If B&N gets rid of Nook, what happens to Pubit? B&N had a bad year in 2011. Being totally selfish, what will happen to us if we lose our hone here? Is there some way we could help the sales of indie ebooks and Nook?
If B&N gets rid of Nook, what happens to Pubit? B&N had a bad year in 2011.
B&N is not looking to "get rid of NOOK", but rather to make it a separate operating segment for financial reporting purposes. This will make the cash flows of the other segments more clear, since right now the Retail (big-box bookstores) figures contain some NOOK and NOOK accessories sales, and BN.com also does. It'll also remove the development costs of NOOK devices from BN.com's cash flow reports.
As for "a bad year in 2011", that's hard to justify. B&N doesn't report on a calendar fiscal year, but over the past four quarters they've reported a total of $62 million net loss on $7 billion in sales (USD), which is a loss/sales rate of 0.8%. I can't call that "a bad year", especially when B&N spent a bunch of money designing and manufacturing the NOOK 2 and NOOK Tablet.
B&N does acknowlege overestimating the demand for the NOOK 2, but even given that, total NOOK sales during the holiday period were up 70% in units and 43% in dollars (comparable) over last year.
The stock price is down. They haven't announced what they will do with Nook yet. Nook ST wasn't as strong a seller as they thought it would be, while Nook Tablet did well. I'd say it is uncertain until B&N makes an announcement. The statement by the CEO was vague.
In other words PubIt will operate autonomously from BN just as CreateSpace does with Amazon. The accounting will be basically the same but BN won't have to write off the loss of revenues from operating PB. The Nook will still be BN's proprietary machine.
Theresa M. Moore Author of the Children of The Dragon vampire series http://www.theresammoore.com/
