Amazon continues to expand in the college bookstore market, announcing another of their “staffed package pickup points” coming to the University of Pennsylvania campus this spring. It will be a 3,558 square foot space, “strategically located” in the university’s largest dining commons. Unlike previous pick-up stations at Purdue and UMass, it will also provide “communal work spaces with interactive media pods where students can connect their laptops and mobile devices to TV monitors for presentations, brainstorming, studying, and collaborating.” Penn vp of business services Marie Witt said the university had “discovered that almost half of all packages delivered to Penn student mail […]
Bookstores
Barnes & Noble “Pleased” with Flattish Holiday Sales
Barnes & Noble celebrated a happily mediocre holiday sales season, in a press release reporting on the nine weeks sales of through January 2. Total sales of $1.1 billion were slightly lower, down 0.8 percent, “due to lower online sales and store closures.” Same-store sales inched up, rising 0.6% over the holidays. Nook sales continue their fade, per the year’s pattern, down 25.8 percent to $41.2 million. Though the bungled summer relaunch of their web site clearly continued to cause problems, new ceo Ronald Boire says in the release, “We were also encouraged by the improved performance of BN.com during December, as the […]
Benjamin’s The Swans of Fifth Avenue Leads February Indie Next List; Sepetys Tops LibraryReads List
Melanie Benjamin’s newest historical novel The Swans of Fifth Avenue is booksellers’ number one pick on the ABA’s February Indie Next list. The rest of the list features: Be Frank With Me, by Julia Claiborne Johnson The Yid, by Paul Goldberg Breaking Wild, by Diane Les Becquets Orphan X, by Gregg Hurwitz The Portable Velben, by Elizabeth McKenzie The Forgetting Time, by Sharon Guskin All the Birds in the Sky, by Charlie Jane Anders The Things We Keep, by Sally Hepworth The Arrangement, by Ashley Warlick Sweetgirl, by Travis Mulhauser Georgia: A Novel of Georgia O’Keeffe, by Dawn Tripp My […]
Briefs: Amazon Holiday Stats, Printers Row Drops Print, and More
Amazon‘s annual holiday release featured a blizzard of whimsical non-statistics about all of the things they sold during the busiest shopping time of the year. Among the ebook-related bits, “the most popular Kindle book purchased on Christmas day was The Snow Child, by Eowyn Ivey.” The most gifted Kindle book during the holidays was the self-published Rath’s Deception by Piers Platt, and the most borrowed book all year in the Kindle Unlimited subscription program was No Ordinary Billionaire by J.S. Scott. The Chicago Tribune’s Printers Row Journal, a subscription-based supplement of book reviews and more, will drop the print version in the […]
BN Education Announces Stock Buyback
Now that no one else seems to want its stock since reducing forecasts for the year when reporting quarterly earnings a week ago, Barnes & Noble Education announced that the board has authorized stock repurchases of up to $50 million worth of shares. That has given the company’s shares a small boost in price this morning, though BNED still trades below $9 a share — down over 40 percent from its recent peak on November 27. With a current market capitalization of only about $425 million, that repurchase authority covers a meaningful portion of shares outstanding.
Shareholders Approve Plan to Take Books-A-Million Private
As expected, Books-A-Million shareholders approved the Anderson family’s plan to take the company private in a deal worth $3.25 a share. The transaction is set to close on Thursday, December 10, and, according to BAMM’s announcement, the merger agreement was adopted by the stockholders representing approximately 88.3 percent of the aggregate voting power of outstanding common stock, as well as by 66.3 percent of shareholders not affiliated with the Anderson family, “thus satisfying the ‘majority of the minority’ stockholder approval condition in the merger agreement.” In their most recent quarterly filing, posted last month, Books-A-Million reported third quarter sales of […]