter giving a tl;dr? Maybe? Ya think?