Monday, February 25, 2013

More trouble for Barnes & Noble

The news is not good:

Barnes & Noble, the nation’s largest book chain, warned that when it reports fiscal 2013 third-quarter results on Thursday, losses in its Nook Media division — which includes sales of e-books and devices — will be greater than the year before and that the unit’s revenue for all of fiscal 2013 would be far below projections it gave of $3 billion.

The problem was not so much the extent of the losses, but what the losses might signal: that the digital approach that Barnes & Noble has been heavily investing in as its future for the last several years has essentially run its course.
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comments: 1

Matthew Schmeer said...

I love my Nook Touch, but I've NEVER spent a penny on an ebook. I use it for reading free books from Project Gutenberg and several online magazines that have free EPUB files for download. All these go on a miniSD card that slides into the Nook.

B&N makes good hardware, even though their products are crippled out of the box and can be easily hacked to run a full Android OS.

B&N's real problem is the price of ebooks--and part of that is out of their hands, as price is often determined by the publisher.

Also, it is easy to convert an Amazon MOBI file into an EPUB using Calibre. I've downloaded dozens of free books from Amazon and converted them to EPUB format for reading on my Nook.