Archives for November 2007

Borders: Good News (Comp Sales Up), Bad News (Losses Ever Bigger) At least Borders is selling more books. Same-store superstore sales of $616 million were up 1.1 percent on a comp basis, while Walden store comps were up 3.6 percent at $110 million, and international comp sales rose 7.8 percent (thank you weak dollar/strong Asia). But they continue to lose more money than Wall Street dared to expect, dropping $39 million in net operating losses, or 66 cents a share, compared to $33 million a year ago. The total net loss is much more impressive at $161 million, though, including […]

BN Performs: Comp Sales Rise Barnes & Noble reported a better than expected third quarter, with same-store sales up 2.6 percent for the period, “at the high end of guidance for a flat to low-single digit increase.” Sales of $108 million at BN.com were up 14.5 percent compared to a year ago, as companywide sales hit $1.176 billion. The operating net loss per share of $1.8 million was also less than half what the company expected, further improved by an “after tax benefit of $6.2 million, resulting from a more favorable physical inventory shortage rate than previously estimated and accrued.” […]

Snap Judgments, Kindled Perhaps it means something that, even as Amazon’s morning press conference to introduce the Kindle was unfolding slowly this morning, their online Kindle store was already live with all the specs, pictures, promotional videos and more that one could want. Having attended events like this for some seven-odd years now, there is a sameness to the proclamations and timelines. Today ceo Jeff Bezos noted at the beginning, “an interesting question to think about is, why are books the last bastion of analog?” Acknowledging the printed book as a near-perfect device, he said, “we forget this is a […]

Newsweek Trades Puff for Kindle First Look Amazon wanted a reporter who would write a long gooey cover piece about how the Kindle will transform the reading and writing experience, a new gloss on the piece reporters have been getting wrong for at least a decade now, and they found their man easily in Newsweek’s Steve Levy. But inside the long article and its ethereal declarations — “This is the most important thing we’ve ever done,” says Jeff Bezos. “It’s so ambitious to take something as highly evolved as the book and improve on it. And maybe even change the […]

“Last Lecture” with Randy? The NY Post reports on the auction for WSJ columnist Jeff Zaslow’s book based on Carnegie Mellon professor Randy Pausch’s “last lecture,” delivered in September by the 46-year-old computer scientist who suffers from terminal pancreatic cancer. “I’m dying and having fun,” Pausch said in the lecture, “And I’m going to keep having fun every day because there is no other way to do it.” The Post says “the lecture became an instant hit on the Internet, with people calling and e-mailing Zaslow to say how Pausch’s inspirational words had helped them deal with their own problems, […]

Oprah Taps Follett Who needs a National Book Award when you’re an Oprah pick? Yesterday Winfrey selected Ken Follett’s 973-page THE PILLARS OF THE EARTH as her latest selection (as MJ Rose has noted, keeping her long streak of selecting books by men intact). In a statement Oprah said it’s “like nothing I would ever read or had ever read before.” A spokesman for NAL said they had shipped 612,000 copies to stores in advance of the announcement. Spitzer Spares Internet Affiliate Sales New York Governor Eliot Spitzer called a quick halt to the efforts reported earlier this week to […]