MELVILLE HOUSE: On Tuesday, the embattled baby changing station Barnes & Noble released its quarterly report and announced that it would no longer produce the Nook tablet in house. And, while the Nook’s catastrophic failure has rightfully received a great deal of attention over the last few days, there were a number of other uncomfortable and unfortunate truths in the report, including that Barnes & Noble is maybe not that good at selling books anymore, either (though it is still better at selling books than it is at selling tablets): the company’s retail revenues fell 10% in the fourth quarter of last year and 5.9% for the year.
To be fair, the Nook is partly to blame for this drop in revenue, but yesterday The Wall Street Journal’s Jeffrey Trachtenberg took a look at another possible culprit: that B&N is “reducing the range of titles it stocks, as it gives more floor space to toys, games, and other products that generate high profit margins” and that this strategy is driving book-lovers—ostensibly the base of a bookstore—to Amazon…
It’s hard not to look at the bookseller’s clumsy identity shifts—its catastrophic entry into the digital marketplace with the Zune Nook and its identity-damaging transition from bookstore to Godiva chocolate showroom—and not think of Borders, who decided to go all-in on CDs (lol) as the pathway to higher margins. Being wrong or late—even by just a hair—to recognize tectonic shifts in the digital age can be disastrous. So far, Barnes & Noble has been able to stay afloat, but its continued existence increasingly seems more the result of luck than ingenuity… (more)
EDITOR: One would not imagine the chain having difficulties based upon the number of shoppers and apparent heavy patronage at the Lancaster store. It would be a blow to ongoing education and recreation for the chain to go the way of Borders.
