We last updated you on Barnes & Noble’s performance when it closed its 2017 fiscal year. While its profits are up, sales are down. Now results are coming in from Barnes & Noble Education, an autonomous company that operates college and university bookstores and serves K-12 schools, both private and public.
B&N Ed, as we’ll call it, is split into two parts. The first part is Barnes & Noble College, which, as of the end of July, had 781 physical stores. The other part is MBS Textbook Exchange—added in a February acquisition—which offers print and digital textbooks in 714 virtual stores. It was just over two years ago, in the summer of 2015, that Barnes & Noble spun off Barnes & Noble Education Inc. as a separate entity trading under the ticker symbol BNED on the New York Stock Exchange. And on the whole, this has looked like the happier of the two B&N siblings, Education largely holding up better than the commercial chain.
And news from the quarter ending July 29 at first sounded good: the MBS part of the business had driven sales up 48.7 percent, year over year. However—true to what seems like every financial report from something with B&N in its name—B&N Ed is experiencing net losses. On the B&N College side, same-store sales fell 2.5 percent in the quarter, year over year. The company reports that the main culprit was textbook sales, which were down 8.5 percent for the quarter.
In an article worth every author’s attention as both B&N companies struggle, Nathan Bransford interviews Mike Shatzkin, who spells out the grave impact the loss of B&N could have on trade publishing, which was built on the ability of big publishing houses to put books on shelves. “That’s what they can do that authors can’t do for themselves and, up until now, Amazon couldn’t do for them either,” comments Shatzkin.
Starting with the premise that B&N sells two-thirds of the books in the States, Shatzkin’s points include:
- Smaller trade presses would be hurt worse by a B&N collapse, since they have fewer mass-merchant outlets (such as big-box stores, which trade mostly in bestsellers) for their books.
- Big publishers would find it less efficient but doable to launch trade books only through the disparate network of indie bookshops; smaller presses would have a harder time.
- Should Amazon Books (Amazon’s physical stores) keep ramping up quickly (Bransford thinks that 1,000 of these small, super-efficient locations might be possible in three years), then all publishing roads would, finally, lead to Seattle.
Bottom line: While B&N Ed and B&N proper are two different companies, they’re the country’s remaining mainstays in physical stores at this point, both with questionable futures. While Michael Cader of Publishers Lunch talks (paywall) of weak speculation that B&N might be bought by another outfit and “taken private” (no longer publicly traded), Shatzkin conjectures that we may see a day when Amazon says to publishers, “You pay the cost to print your books, and we’ll put them on our shelves”—at the publishers’ risk. More authors might by then be moving to Amazon Publishing for its status as the reigning producer and retailer of books. Stranglehold is Shatzkin’s word for the grip Amazon would then have on the business.
Jane Friedman has spent her entire career working in the publishing industry, with a focus on business reporting and author education. Established in 2015, her newsletter The Bottom Line provides nuanced market intelligence to thousands of authors and industry professionals; in 2023, she was named Publishing Commentator of the Year by Digital Book World.
Jane’s expertise regularly features in major media outlets such as The New York Times, The Atlantic, NPR, The Today Show, Wired, The Guardian, Fox News, and BBC. Her book, The Business of Being a Writer, Second Edition (The University of Chicago Press), is used as a classroom text by many writing and publishing degree programs. She reaches thousands through speaking engagements and workshops at diverse venues worldwide, including NYU’s Advanced Publishing Institute, Frankfurt Book Fair, and numerous MFA programs.
