Comments on: Barnes & Noble Posts Losses, Still Committed to Nook

By: Felix Torres

Felix Torres — Thu, 28 Feb 2013 22:25:47 +0000

In theory, B&M availability *should* be a plus.
But the evidence appears to be that it isn’t.
B&N just reported $21M in returned hardware losses. That is 200,000 Nook STRs worth.
Or consider WalMart: their in-store sales featured Sony and Kobo but they dropped them for slow sales to feature Kindle and then dropped Kindle (allegedly because Amazon is a competitor–but they were a competitor when they brought Kindle in).
Target? Sony, iRiver, Kindle… All have been featured at one time or another. If sales were great they would still be carrying them.
It may be as simple as that people shop for readers where they shop for gadgets, not where they shop for books or clothes or groceries.

By: Juli Monroe

Juli Monroe — Thu, 28 Feb 2013 21:54:41 +0000

Felix, excellent point. I suppose I could be convinced the split is good. I just think there has to be an advantage in being able to walk into a store and buy a device made/serviced by that store. When I still owned a Nook Color, I took advantage of the knowledgeable Nook folks in my local B&N. They saved me lots of time and money over calling Customer Service. Amazon has great customer service, but being face to face with a person is an advantage. Too bad B&N isn’t able to leverage that.

By: Felix Torres

Felix Torres — Thu, 28 Feb 2013 21:43:43 +0000

The Nook mbers $316M revenue leading to *net* losses of $190M are downright scary. At the grossest level, it costs Nook $1.50 to earn $1.00.
Depending on how bad their hardware inventory issues are or aren’t, they could conceivable be losing $2 for each $1 of ebook revenue.

Something is very wrong over there.

By the way: the storefronts declined by 10% but if Nook expenses are excluded their decline is only 2%. (I still think a split benefits the storefronts.)

By: Marilynn Byerly

Marilynn Byerly — Thu, 28 Feb 2013 21:12:44 +0000

On a side note, I got a letter from one of my publishers who said that ebook sales are way down, and according to other authors with small publishers, the news is the same. We’re talking only holding on to financial solvency by a bare minimum. That’s worse then even in the early days of ebooks when no one even knew what an ebook was.

He blamed the massive influx of backlist and new titles in the market.

I wonder if it is also about the incredible emphasis placed on self-published titles. All the sites, review lists, and magazines I read are screaming about successful self-pubs and the big name authors, but no one is talking about the rest of us.

And, whether there’s a correlation or not, the pirate sites are having no problem collecting small publisher titles and downloading them by the tens of thousands so there’s obviously some interest in these books.