Quote:
Originally Posted by PatNY
And the worst option is to try nothing. To just sit there with their old strategy and die a slow death. At the very least, they can make that death less painful and more honorable. They can go down fighting!
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One fight possibility: Admit that their old strategy of banging heads with tech companies was wrong, and
fight for paper:
Quote:
. . . there is one bullish scenario. Barnes & Noble could be a profitable investment if the company were to sell its stake in Nook Media and focus instead on harvesting the remaining cash flow from its bookstores for dividends, some analysts say.
That would be a sharp change from the current strategy of funneling all bookstore profits into the loss-making Nook venture.
Peter Wahlstrom, analyst at investment researcher Morningstar, MORN -0.29% estimates the company's nearly 1,400 bookstores—half of them on college campuses—could produce more than $1 billion in pretax operating cash flow over the next five years if they were simply managed as a stand-alone business.
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No one knows how long paper books have to go, but I suspect there will be a lot more die-hard dead tree fans than there were with vinyl records. As paper book sales decline, the prices of paper books, and the margins, will probably go up. So why not fight for that?
Now, I know, we are mobile readers. The plan I quote is for B&N to turn their backs on everyone here. But it would be mistake for Barnes and Noble to try to please me, since I'm not likely to buy from them anyway.