The sales decline of Barnes & Noble, Inc.'s Nook e-reader business and e-books resulted in a 17 percent drop, based on the company's quarterly report.
Despite the recent spin-off of its college-bookstore department, Barnes & Noble has closed some stores, struggilng to boost its sales growth despite a recent upgrade to compete with Amazon.com, Inc.
In one year, Barnes & Noble's debt tripled to $192 million. While the company had $32 million in cash in 2014, their cash figure is now down to a meek $13.4 million. This year, the company shares plummeted to almost 40 percent. In a world where online shopping seems to be the norm, Barnes & Noble struggled to keep up with a highly digital world.
To keep up with the times, the largest retail bookseller created the Nook e-reader to go compete with Amazon's Kindle. Unfortunately, Nook turned out to be a big failure in terms of sale, plunging by 32 percent compare to its 2014 figures. In the past several years, instability has also been brewing in the company's executive suite.
In 2010, Steve Riggio left the company. Steve is the brother of the company founder Leonard Riggio, who's also Barnes & Noble's biggest shareholder. William Lynch, former company president, succeeded Steve. Lynch left in the summer of 2013 and was replaced by chief finance officer Michael Huseby who resigned in the summer of 2014 to lead the company's college bookstore division, Barnes & Noble Education.
Barnes & Noble's current CEO is Ron Boire. The company has had four CEOs in just five years. Despite loses and debts, the company is not ready to close its doors, rather, it is planning to venture away from books.
Barnes & Noble recently held a 3D printing event called "Mini Maker Faire." There's also the coloring book event called "All-American Art Unwind." The company is also leveraging on the recent rebirth of the vinyl record trend wherein the company raked in a record sale of Adele's new "25" album.
"Barnes & Noble has been at the forefront of the coloring book trend," said Boire.
Analysts think that Barnes & Noble could be spared the same fate as that of Borders, which closed its doors in 2011 due to bankruptcy.
