They have lost money the past two years, and I don’t see any sign that they are turning things around, so it is a real possibility.
Well, no personal insight here, but…
I’d wager that parts of B&N would be auctioned off. That may or may not include the stable of Nook contracts and users. If that’s the case the books may be transferred over ot whatever new system acquires them. If not, and the store goes down, I’d say you’d be SOL.
I think the Nooks and the Nook store are doing reasonably well on their own, so it’s likely that either B&N would work it so they close just the stores and become online-only or else someone will happily pick up the Nook side of the business.
B&N considered spinning off Nook last year and did sell a small stake to Pearson. Nook might well survive a collapse of the rest of the company.
Parenthetically, I have never understood this business model–sell the part of the company that’s doing well–but that’s off topic.
Not necessarily off-topic if it leads to an understanding of the answer to the OP’s question. Since Nook is successful on its own, spinning it off or finding a way to integrate it with other e-book systems becomes a sale of its customer base more than a sale of the notably ephemeral technology or the universal content.
By taking over a failing company and repackaging its elements, breakers can realize a profit by selling the good parts at high individual return, trading possibly useful parts (e.g. national warehousing and distribution facilities) to other companies and packaging what’s left (inventory, facilities, even whole departments with generic value) at break-even rates. By stripping the gold, scrapping the steel and finding someone to take the debris, it can be very profitable. Just not very “friendly” to anyone but the breakers themselves.
SOL how? Books on Nook are stored locally, and won’t go anywhere if B&N shuts down.
Kobo is still around despite Borders going down in flames.
That would have been a good nickname for Mr. Romney: “‘Breaker’ Milt”’.
http://mediadecoder.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/01/03/barnes-noble-reports-tepid-holiday-sales/
If your device gets reset, or you switch to a new one… where do you get your books reloaded from? Your books disappear, not with a bang but with a whimpper. (Or as the other cliche goes, … they just fade away.)
With Kindle, any time I add a new PC (program) or iPad/iPhone (app) onto my account, I can reload the books onto that device too. Plus, I can email my own PDFs and MOBI files (Use Caliber to convert) to a server for Kindle and the books are also available for download.
It’s a vicious spiral. I assume the central servers and account authorizations are financed by ongoing sales. As the company loses market share, the revenue stream starts to dry up. Looking to the future, would you buy more eBooks from B&N or invest the $90 (or get a free iPad app!) and buy all future books on a platform with more stable history like Kindle?
http://mediadecoder.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/01/03/barnes-noble-reports-tepid-holiday-sales/
Best case is an orderly shutdown or acquisition. Even an orderly shutdown means what you bought, you possibly don’t really own:
Maybe they will let you convert protected files to unprotected that you can read on a PC etc., if their contracts with the publishers allow them. As business declines, can they fight, say, Kindle paying a premium for “exclusive” sales rights?
If, say, Amazon buys they, they might allow you to gradually convert the files to Kindle equivalents, keeping the protection (or issue an ultimatum to convert by X date)… or update the reader software to handle Kindle protection instead.
But, as NitroPress points out, the most valuable asset Kobo has is its customer base. These are people who like reading enough to invest in a $100-plus dedicated reader. Odds are the future sales from them will be lucrative.
As for breaking up - what’s the alternative? The business model does not work. Fewer and fewer people are buying buggy whips or paper books. (Or paper anything, for that matter). The bricks and mortar don’t work; as you close stores, you shrink the customer traffic and base. Online is already dominated by someone with name recognition and razor-thin profit margins and almost no overhead. Time to get incredibly creative, or call it quits, or keep rearranging the deck chairs until the icy cold water laps at your face. (How many video rental stores in your neighourhood nowadays?)
Or for Obama forcing companies to cut hours to pay for Obamacare.
Mitt “Obama forcing companies to cut hours to pay for Obamacare” Romney?
Nah, that doesn’t really work very well as a nickname.
A few things:
- It goes against common wisdom, but the profitable part of Barnes & Noble right now is the bricks and mortar book business. It generates a lot of profit and cash right now. The founder / biggest shareholder (I’m not sure exactly his deal, he’s part of the family that’s owned B&N forever) actually wants to buy just the bricks and mortar business and take it private. He doesn’t want the Nook business because it’s losing money.
Now, that surprises some people, but it shouldn’t. While B&N has some unprofitable stores that it is closing, they still get a good bit of foot traffic and their stuff is marked up to holy hell. So when they do make a bricks and mortar sell it’s a pretty good profit margin. That being said, all of the long term indicators are the B&N bricks and mortar business is going the direction of Borders, B. Dalton, Walden Books and etc. But it isn’t there yet and in fact is actually still quite profitable. Me personally if I was a billionaire like the guy who wants to take the bricks and mortar business private, I’d question spending billions of my own dollars and using my own stake in the company as collateral on a business without long term profits. I’ve actually seen some speculation that him and his advisers have done the math and if he gets to take it private at the price he wants he’ll reap profits for around 10 years and then have a lot of assets to sell at the end of the road and actually end up having earned a good bit of money on his ten year investment.
Or, it could be because of his long association with the bricks and mortar business he thinks he can shift the paradigm, maybe by specializing in selling stuff that isn’t declining. (I don’t know what that would be, gift cards or random junk I guess, and maybe coffee.)
- The Nook business is widely unprofitable and unsuccessful. I’m a Nook owner and don’t regret the purchase, but when I buy my next ereader I’ll probably have to move away from B&N because I don’t have faith in the long term health of the platform. There was a period around the time I bought my Nook (I bought the first gen Nook Color) where it the division was doing very well and it was looking like the Nook division was going to save the B&N brand. A few short years where other companies have just released much stronger products versus the newer Nook offerings have made Nook an also ran that I do not think will last long term.
I’ve looked into my Nook books and there are a few bright spots:
-You can store Nook books locally on your PC
-You can read Nook books locally on your PC with the downloaded B&N desktop reader. Theoretically as long as you kept a working copy of your files and your desktop reader you’ll be able to read these files until Windows OS can no longer run the program. That may essentially be never, as I’ve got programs from the early 1990s I can get running in Windows 7 with some effort.
-There are techniques for converting B&N copyprotected nook book files to unprotected ePub which I won’t go into further, but if you were someone with thousands of dollars in content that may be something you would feel justified in pursuing. Most readers including iPad, Kindle etc can read the standard ePub.
Kobo wasn’t the creation of Borders – It’s a Canadian compan that simply used Borders to sell their products through, so they didb’t have the kind of stake in Borders that B&N does with Nook.
Reported.
Moderator Warning
Claverhouse, you’ve been here long enough to know that political jabs are not permitted in GQ. Jim’s Son, I’m sure you are aware of it, since you’ve previously been warned for it. This is an official warning. Do not do this again. Jim’s Son in particular, if you continue to ignore this rule you may find your posting privileges under discussion.
Colibri
General Questions Moderator
Maybe… except I’ve found in the past that books I hadn’t read in a while (“in a while” being anything from 2 weeks to much longer) disappeared and had to be re-downloaded. And when my old credit card expired, ALL my B&N books disappeared. I had to update the credit card info and redownload them all. I haven’t tried reading them on a desktop yet, but I’d worry that something downloaded pre-expiration might not work post-expiration until I did such an update.
As a general piece of advice: There are questions as to whether it’s legal to hack DRM’ed books - that you paid for - for your own use. If you believe (as I do) that doing so is fine, then you can solve the problems of your B&N books disappearing. This will also let you read them on other brands of ereaders (Kindle, Kobo, and a variety of smartphone apps).
This is the point :
Your computer or device needs to be authorized against your account. Your account is on the B&N servers. When they go, no more authorizing.
Your purchases, if you need to re-download them, are on B&N servers. No servers, no data to download. (As a wild-ass guess, the reader has limited memory and so it will flush the least-accessed books to make room for the next downloads… on the assumption you can just download them.)
If you have a new computer, or new Reader, you need to also authorize that - again, against B&N servers. So maybe you can keep reading until you buy a new computer, or until your reader dies - but no new computer or reader once B&N servers go off-line; even if you can get a sweet deal on a used Nook on ebay - what good would it be?
So your best bet is an orderly shutdown (or merger) of Nook infrastructure that allows you to migrate your purchases. Worst case, one day your books start to fade away.
Direct personal experience with something similar: There used to be a company that most recently sold as Ereader.com (previously Palm Digital Media, or Peanut Press). Originally its books had DRM, later on it turned out they did not.
B&N bought Ereader.com and kept it up as a separate entity for a while. I could still redownload old purchases, though Ereader didn’t always have those same books for sale to new clients. I could not download the books from the B&N site at that point (well, if I repurchased them maybe…).
About 4 months ago, B&N decided to pull the plug on the Ereader.com brand - not sure what took them so long, actually. At that point they made virtually all the books available to download to my Nook directly from B&N. There may have been a few that could not be transferred over - but since I’d long since downloaded and converted them from Ereader, it was a non-issue.
I would hope that if the Nook division is sold off, the purchaser would do something similar to avoid alienating existing customers.
This is true for all content. If Amazon or Apple go out of business, you can’t download past purchases any more.
With an iPod or a Kindle, you can store local copies of purchased content. Is the nook different in that regard?
Lucky for you. As a Canadian Ereader.com, I did not have the option to transition to Nook. Fortunately, I still have all my book files, and the ereader software uses my credit card number as a ‘password’ instead of requiring re-authorization. I’ve even figured out how to download my Ereader books from a URL to my android phone and launch them in the Android Ereader.com app, so I don’t need to keep all my book files local just because the Ereader.com online bookshelf is down.
(And just to hedge my bets, I’ve used another workaround to convert the books to Kindle format.)