Posted on 06/01/2013 5:00:13 AM PDT by SeekAndFind
The doors of New York’s Javits Center swung open wide this morning to welcome thousands of booksellers, publishers, librarians, authors and their agents at the annual jamboree known as BookExpo. Almost certainly, the event will resurrect the seemingly endless debate over e-books and the future of reading.
While Barnes and Noble (NYSE: BKS) and its Nook e-book division may not be among this year’s exhibitors, the book industry headlines that likely will hit the papers in the coming days should prompt investors to consider the many risks that hover over the book retailing giant’s head, especially given that the stock is now sitting on a 34.5 percent return over the last 12 months and an astonishing gain of 46 percent so far this year.
The company is due to release its fourth-quarter earnings soon, and they may well be even more depressing than its third-quarter results, which saw a 10 percent revenue shortfall and a net loss when analysts had been calling for a profit. Barnes & Noble’s operating cash flow is solidly in the red, thanks in part to the costs of ensuring that its Nook e-book franchise keeps up with Amazon’s (NASDAQ: AMZN) Kindle – not to mention Apple’s (NASDAQ: AAPL) iPad, which has a secondary role as a reading device. And questions about the fate of Nook and of Barnes & Noble’s bricks-and-mortar business are – or should be – overshadowing the performance of the company’s stock.
While companies like Dell (NASDAQ: DELL) and Best Buy (NYSE: BBY) continue to battle with similar questions about the sustainability of their business models and have suitors in the wings eager to take them private at a suitably inexpensive price, Barnes & Noble must deal with two separate sets of uncertainties. On the one hand,
Leonard Riggio, chairman of Barnes & Noble and its single largest shareholder, has said he might be interested in formally separating the traditional and the e-books business and taking the former private in a buyout.
Meanwhile, rumblings that Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT) might be willing to fork over up to $1 billion for Nook Media’s digital business is largely responsible for the latest and largest surge in Barnes & Noble’s share price. Read more at
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Convenient supplies of tinder for when the government throws us back to the stone age?
I can still by turntables too.... there will be some kind of market for books for another 50 years.... but, they’ll be in the Novelty section.
Sales of Kindles?
How about speculation tht B&N stock will sell at a premium when the company is eventually bought out?
They have a lot fewer books these days and their main competition went out of business (Borders). They make money on trinkets, coffee, etc.
They almost certainly got a bounce by losing hundreds of competing Borders.
My oldest son was participating in the B&N management training program through his college bookstore. He left because they wanted him to work without pay—the entire company being on financial life support.
Sounds highly unlikely. Maybe you’re not getting the full story?
B&N has the competing Nook which is not very successful.
But while tablet sales exploded over the Christmas season, Barnes & Noble was not a beneficiary. Buyers preferred Apple devices by a long mile but then went on to buy Samsung, Amazon and Google products before those of Barnes & Noble, according to market analysis by Forrester Research. “In many ways it is a great product,” Sarah Rotman Epps, a senior analyst at Forrester, said of the Nook tablet. “It was a failure of brand, not product.
I used to say I would only read books printed on paper, but now it's the other way around.
Probably the best part of all is that I got to ditch my reading glasses. With eBooks, you just make the fonts bigger.
What brands won't make it to 2014
Nook ranks just behind JC Penney..which is toast
Yeah—That’s it. My son’s an idiot.
Three-plus years with the company and an assistant manager for two of them. Clearly he doesn’t have a clue about what’s going on.
Books aren’t dead. There are more books in print now than ever before. People just buy them online instead of at a local bookstore.
I use my Kindle when traveling, but prefer hard copy otherwise, also most books I buy and read I give away to others.
My wife has some “classic” LP Albums - no turntable or reason, especially since all the music is readily available elsewhere.
We still read paperbacks though.
For some reason, Itunes and other sources of pre-digitized music is not that good of quality. Bit rate seems to be secondary, too.
Playing the music directly from the turntable is much better too.
Analogous to the digital camera: for years and years and maybe even to this day, an old film camera will shoot much better quality photos than a digital camera. The digital camera offers convenience over quality.
Those of you who find an electronic reading screen more adaptable to your personal style, that is all right with me. Why?
I own a small growing collection of, at present, 300 books. That’s right, books. I have a ‘reading schedule’ that I keep, mentally, so that when I am not ‘out of stuff to read’. When I finish five books, I find another two to purchase for the shelf. I can list reference, cooking, mystery, history, fiction, western, sports, politics, and self-improvement.
I look at books, the way some of the previous generation of writers looked at their typewriters. “I press the key for an ‘s’, and there it is on the paper. I put it there, directly.” I am a published writer, in the times when manual typewriters (”What the heck is that?), ‘electronic word processors’, and now, in the twilight age of laptop computers, have come to be and moved on. I like the feel of the printed word. When I read, I see it, my eyes read it, my mind creates the written environment and characters of the printed page.
I suppose, to me, the book is the original ‘laptop environmental and characterization generator, version 1.0’.
I need no batteries to recharge my ‘reader’, either.
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