Barnes & Noble followed up their pre-New Year’s sales warning with a fuller holiday sales report: Same-store sales at the BN superstores and BN.com fell 8.2 percent (and 10.9 percent overall), at $1.2 billion for the nine-week period. Much of the decline was due to weaker sales of Nook devices and accessories but even leaving that product line aside, “core” store sales still declined 3.1 percent compared to last year “due to lower bookstore traffic.” (A core decline had been forecast, however, in the low-to-mid single digits, and the company said those sales “exceeded expectations.”) In the last quarter BN management […]
Bookstores
Bookselling: Prairie Lights’ New Publishing Venture: Robin’s Bookstore, Puddn’Head Books Close; And More
Prairie Lights Bookstore is teaming up with the University of Iowa Press to publish a handful of books annually, starting with Philip Levine’s poetry collection SWEET WILL. The Iowa Press-Citizen reports Prairie Lights will act as the publisher, while UI Press will produce, design and distribute the books. Store co-owner Jan Weissmiller told the paper there aren’t any strict guidelines on what will be published, but the work “will likely be fiction, poetry and literary non-fiction, rather than history or journalism.” The LA Times profiled recently-opened bookstore Bank of Books, Malibu, highlighting the “novel ways” the store attracts customers, including […]
Bookselling: More BN Stores to Close; Foyles Turns a Smaller Profit in 2012; And More
Barnes & Noble will close both of its stores in Irving, TX on December 31. The Irving mall and Las Colinas locations are shutting down “as part of the national book store’s recent business decision to reevaluate low-selling locations,” according to neighborsgo.com. It goes along with the pattern in which BN closes stores when the leases expire if they cannot agree on acceptable renewals: December 31 will also see the shutdown of stores in Westlake, TX; Plainfield, IL; Campbell, CA; and, as previously reported, the Sixth Avenue store in New York’s West Village. BN will also close a store in […]
BN Closed Tikatok; Faces Further PIN Pad Inquiries and Another Possible Patent Fight
Barnes & Noble’s latest quarterly filing unusually contained a few interesting nuggets that were not announced when the company first reported basic earnings information for the period. They “decided to shut down the operations of Tikatok,” the online children’s writing platform, and took an impairment charge of $1.97 million on the closure. BN bought Tikatok three years ago for $2.3 million “as part of its overall digital strategy, expanding the company’s reach to additional parents, educators and librarians.” On the plus side, after the quarter closed, in November they received their first operating payment from Microsoft as part of the new […]
Celona’s Novel Tops January Indie Next List
The novel from Free Press beats out Oprah pick The Twelve Tribes of Hattie to top the ABA’s Indie Next list for January: #1 Y: A Novel, by Marjorie Celona Tenth of December: Stories, by George Saunders Me Before You: A Novel, by Jojo Moyes The Twelve Tribes of Hattie: A Novel, by Ayana Mathis The Third Bullet: A Bob Lee Swagger Novel, by Stephen Hunter Finding Camlann: A Novel, by Sean Pidgeon The Death of Bees: A Novel, by Lisa O’Donnell Hikikomori and the Rental Sister: A Novel, by Jeff Backhaus The Intercept: A Jeremy Fisk Novel, by Dick […]
Bookselling: Books and Boos Opens in CT; BN Sixth Avenue Location To Close on December 31; and More
Barnes & Noble will close its West Village location on Sixth Avenue on December 31, according to a notice posted on the store’s window we observed last week. New and used bookstore Books and Boos opened in Colchester, CT last week. Owners Jason and Stacey Harris, also on the board of directors of the New England Horror Writers’ Association, told the Norwich Bulletin “it was something we always wanted to do” and that the store caters to “those of us who enjoy a good book, a good time and a good scare.” Yawn’s Books and More in Canton, GA will […]