Barnes & Noble digital division plummeting due to poor Nook sales

By Mike Flacy January 9, 2014

Nook HD — Image used with permission by copyright holder

Covered by the New York Times earlier today, Barnes & Noble announced a 60 percent drop in revenue year-over-year within the digital content division of the company. This section of the company includes all current Nook hardware as well as digital sales on the e-book market. In addition, executives within the company mentioned that Barnes & Noble’s portion of the e-book market has fallen to 20 percent. Barnes & Noble originally snagged 25 percent of the market when the first Nook e-reader was released during 2009, but that figure has continued to drop over the past few years due to competition from Amazon.

According to the press release, Barnes & Noble executives attribute the loss of digital sales to the lack of new hardware during 2013. Referencing the difference, CEO Michael P. Huseby said “Sales in the NOOK segment declined year-over-year largely because during the previous holiday season the company introduced two new tablet products, while no new tablets were introduced this year.” According to Huseby, the company is looking into new partnerships with device manufacturers that could lead to new developments in the Nook line of devices.

barnes & noble via stevenferrari.com — Image used with permission by copyright holder

It’s likely that Barnes & Noble is having a difficult time competing with Amazon’s significantly discounted prices as well as programs like the Kindle Lending Library that allow Amazon Prime users to check out one book each month for free rather than paying for it. Interestingly, sales at brick-and-mortar stores only declined by approximately 6.6 percent year-over-year. In addition to hard cover and paperback books, this figure includes sales of games, toys, educational items and other popular gifts.

Book publishers are heavily dependent on Barnes & Noble to showcase new releases, specifically because the company is the largest remaining bookstore chain in the United States. The second largest brick-and-mortar bookstore chain, Borders, closed during 2011 due to lack of sales. Not surprisingly, Barnes & Noble acquired Borders’ trademarks and the old Borders site now redirects to BarnesandNoble.com.

Topics

Emerging Tech

Contributing Editor

By day, I'm the content and social media manager for High-Def Digest, Steve's Digicams and The CheckOut on Ben's Bargains…

News

Digital Trends’ Top Tech of CES 2023 Awards

Best of CES 2023 Awards Our Top Tech from the Show Feature

Let there be no doubt: CES isn’t just alive in 2023; it’s thriving. Take one glance at the taxi gridlock outside the Las Vegas Convention Center and it’s evident that two quiet COVID years didn’t kill the world’s desire for an overcrowded in-person tech extravaganza -- they just built up a ravenous demand.

From VR to AI, eVTOLs and QD-OLED, the acronyms were flying and fresh technologies populated every corner of the show floor, and even the parking lot. So naturally, we poked, prodded, and tried on everything we could. They weren’t all revolutionary. But they didn’t have to be. We’ve watched enough waves of “game-changing” technologies that never quite arrive to know that sometimes it’s the little tweaks that really count.

News

Digital Trends’ Tech For Change CES 2023 Awards

Digital Trends CES 2023 Tech For Change Award Winners Feature

CES is more than just a neon-drenched show-and-tell session for the world’s biggest tech manufacturers. More and more, it’s also a place where companies showcase innovations that could truly make the world a better place — and at CES 2023, this type of tech was on full display. We saw everything from accessibility-minded PS5 controllers to pedal-powered smart desks. But of all the amazing innovations on display this year, these three impressed us the most:

Samsung's Relumino Mode
Across the globe, roughly 300 million people suffer from moderate to severe vision loss, and generally speaking, most TVs don’t take that into account. So in an effort to make television more accessible and enjoyable for those millions of people suffering from impaired vision, Samsung is adding a new picture mode to many of its new TVs.
[CES 2023] Relumino Mode: Innovation for every need | Samsung
Relumino Mode, as it’s called, works by adding a bunch of different visual filters to the picture simultaneously. Outlines of people and objects on screen are highlighted, the contrast and brightness of the overall picture are cranked up, and extra sharpness is applied to everything. The resulting video would likely look strange to people with normal vision, but for folks with low vision, it should look clearer and closer to "normal" than it otherwise would.
Excitingly, since Relumino Mode is ultimately just a clever software trick, this technology could theoretically be pushed out via a software update and installed on millions of existing Samsung TVs -- not just new and recently purchased ones.

Entertainment

AI turned Breaking Bad into an anime — and it’s terrifying

Split image of Breaking Bad anime characters.

These days, it seems like there's nothing AI programs can't do. Thanks to advancements in artificial intelligence, deepfakes have done digital "face-offs" with Hollywood celebrities in films and TV shows, VFX artists can de-age actors almost instantly, and ChatGPT has learned how to write big-budget screenplays in the blink of an eye. Pretty soon, AI will probably decide who wins at the Oscars.

Within the past year, AI has also been used to generate beautiful works of art in seconds, creating a viral new trend and causing a boon for fan artists everywhere. TikTok user @cyborgism recently broke the internet by posting a clip featuring many AI-generated pictures of Breaking Bad. The theme here is that the characters are depicted as anime characters straight out of the 1980s, and the result is concerning to say the least. Depending on your viewpoint, Breaking Bad AI (my unofficial name for it) shows how technology can either threaten the integrity of original works of art or nurture artistic expression.
What if AI created Breaking Bad as a 1980s anime?
Playing over Metro Boomin's rap remix of the famous "I am the one who knocks" monologue, the video features images of the cast that range from shockingly realistic to full-on exaggerated. The clip currently has over 65,000 likes on TikTok alone, and many other users have shared their thoughts on the art. One user wrote, "Regardless of the repercussions on the entertainment industry, I can't wait for AI to be advanced enough to animate the whole show like this."