Hmm, Shatzkin thinks B&N might have converted too many B&M customers to digital and pushed others away...
http://www.idealog.com/blog/bn-resul...-of-the-blame/
Quote:
Since the results were announced this morning, I had a conversation with a journalist who pointed out that the indies (anecdotally) seem to be reporting a very good Christmas. Why would the indies be up and B&N be down, this person wondered?
Thinking about that yields one piece of anecdata, one bit of conjecture (offered in yesterday’s forecast post), and one newly recalled (and somewhat frightening) insight.
The anecdata is that a Big Six CEO told me a couple of months ago that a very major book being published by that house (certainly one of the ten most anticipated releases of 2012) was not primarily promoted at B&N because they couldn’t get the bandwidth and cooperation on the B&N side to put something together. So the book was instead primarily launched through Walmart.
The conjecture in the last post was that the independents were more focused on selling printed books than B&N was. Indies are selling Kobo readers, but I’ll bet not one of them is devoting the prime sales space and portion of the paid staff to them that B&N does to the NOOKs. They’re focused on selling books, not devices, so they’re merchandising them better.
And the insight is that B&N has converted much of its store traffic to an online customer base because of their success at selling NOOKs. Those people may not be coming back, except virtually. These results may be the evidence of that.
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It's an idea, I suppose.
Not sure about it, myself, though.