[fjtorres]

First, the news:

B&N Worst holiday quarter since 2005:

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/artic...er-in-a-decade

Bookstore chain’s same-store sales tumbled 8.3% in the period
Company now expects a decline of 7% for the full year
Sales of Nook content, devices and accessories fell 26 percent last quarter, which ended Jan. 28.

But it's not their fault.

http://seekingalpha.com/article/4051...pt?part=single

Nook is fading because ebooks are fading:

Now, we also have to look at the drop in retail traffic, and our sales are suffering because of traffic declines, some due to the fact that people are not coming to us, but we think more due to the fact that there are less cars in the lot, there are less pedestrians walking by, our retail co-tenants have had sales declines and traffic declines, so that where years ago one retailer’s traffic would--or traffic increases would be the benefit of the others, what we are experiencing today is that the decline of one increases the decline or causes the decline in others.
Now in our particular case, there is a long-term effect of the so-called digital revolution. Had we made a prediction of where retail book selling was going four years ago, it was pretty clear that if the sale of devices and the sale of ebooks continued to escalate as it was, there would be no future in retail book selling. We also know that that increase in sale of digital products has abated and possibly, very possibly might be abating. We know this by our numbers and we know it anecdotally as we speak to people, many, many customers who have come back to books because they prefer reading books and also owning books, as opposed to owning just a dot on their site.

And sales are down because... Well, politics:

About eight or nine months ago, I was the first, we were the first retailers to talk about the effect of the election, this particular unprecedented election cycle and post-election goings-on. There is a profound effect of media on book sales. Many, many books get their start in the media, the newspapers and on television. There are precedents for this throughout the course of our history, when the media becomes preoccupied over a sustained period.
The book authors and the book subjects stop appearing on the evening news programs, certainly the commentator programs, great shows like CBS Sunday Morning, and even one of the biggest drivers of book sales, which is the morning news shows, the morning entertainment shows. All the talk now is about politics, and books have been starved of any presence there. We see cookbooks and health books and fashion and dieting - so, so many books become explosive as a result of their exposure on TV and in the newspapers. That has all but dried up.
Now in addition to that, there has been a measurable effect of this election that we noticed some time ago, and I’ve charted this over a long period of time. I was one to think that this would go away after the election, and it did just a little bit and our sales started to look like they were righting themselves and it seemed like people were going back to their normal lives. Then we had the inauguration and it started again, and even more fiercely than we had experienced before. So what we’re looking at, and I’m sure other retailers are though I haven’t seen much reporting on it, what we’re looking at is a major difference between our sales in the daytime and our sales at night. The conclusion that we could come to and we believe is the case is that people are spending their time at night watching--there’s no question that the viewership of Fox News and CNN and MSNBC’s of the world is way, way up again, subscription to the Times, as you know, way, way up. People are all engaged in this new government and all of the controversies that come with this and the war between the parties.

Lots more at the sources.