Quote:
Originally Posted by Kali Yuga
I seriously doubt ebooks have much to do with their fall. This has been years in the making, and ebooks have been a tiny slice of book sales until very recently.
They almost certainly expanded too fast and unwisely. International stores, acquiring and then closing other chains, too much overlap with B&N....
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Yes and No.
They were having issues before but failed to enter into the ebook market on time. Last two years basically changed the game in terms of how the people read and how much are willing to pay for a pbook; e-readers were the factor which change that.
Statistics and most recent reports say that people are buying more ebooks now than their counterpart in paper format (at least in USA). We will have to say if that is just temporary or a trend, but when you have a brick store which electricity to pay, employees, rent in some cases, etc, it is difficult to win the game against a online Webserver, which is working 24/7 running Oracle or MySQL with a few DBAs well paid. One more example, B&N, although they were smarter and hit the jackpot with the Nook Color but still, having money issues running all those brick stores around USA.