While the Kindle accounted for nearly 90 percent of all e-books sold several years ago, it’s now closer to the 60 mark, says the Times, while the latecomer Nook has secured a beachhead, about 27 percent of the e-book market. That investment appears to be paying off. In the past two years, the chain, headed up by Dallas native William Lynch Jr., has already shed almost half its bookstores, begun reconfiguring the remaining outlets (he plans to phase out the CD and DVD sections), and plowed millions into Nook’s 300-person Silicon Valley operations. Now it’s in the home stretch, explains today’s Times - either the Nook succeeds in saving the company’s physical bookstores by propping up its bottom line, or else they too are gone the way of the dinosaurs. In a last-ditch Hail Mary of its own, Barnes & Noble launched its Nook e-reader in late 2009. Borders never jumped on the technology bandwagon and last year it finally succumbed. When this magazine visited the subject in 2010, it was already clear that the company, and its main brick-and-mortar competitor Borders, were in the fight for their lives as more and more consumers turned to the Internet. Then along came Amazon with its bookstore-killing Kindle and all of a sudden Barnes & Noble was recast as the last great hope of (paper and ink) book lovers everywhere. (Emmanuel Dunand/AFP/Getty Images)įor years, Barnes & Noble was the scourge of independent booksellers everywhere, driving them out of business with its strip mall superstores. B&N-killer? Amazon’s Jeff Bezos with the Kindle Fire.
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