Fretting about the state of Barnes & Noble’s bookstores is put into perspective by reports from the UK on the performance of Waterstone’s. A government corporate filing showed just how badly the chain had been suffering. It’s important to underscore that the results everyone is writing about are old–they cover the fiscal year ending almost a year ago, in April 2012. The bookseller had a £25.4 million operating loss, and a £37.3 million after-tax loss. Sales fell 14 percent, down to £410.4 million, and same-store sales dropped 11.1 percent. Managing director James Daunt blamed the result on “what I inherited…. […]
Bookstores
Ish No More; Bookish.com Is Live
After years of development, three ceos, eight figures of funding and the challenges of operating a start-up joint venture after the founding partners negotiated settlements with the Department of Justice over alleged collusion, Bookish.com officially launched to the public on Monday evening. (As HBG ceo David Young told the AP, “We received clearance for Bookish, but every time any of us talk about something we have to conform to the DOJ rules.”) The three founding partners–Hachette Book Group, Penguin and Simon & Schuster–are joined by 16 other publishers (including the other three largest publishers, as well as Harlequin, HMH, Norton. […]
BN Hopes for An Orderly Reduction of 20 Stores A Year, For A Decade
CEO of Barnes & Noble’s retail group Mitchell Klipper reiterates the company’s expectations for an orderly slimming of their bookstore base to the WSJ. BN forecasts that they will close about 20 stores a year for the forseeable future–meaning that “in 10 years we’ll have 450 to 500 stores,” Klipper said, compared to 689 stores right now. (They reached “peak superstores” in 2008, when the chain comprised 726 BN outlets.) One key to whether that strategy plays out as predicted is their lease portfolio, since bookstores are a real estate business as much as anything. BN has a very flexible […]
ABA Lists New Stores for 2012
The ABA provides their annual roster of new member bookstores that opened during the previous, listing 40 new stores that opened in 2012 in 24 states. As usual, the list includes brand-new stores selling new books (28); new branches of existing business (5); and new stores that primarily sell used books (7). That compares to 37 new member stores in 2011–which included 23 new bookstores, and 6 new branches of existing members. It’s informal, but since readers often ask us for tallies of stores that closed, in the Publishers Lunch archives we find reports of at least 28 independent bookstores that […]
Bookselling: WORD To Open Second Location in Jersey City; Black Forest Books & Toys To Close; and More
WORD Bookstore will open a second location in Jersey City, NJ later this year. The new store, which will be located close to the Grove Street PATH Station, will be larger than the original Brooklyn location and have a cafe. Owner Christine Onorati told Shelf Awareness the new WORD location’s inventory “will be ‘very similar’ to the Brooklyn store but with an expanded kids section” while the cafe will double as an event space. “I have very high hopes for this new store, and I’m excited to help foster the vibrant, literary, community-focused spirit of Jersey City.” Black Forest Books […]
ABA Sales Softened In Second Half; UK eSales Still Lag US Considerably
As a group, ABA bookstores had a good year in 2012–but what’s implied in this BTW story is more significant than the stated statistics, ratifying our “story we can’t report” from yesterday. The ABA provides another indication that, despite happy anecdotal holiday sales reports,holiday book sales were soft, providing a soft ending to the year as early blockbusters (Hunger Games; Fifty Shades; etc.) gave way to a holiday season with few dominant, breakout books and a cooling off of the ebook market. (Barnes & Noble’s “core” non-Nook-related bookstores sales fell 3.1 percent during the holiday sales period.) What the ABA […]