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Losing 1 billion seems plausible when you consider the length of time BN has been selling Nook products and recall that the tablet line suffered several large blows and gross mishandling for example the Nook HD which flooded their market with too many choices.
Also factor in that BN used to do most of not all the Nook stuff fully in house that’s a big cost to them.
Personally what I want to see is BN sell the Nook off to Kobo and work out a deal to sell the devices in store. This would relieve them of the financial burden of developing Nook while allowing them to benefit from whatever sales they can. They could potentially still sell ebooks in store as well though that’s not something that they’ve really tried to do in quite some time.
This would also give Kobo a better partner than Walmart since at least BN is focused on books whereas Walmart is a general goods catch all store where Kobo is easily looked over.
And it’s not entirely unprecedented, Kobo are the ones who ultimately ended up with Nook UK customers though I believe that there was a company who had snagged them in the initial shut down before themselves turning it over to Kobo
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