Quote:
Originally Posted by ZodWallop
Thank goodness. I think B&N pulling back from ebooks would be a big mistake.
I hope B&N goes back to investing in the Nook.
|
Invest?
Great.
In what exactly?
They're behind the curve on everything: generic China Inc hardware, limited/buggy software, small ebook catalog, small active customer base, poor support apps on PC/Mac, tainted brand. Even Nook hardware owners are buying their ebooks from Kobo or Google.
What can he do to get Kobo buyers to switch?
Kindle users are likely to be Prime users and/or have deep ebook libraries by now. Apple users are also not in play.
Doesn't leave much market in play.
The market has moved on and Nook is an afterthought.
It's not 2010 when the market was wide open and the B&N name had value.
Today most ebook shoppers are committed to one walled-garden or another.
Sure, they can invest to make things better for their remaining Nook owners, get them to buy from them instead of Kobo. But that isn't going to do much for them.
They might advertise like crazy to remind non-enthusiasts they still exist and try to bring in some newcomers to eBooks but that isn't going to move the needle.
Daunt is giving ebooks lip service because he needs whatever money he can generate to keep the B&M stores open. The lockdowns haven't exactly filled the stores with bored shoppers. Things were bad before, they're much worse now.
What he can do is OEM a new ereader from China and hire an India code shop for better software. And then what?
Nook is hardly bigger than Google these days and Google isn't even trying.
You don't fix ten years of mismanagement by throwing money at the problem and instantly fix it. It might even be too late to fix, going by their last sales reports.
It's good he's not killing it outright but let's not kid ourselves, Nook has to go a long way to be even as relevant as Kobo. There's no magic bullet.
He doesn't have much to work with and much bigger problems to deal with, too.
The entire publishing industry too:
https://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/...-in-april.html
Quote:
Net publishing sales fell 3.5% in April compared to April 2019 for the 1,361 publishers who report revenue to AAP’s StatShot program. The small decline, however, is deceiving. Gross sales fell in the monthly comparison, dropping 16%, but were offset by a nearly 49% drop in returns. (AAP calculates net sales by deducting returns from gross sales.) Returns were down in every category and point to an issue that many publishers are keeping an eye on—the possibility of heavy returns when bookstores reopen after closing because of the pandemic.
Nearly all college stores were closed in April, leading to a 57.9% decline in returns to publishers of higher educational course materials in the month compared to 2019. And even though gross sales fell 30.8% in the month, the plunge in returns led to a 139.8% increase in net sales in the category. The AAP said it expects an increase in returns in the category in future months as stores, distributors, colleges, and universities reopen.
|
On a sale of 1-10, Nook is maybe an 8 on Daunt's priority scale. Keeping as many stores open as possible is 1.