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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
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.
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.
I graduated with an English degree and love literature. Too me paper books were sacred.
You can't make this stuff up, folks.
"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!