Barnes & Noble Profits Fall

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Barnes & Noble's revenue continues on a downward spiral. A lack of delicious trilogies like, The Hunger Games and Fifty Shades of Grey have seriously hurt the industry and Barnes and Nobles bottom line. Basically, America needs a new author to be obsessed with.

On Tuesday, America’s favorite book seller announced that it lost $87 million in the most recent quarter. 75 percent of its total revenue is retail revenue, which dropped 9.9 percent. Barnes & Noble also stated that Leonard Riggio, its chairman and largest shareholder, dropped his endeavor to buy the retail side of the business. The Nook side of the business was down 20.2 percent, and the actual sales of the device itself are down 23 percent.

Analysts assumed that Barnes & Noble would bring the exertion to an end. However, the company says it still plans to integrate its Nook and retail businesses. Barnes thinks that its digital efforts still have major potential to bolster its retail business, claiming 22 percent of the U.S e-book market, and has sold 10 million Nooks.

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“If we want to be in the device business, we have to be in the content business no matter how they’re produced. We think our people can produce better devices than anyone else,” Michael Huseby, company president, told investors in a conference call on Tuesday morning.

In this day in age, it would be expected that Barnes should have a natural advantage in the industry, because most readers appear to want a mix between print and digital, explains Michael Zhatzkin, Chief Executive of Idea Logical, a consultant for publishers.

“Only Barnes & Noble has e-books, print books, online and offline. The challenge for them is to keep the customers as customers change their patterns of consumption,” Zharzkin says. “It’s very hard to discern, because Amazon buries its numbers so much, but it’s my impression that the gap between Amazon.com and BN.com is growing.”

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