Barnes & Noble's Nook Business Sees Fifty Shades of Red
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Barnes & Noble‘s products with power buttons and virtual pages have turned into horror stories. With demand for its Nooks disappearing, the New York-based company just posted a $118.6 million loss in the three months ended April 27—more than double its year-earlier loss and much worse than Wall Street expected. Now the company plans to get out of the tablet-making business entirely, though it intends to continue selling them.
Barnes & Noble’s Nook revenue dropped 34 percent since the same quarter last year, and revenue from the sales of e-books sagged by 9 percent. The company took a $18.3 million impairment charge on its tech gadgets in what is tantamount to an admission that the unprofitable Nook has ended up on the losing side of the e-book format war. Amazon.com, which doesn’t release specific data on the performance of its Kindle readers, has said its e-book business grew by 70 percent last year.
