Barnes & Noble more or less met analysts’ low expectations for their fiscal second quarter ending, October 29: Sales fell 4 percent, to $858.5 million, with same store sales down 3.2 percent “on lower store traffic,” even with the help of Harry Potter and the Cursed Child. Total Nook sales — including content and devices, was down a mere $35 million for the quarter. Consolidated second quarter EBITDA improved to $0.7 million, but the company still recorded a net loss of $20.4 million, or $0.29 per share (compared to a loss of $27.2 million, or $0.36 per share a year ago). With the Dow Jones industrials […]
Barnes & Noble Hires A COO While They’re Supposed to be Looking for A CEO
Barnes & Noble announced on Monday afternoon that they hired Demos Parneros, 54, as chief operating officer, reporting to Len Riggio, who is now referred to as “chairman and CEO of Barnes & Noble.” Parneros “will work closely with Mr. Riggio on all aspects of company operations including stores, merchandising, e-Commerce, systems and real estate.” He was president, North American stores & online for Staples until late 2012 (so as with the fired ceo Ron Boire, who came to BN from Sears Canada, they are looking to another non-book bricks and mortar retailer). He is a member of the board at Keycorp, […]
The Washington Post’s 10 Best: Whitehead and More
As we’ve suggested previously, it’s pretty clear already that Colson Whitehead’s novel The Underground Railroad is the consensus “book of the year,” and the Washington Post’s just-published 10 best only adds to the case. Their full list: Fiction Commonwealth, Ann Patchett News of the World, Paulette Jiles Swing Time, Zadie Smith The Trespasser, Tana French The Underground Railroad, Colson Whitehead Nonfiction Evicted, Matthew Desmond The Gene, Siddartha Mukherjee The Return, Hisham Matar Rogue Heroes, Ben Macintyre Secondhand Time, Svetlana Alexievich As usual, the paper’s full “best books” package includes extensive lists of notable fiction and nonfiction. Oprah Winfrey’s O Magazine has […]
People: Besser and Borland Promoted
At Putnam Children’s, publisher Jen Besser has been promoted to president as well, reporting to Penguin Children’s president Jen Loja — who writes that Besser “has continually wowed us with her keen publishing sensibility, and her ability to find the best books for every kind of reader.” Loja adds, “Her perfect balance of believing in what she does deeply but also being able to see the fun and the humor in what we all do, not only makes her a valuable leader, but also a delight to have in the senior management of the group.” At Atria Books and Washington Square Press, […]
Kindle Unlimited Pool and Page Rate Rise, As Pages Read Declines
In their latest retroactive allocation of funds, Amazon has decided to give Kindle Unlimited participants a slightly larger pool of funds to share for October — $16.2 million (up from $15.9 million in September), with the per page payment rate jumping to $.005189 (up from $0.00497397). But at least some authors continue to have concerns about whether the software that tracks page reads is functioning correctly, as previously reported in October. Total pages read declined for the second month, to approximately 3.122 billion, down 2.3 percent from the 3.197 billion pages counted in September.indle
Triumph at The National Book Awards: Whitehead, Lewis, Kendi and Borzutzky
With anticipation of life in Trump’s America weighing heavily throughout the evening, the National Book Awards ceremony on Wednesday evening was a bastion of diversity, resistance and hope, celebrating joy and the enduring power of words and reading to change and reframe the world. Colson Whitehead‘s The Underground Railroad was expected to win the fiction award, and is by far the most commercially successful of the year’s NBA contenders, but the emotion of the evening and its celebration of stories, publishers and sentiments outside of the mainstream was less expected. As chair of the nonfiction judges Masha Gessen noted in discussing […]