Barnes & Noble on Thursday reported disappointing holiday sales for the nine-week period ending Dec. 29, particularly for its struggling e-reader business.
Retails sales from the company's bookstores and its Web site, BN.com, decreased by 10.9 percent from the same period in 2011, to $1.2 billion. More shockingly, sales for the Nook unit - which includes e-readers, tablets, digital content and accessories - decreased 12.6 percent over the same period.
The nation's largest book chain has invested heavily in recent years in developing a tablet that could compete with offerings from media giants like Google, Apple and Amazon. While its most recent products have won critical praise, the sales figures emphasized just how hard the battle has been in an increasingly competitive digital market.
The company pointed out that the Nook unit sales decreased even though digital content sales actually increased 13.1%. (Digital content sales are defined to include digit al books, digital newsstand, and the apps business.) So the decline was a very bad sign for the sales performance of their tablets, which offer services like music and video in addition to books.
“We entered the holiday with two great new products, NOOK HD and NOOK HD+, both highly rated media tablets of phenomenal quality,†William Lynch, the company's chief executive, said in a written statement. “NOOK device sales got off to a good start over the Black Friday period, but then fell short of expectations for the balance of holiday. We are examining the root cause of the December shortfall in sales, and will adjust our strategies accordingly going forward.â€
Last month, Barnes & Noble announced that Pearson, the British education and publishing conglomerate, was taking a 5 percent stake in Nook for $89.5 million. Analysts said that that cash investment - following a $300 million investment by Microsoft last spring - will help the business but not solv e its core problems.
