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Originally Posted by jocampo
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.
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I would agree that their e-book strategy didn't help - but I'm not sure that it could have: even a better executed strategy would have them competing against B&N and Amazon. And they have been failing at this for at least five years.
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Statistics and most recent reports say that people are buying more ebooks now than their counterpart in paper format (at least in USA).
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No, people are still buying more than 10 times as many paper books as e-books in the US. Only at *Amazon* (15% of the market and seller of the leading e-book reader) are the sales of e-books overtaking paper books.
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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.
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This is a good point; B&N is barely keeping its head above water, and has been in a similar position for many years.
There is still money to be made with B&M stores - but not as much as there used to be, and clearly not when B&N and Borders have so many giant stores within a couple of blocks of each other. Two stores barely breaking even close to each other *can translate* into one store making a decent profit if the other one goes away.