Barnes and Noble Wants To Be More Like An Indie Bookseller

[Pizza_Cant_Read]

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/featu...die-bookseller

New CEO aims to shake things up and seems to have the money backing him up. I love to see a player give competition to Amazon but also fear that they’ve burned too many bridges for this not to be another waste of money.

Kudos for Elliot’s board for choosing a more interesting CEO. As the article states, choosing leaders from dying companies didn’t seem to be helping things...

[Apache]

Originally Posted by Pizza_Cant_Read

[url]https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2020-03-04/
Kudos for Elliot’s board for choosing a more interesting CEO. As the article states, choosing leaders from dying companies didn’t seem to be helping things...

About as smart as one failing company buying another failing company. ie: Sears and Kmart.
Apache

[fjtorres]

Originally Posted by Apache

About as smart as one failing company buying another failing company. ie: Sears and Kmart.
Apache

The Smart part is Elliot got B&N so cheap they make money if they close all the stores and sell the warehouses and logistics chain to somebody like Ingram. The stores are depressing the overall value of the rest of the company.

In the near term, they can try to fix the stores before IPOing the fixed company. And if they fail, they can liquidate and still come out ahead.

[Hemmi]

I got this nugget from an author's newsletter today "This morning I was notified that Barnes&Noble is struggling to meet its expenses and can't make this month's royalty payments"

She's taking down her ebook preorders and pulling most of her catalog from B&N.

[Dr. Drib]

Their failure (soon to be imminent?) would make an interesting ebook. I would buy it, from Amazon or Kobo, depending on who has the better price.

[fjtorres]

Originally Posted by Hemmi

I got this nugget from an author's newsletter today "This morning I was notified that Barnes&Noble is struggling to meet its expenses and can't make this month's royalty payments"

She's taking down her ebook preorders and pulling most of her catalog from B&N.

They're not paying the big aggregators: Smashwords or Draft2Digital:

https://the-digital-reader.com/2020/...oney-problems/

Do you want to know how small fry the Nook is to B&N?

In B&N's last fiscal year, Nook revenues, including both hardware and content sales, totaled $92 million, while revenues for the fiscal year totaled $3.6 billion.

That is not a lot of money when divided into monthly payments, which is even more worrisome. A back of the envelope calculation suggests that Nook royalty payments for February are in the ballpark of $3 to $4 million.

Seasonality plays into it a bit: feb is one of the slowest months for ebook sales.
And it was before the crisis led to the closures so they still had B&M revenues.

https://www.smashwords.com/about/updates

April 20, 2020 - Barnes & Noble is having cash flow issues due to Covid-19, and delaying payments to suppliers. This means that this month's round of payments, which we are processing today, will *not* include February sales at Barnes & Noble. Per our Terms of Service, we pay our authors and publishers based on what the retailers pay us. Other Smashwords retailers and library partners are current with their obligations, which means this only affects your B&N portion of accrued earnings. In the next couple days I'll send an email update to all Smashwords authors and publishers because not everyone follows these Site Updates.

Moving forward, things won't get better for march or april payments: Those 400 closed storefronts still have to pay rent.

[Tomk2]

Uh oh. Thanks for the links.

Sent from my SM-G930V using Tapatalk

[rcentros]

Originally Posted by fjtorres

Moving forward, things won't get better for march or april payments: Those 400 closed storefronts still have to pay rent.

Looks like they found the money somewhere... from Smashword's site...

April 23, 2020 - Great news on the Barnes & Noble front. They plan to issue a full payment to Smashwords on Monday, and return to our regular payment schedule. Thank you to everyone at Barnes & Noble for your consideration and for your advocacy for indie authors. We will issue a special payment round to make authors whole.

[Hemmi]

Yes, the author sent out another newsletter. Apparently B&N is paying ebook royalties, it's paper book royalties they will no be able to pay in full.

[Quoth]

Originally Posted by Hemmi

Yes, the author sent out another newsletter. Apparently B&N is paying ebook royalties, it's paper book royalties they will no be able to pay in full.

Choosing not to pay. It's a small part of their overheads.

[Apache]

Originally Posted by Quoth

Choosing not to pay. It's a small part of their overheads.

Damn, I did not realize I could make a profit if I just elect to not pay my bills.
Apache

[Logseman]

Originally Posted by Apache

Damn, I did not realize I could make a profit if I just elect to not pay my bills.
Apache

Loads of big chain businesses chose to not pay rent to their landlords as well. I'd pay to be a fly on the wall in the renewal meetings that happen in the coming months.

[fjtorres]

Originally Posted by Logseman

Loads of big chain businesses chose to not pay rent to their landlords as well. I'd pay to be a fly on the wall in the renewal meetings that happen in the coming months.

It'll be easy for B&N: they'll just close the store.
Odds are, they were going to anyway.
Those leases are the second biggest problem Daunt faces.

They're moving to smaller stores and, if they can afford it, more of them.
The goal is to be like a chain of independents. Which looked to be tricky but after the crisis kills off a fair amount of those it might work.

[DuckieTigger]

Originally Posted by fjtorres

It'll be easy for B&N: they'll just close the store.
Odds are, they were going to anyway.
Those leases are the second biggest problem Daunt faces.

Closing the store by breaking the lease is not that easy at the moment. Normally you would do that if the lease has a bailout clause. But right now there is nothing normal about the economy. The landlord could probably tell B&N that a bailout is not valid, because most everybody's retail stores are closed right now. Don't have enough money for their rent? Then they need to get a loan through the Corona Virus Relief bills. Catch 22 would be, that there is stipulations that they may have to pay back more if they fire people. So B&N cannot take advantage from the Corona virus to close stores early that they planned on closing anyway.

[binaryhermit]

Or B&N could file for bankruptcy and the landlord would be f'd anyway.