Barnes & Noble finally reported their fiscal year last week, letting me complete my annual bookstore sales survey. I’ll start with a graph from that report which is worth a thousand words:
If I graphed the stocks of these booksellers, the trends would be similar but much more pronounced. Amazon continues to grow their share of media sales (Books, Music and Movies) in North America, while Borders continues its death spiral. The hold-up on the Barnes and Noble 10K filing this year was their integration of the college bookstore division, which was previously a privately owned company. For the graph above, I subtracted out the college bookstore sales, so the the historical component would remain relevant.
The current trends would put Amazon North America at over $6.6 Billion for 2010, more if their share of eBook sales holds up. The Barnes and Noble bookstore sales would continue their downtrend towards $4.0 Billion in 2010, and Borders would dip under $2.5 Billion. With a little bit of luck, Amazon’s North America media sales for 2010 could be more than the bricks and mortar stores of Borders and B&N combined!
The good news for Barnes and Noble is that BN.com had its best year of the decade, growing 24% in 2009. If the Nook catches on and BN.com can start selling a lot of eBooks, they’ll be able to show good growth. The caution is that BN.com sells eBooks through an agency model, and reports the total sale price, as opposed to their share of the transaction. Still, as they used to say during the cold war, better read than dead.
As for Borders, I’ve considered buying their stock (BGP) as a private equity takeover speculation, since it’s trading for a buck and change. But as with most stocks that have lost 95% of their value, it’s more likely we’ll be reading about them in Chapter 11.
>>it’s more likely we’ll be reading about them in Chapter 11.<<
In the Borders book, Chapter 11 may be followed by Chapter 7–the final chapter.
Also, there may be legal trouble for B&N with e-Reader patent violation suits from Amazon (Kindle) and Spring Design (Alex): http://techriot.net/amazon-kindle-dual-screen-e-reader-patent-granted-barnes-noble-nook-potentially-in-trouble
[...] courtesy of Foner Books http://www.fonerbooks.com/selfpublishing/?p=213 Chart courtesy of Foner Books « Janjaweed Cover and a Good [...]
Ahem, although this is not the post I responded to I know you don’t like me to reply on older posts as you can never find the replies.
I found out it was an error at Nielsons which caused this! It somehow got changed back to the original cover price which I put down for me ISBNs which I reduced.