As we have every quarter for the last several, we’re looking at Barnes & Noble’s recent quarterly report to gauge the trends that are impacting the book industry – which books were big over the last few months and what’s expected for the months ahead.
For the 4th quarter ended January 31st, it wasn’t pretty. Sales fell by -7.3% compared to the quarter a year ago. Barnes & Noble said that a drop in store traffic, not average ticket (the average amount spent by each shopper), was primarily responsible for the decline.
What follows are insights gleaned from Barnes and Noble CEO Steve Riggio’s comments on the conference call discussing Q4 results. (Transcript provided by Seeking Alpha.)
The original impetus for this regular feature was my noticing that Riggio liked, when laying out B&N’s results to Wall Street analysts, to share some details on which books had been flying off the shelves and which books he expected to be big sellers in the coming months. Direct from the mouth of the guy running the biggest brick and mortar bookstore chain in the world, it was some insider insight into what stories would soon be buzzing around the industry. However, over the last few quarters, Riggio has essentially stopped talking about books during these quarterly calls. It’s quite possible that he’s just trying to speed things along, but I can’t help but wonder if the enthusiastic talk of individual titles falls by the wayside as the retail environment gets more and more dire.
- Riggio called 2008 “by far the most challenging retail environment we’ve ever experienced.”
- It sounds like B&N is feeling the digital itch as Amazon gets aggrssive with the Kindle: “We also plan to return to the business of offering customers digital content inclusive of eBooks, newspapers and magazines. We have a large number of assets in place to enable us to sell digital content, our ecommerce platform is solid and scalable.” Riggio didn’t give further specifics but said, “we do have a wide range of initiatives in development.”
