Barnes and Noble Hit Hard

[Jude Hardin]

From the Wall Street Journal: http://tiny.cc/fsfpcw

Thoughts on how all this might affect authors, and the publishing business in general?

[I. J. Parker]

Who can tell how that will impact authors?  I'm just theorizing here.  If Amazon does indeed start cutting prices for bestselling books, they may sell more of them, thereby taking customers from self-pubbed authors while adding income for publishers. The authors belonging to the publishers may not see much difference or they may experience losses because their profit margin is so narrow with the current contractual percentages.

 

As for Amazon, if they continue to be financially healthy, they are more likely to support their own authors.

[Eric Christopherson]

Amazon will be more dominant in the short term and go back to discounting Big Six ebooks at $9.99 and continue squeezing its suppliers, including the Big Six, and it'll gobble up a lot more market share. Not much change in sales for indie authors in the short term I think. In the long run I expect Apple to prevail in the courts, for the agency model to survive, and for a reasonable amount of competition for Amazon within the publishing industry (thankfully). If agency goes down the tubes, though, so will B&N.

[Benjamin Sobieck]

I think the slumping stock price is more to do with investor confidence in entertainment brick-and-mortar retail overall. Best Buy is going the same route. It gave its CEO the boot this month because it couldn't change quick enough. Both B&N and Best Buy are trying to figure out a "showroom" model to connect physical stores to online ones.

[Eric Christopherson]

B&N won't be able to match the deep discounting of Big Six books that Amazon will soon be doing so they'll likely lose market share, or if they do try to match, lose profits. I think this explains the immediate drop in stock price, but there is a long term trend as well in regard to bricks and mortar book stores.