Nook

New Barnes and Noble CEO Will Kill NooK

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This post by Michael Kozlowski originally appeared on GoodEreader on 7/3/15.

Barnes and Noble has lost over one billion dollars on trying to make the Nook brand into a viable business model. Since 2009 the largest bookseller in the US has gone through two CEO’s and has just announced they have hired their third, Ron Boire, who starts this September. It looks like the Nook brand is in seriously jeopardy.

Boire—who has only been CEO of the faltering Sears Canada department store chain for the last ten months has kept the store in business by closing retail locations and axing thousands of job will be the new CEO of Barnes and Noble. His number one priority with the company is to stem the blood loss from the ailing Nook division. Last week Barnes and Noble announced that Nook hardware and e-books sales fell 40% in the three months ending May 2 and declined 48% year on year.

 

Read the full post on GoodEreader.

 

Which eBook Publishing Platform is Best?

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This post by Kristen Eckstein originally appeared on The Future of Ink on 3/13/15.

Before we get too deep into answering this question, know upfront this is like asking a mother of three which child is her favorite. Each platform comes with unique benefits and drawbacks.

Digital publishing is a huge all-encompassing world of everything from e-books and Kindle to video and teleseminars. For the purposes of this article’s length and my own personal expertise, we’ll stay focused on ebook publishing platforms. There are three primary platforms to publish an ebook: Amazon’s Kindle, Barnes and Noble’s Nook and Apple’s iBooks (iPad).

 

Amazon’s Kindle

Kindle is the granddaddy (though still quite young to be a grandpap) of e-bookdom. To this day, the Kindle Store still holds the record for e-book sales—67% of the e-book buying market. While this number has fallen to Nook over the past couple of years (it was closer to 99%), it’s still a good chunk of the market share. When Amazon came out with the Kindle, it did a lot of things right:

 

Read the full post on The Future of Ink.

 

Will Barnes & Noble be gone by New Year's?

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This editorial by Michael Levin originally appeared on The Contra Costa Times News on 5/2/14.

If anyone gives you a Barnes & Noble gift card, be sure to cash it in by the end of the year.

This may be the last year that Barnes & Noble bookstores remain open.

It’s bad news for people who love books. It’s worse news for the next generation of readers, who may never experience buying a book in a bookstore.

B&N has been closing about 20 stores per year since 2012 and has said it will continue to do so for the next several years. But its financial position is bleak.

This follows a decades-long period of expansion, moving into neighborhoods where privately-owned bookstores thrived, destroying those stores with cut-price best-sellers, and all but owning the book business.

Borders collapsed because of poor choices — weak locations, an overemphasis on music, and, worst of all, selling off its online bookstore to Amazon for $20 million in the 1990s. Chump change, by today’s standards.

So why is B&N on the ropes, if it has virtually no competition today from chains or privately owned bookstores?

 

Click here to read the full editorial on The Contra Costa Times News.

 

Barnes & Noble's Nook Nightmare Stars Amazon and the DOJ

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This article by Brad Stone originally appeared on Bloomberg Businessweek on 1/9/14. It’s a worthy read for authors or publishers releasing books for the Nook platform.

Let’s boil down Barnes & Noble’s (BKS) Nook nightmare into a handy juxtaposition concerning the price of the digital version of Donna Tartt’s gripping new novel, The Goldfinch.

Amazon’s (AMZN) Kindle price: $7.50.

Barnes & Noble’s Nook price: $14.99.

There are plenty of reasons for the stunning decline of the once-promising Nook. Barnes & Noble has found itself unable to compete with the likes of Apple (AAPL) and Amazon in the broader arena of multipurposed tablets. The New York-based retailer has also been undermined by the continuing migration of its customers from physical stores to online book-buying and by the desire of its risk-averse institutional shareholders to support deep, profit-draining, long-term investments in new frontiers.

Even that doesn’t completely account for the dramatic upending of its Nook business. Barnes & Noble today reported gruesome numbers—a 60 percent drop in its digital division, to $125 million, from its sales in last year’s holiday period. (Sales in its physical stores fell 6.6 percent from the previous year.)

 

Click here to read the full article on Bloomberg Businessweek.