Barnes & Noble's Nook division tanked during holiday shopping season

Shawn Knight

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The holiday shopping season is rarely associated with disappointment – especially in the technology industry – but that’s exactly what Barnes & Noble’s Nook division delivered last month despite striking up a strategic partnership with Samsung over the summer.

The bookseller’s anemic Nook division earned $56 million during the nine-week period ending this past Saturday. That includes all devices, accessories and content according to figures released by the company.

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Overall, the division brought in 55.4 percent less than it did during the 2013 holiday shopping season. Broken down individually, device and accessory sales slid 67.9 percent to $28.5 million while content sales declined 25 percent year-over-year to $27.4 million.

The company’s Nook division has been reeling for quite some time so it’s likely that the holiday performance wasn’t much of a surprise. In fact, Barnes & Noble announced this past June that they plan to split their retail and Nook businesses into two separate companies. That spinoff is expected to be complete by the end of August 2015.

Barnes & Noble isn’t the only one coming up short thanks to the poor performance from its Nook division. In 2012, Microsoft invested $300 million in the Nook venture – only to sell back the 17.6 percent stake the Redmond-based company purchased a few years later for $62.7 million and 2.7 million Barnes & Noble shares.

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It might help if B&N would have competitive pricing for their e-books. I have a Nook and it's a great tablet, but the books are on average 20-25% more than what you can get from Amazon. So no problem, I just downloaded the Amazon app and buy my e-books from there.
 
I also have a nook hd+, awesome for the price they had. They can't expect to sell ebooks very well if you just search the same ebook on amazon and you find them almost everytime cheaper. Also, their current tablets have lower specs that the previous ones, I don't see anyone wanting to "update" to that.
 
They just cant compete. They need to figure something out soon because the paper books and starbucks strategy isn't going to last forever. Maybe bring back the E-book....in COLOR
 
I also have a nook hd+, awesome for the price they had. They can't expect to sell ebooks very well if you just search the same ebook on amazon and you find them almost everytime cheaper. Also, their current tablets have lower specs that the previous ones, I don't see anyone wanting to "update" to that.


The prices for ebooks are ridiculous. I so often see a "new" ebook for $10-15(sometimes more) whereas the used, physical book can be as low as 99 cents. ebooks are a convenience, but the price for that convenience is too high to be worth it. I don't read "new" books and live 2 blocks from a library. In order to sell ebooks they have to make it cheaper and easier for me to buy it from them instead of walk up to the library.

O'well, they're just fueling piracy with their ridiculous ebook prices. Ebooks shouldn't cost anymore than $2-3 seeing as how there is no material, manufacturing or shipping fees. I remember when everyone thought that digitizing everything was going to bring prices down, not raise them.
 
I don't use ebooks however I'm glad that B&N still exists as a real store where I can browse, touch and purchase physical books.
 
To top it, they won't allow international users like myself to purchase anything from their store. You better have a US credit card or be doomed. Else, go to Amazon and buy. I own two Nook HD+ and one HD in my family (well, all purchased by me and gifted!), and I find them to be excellent tablets. They are superior to the Kindles, and very light. You get unfettered Play Store access. They can go almost 48 days on a single full charge, if you leave them idle. If you are just reading ebooks (greyscale), they'll give you 15-16 hours on a charge. Browsing with wifi gives you 8-10 hrs. Videos look excellent. Screens are sharp, with fabulous color reproduction (just visit Play Store and see how good everything looks there), and outstanding touch response. They have a fair amount of Android lag from time to time, but that's because of the old Ice Cream Sandwich they run. All they needed was to add a 1.3 megapixel front camera for video chat, and it would have rounded off the deal. Instead, they went for rebranding Samsung, which was the silliest thing to do. I still have motivation to pick up a few more of the old HD and HD+, if I find some cheap, but none whatsoever for picking up the Samsungs.
 
It might help if B&N would have competitive pricing for their e-books. I have a Nook and it's a great tablet, but the books are on average 20-25% more than what you can get from Amazon. So no problem, I just downloaded the Amazon app and buy my e-books from there.
Yeah the Kindle app is a Nook killer IMO. It's a shame because Amazon is taking over everywhere.
 
The problem with drm E-books is apart from the Kindle and ibooks it's a faff to get them on the reader usually using the fiddly Adobe Digital editions
 
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