Barnes and Noble’s struggling Nook division has been widely publicized over the past few years.
Microsoft invested over 600 million dollars in Barnes and Noble’s Nook Media division in 2012.
Now that’s looking like a pretty awful investment decision on Microsoft’s part. Today it was announced that Barnes and Noble is buying out Microsoft’s 16.8% stake in Nook Media, and they are only paying $125 million in cash and stock.
Barnes and Noble needed to buyout Microsoft’s Nook share in order to proceed with their plans to separate Nook Media into it’s own standalone company.
The splitting of Nook into a separate company was expected to take place in early 2015, but now Barnes and Noble says that won’t happen until the end of August 2015.
Things have been changing a lot for the Nook brand over the past year. B&N laid off most of the division devoted to its Nook devices. They announced that they would no longer be making any new Nook tablets. Instead they signed a deal with Samsung to sell co-branded Galaxy tablets. That has helped trim costs for B&N but it’s still not enough.
The number one biggest problem with Nook moving forward is that consumers lack confidence in B&N, especially after doing things like removing the option to download Nook ebooks from their website. B&N comes off like they don’t really care about Nook anymore, about improving Nook-related features and customer experience. Until they do that, the Nook brand is going to continue down the inevitable path of a sinking ship.
via: Wall Street Journal
Aghhh!!!!! What is this company doing? I think they just want to die. Don’t they realize that they are handing the ebook business to Kobo and Amazon? This is so strange. Its like these people have a lot of bad ideas taped to a dart board and whichever one the dart hits, that’s the bad idea of the day.
If B&N wanted to give the ebook business to Kobo and Amazon, they’d just shut down NOOK Media (well, the NOOK part) and stop the bleeding. B&N refuses to give up, but they don’t seem to have any plan that could lead to success.
I’m not sure there IS a plan that could lead to success for NOOK. I hope there is, and I hope they find it soon, but they’ve had five years. The first year was exciting, but the last four, not so much.
Boy-o-boy! Am laid up for 4 weeks due to surgery, wanted to buy my latest novel from B&N, then decide to download the book to NOOK. Well… B&N had removed the link to download to PC or Mac, and with a PC, you could only do so if using Windows 8. Seriously??? They’ve gotta KNOW we hate 8. A very savvy B&N staff, Jeff, of River Oaks, Houston, where I live, did find it in another round-about way, and we are saying “just incredibly dumb…. really? You’re going to try to make me buy Windows 8?
…I was looking for how to download the NOOK App to my PC, that is, not the book…
There are some workarounds. Check out this post: How to Download Nook eBooks Now That B&N has Removed the Option.