Quote:
Originally Posted by DuckieTigger
Well yes that too. Can B&N survive without selling ebooks? Or are they headed the path of Borders and go extinct? Big stores may be nice, but they are not in easy reach unless you are in a big city. If I have to order paper books online, knowing I won't have a choice to get the ebook, why not let a local bookstore to order it. Or order the pbooks from Amazon if no local store is easily available. If B&N has to get rid of Nook, what signal does that send to the customer? Hard to put faith into them if they don't know how to sell ebooks and trust them they know pbooks well enough. In the end it doesn't matter if it was B&N fault or if they got pushed into non-existance by others - to the customer the result is the same.
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Given their current burn rate and store closing rate they can easily survive a decade or more without Nook. (With Nook as they currently run it, maybe two years more.) At the end they might be down to 50 stores but they'll still be around.
As for Borders, their mismanagement brought them to bankruptcy but oddly enough, it was the BPHs that pushed them into liquidation and, worse, prevented even a truncated Borders to remain.
http://dealbook.nytimes.com/2011/07/...d-takeover-by/
It's a long story but, in brief, Borders had a really bad year and had been for months been restocking their stores off return credits. When the BPHs said, "enough, no returns. Pay cash," Borders went to bankruptcy court to reorganize. Instead, the BPHs refused any and all deals. They wanted full payment. (It wasn't even all that much by business standards, some $75 million or so. But Borders leases were eating them up alive and they couldn't come up with even that much.)
By then the BPHs had (collectively, of course) decided that they wanted Borders completely gone so their customers would be forced to go to B&N. So they blocked several attempts by investment groups and individial mall operators to buy the few profitable stores, inventory and all, to keep them running. Even under other names. The end result was the total closure of all Borders stores.
http://mediadecoder.blogs.nytimes.co...ype=blogs&_r=0
Of course, the plan to drive Borders customers to B&N was a total flop. The BPHs, as usual, misread customer behavior. They thought that since 75% of Borders stores were within a mile of a competing B&N would drive them to the survivor. The reality was that those people shopped at Borders because they didn't like shopping at B&N. With Borders gone, most opted to go to Amazon.
(The rest of Borders customers, me included, had no B&N within hundreds of miles and had no choice but to go online.)
Bottom line: the BPHs are unlikely to force B&N over the edge the way they squeezed Borders out because that would leave them with only Walmart, Target, and indies as counters to Amazon.
B&N knows this so they have been squeezing the BPHs for more payola money (the cause of their fight with S&S) which in turn makes them totally dependent on the BPHs and squeezes out smaller publishers. Which is reflected in the Nook sales mix, as reported by DBW.
In the end the BPHs will likely buy up equity in B&N to keep it open at all costs.