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Barnes and Noble didn't lose $74 million on the year due to Nook "R&D". But it did spend a heck of a lot to run the digital side of the business. BN.com, the division which runs the online services (including ordering and shipping physical books, the Nook project and selling e-books), represented 9% of sales but 33% of operating costs. One of the challenges is the margins on Nooks are fairly small vs. selling the actual ebooks.
Even though it collected $7 billion at the till from all business combined for the year (online, retail and college stores), it only had 2.3¢ on every dollar left over after operating costs. It still had interest payments and capital investments which resulted in the loss. Barnes and Noble stopped paying a dividend this year as well to conserve cash to reinvest ... but the business is actually worth less today than it was a year ago.
B&N still has time to fix the business and become profitable -- and there is an offer to buy the business by Liberty Media which presumably would also bring bags of cash to help exploit the Nook. However, by normal measures, B&N is a "sick" company and management has not demonstrated concretely that it has a viable business plan that will reward shareholders in some reasonable time horizon.
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