Barnes & Noble holiday Nook sales plummet

New York – Barnes & Noble Inc. saw a sharp decline in holiday sales in its Nook e-reader division, even as its retail segment showed small improvement. The Nook segment (including digital content, devices and accessories), had sales of $56 million for the nine-week holiday period, decreasing 55% as compared to a year ago.



Device and accessories sales were $28.5 million, a decrease of 68%. Digital content sales were $27.4 million, a decline of 25%. Barnes & Noble is expected to spin off the Nook segment into a separate business in March 2015.



The retail segment, which consists of the Barnes & Noble bookstores and BN.com, fared better with sales of $1.1 billion, increasing 0.2% from the prior year. The continued stabilization of physical book sales and growth in the educational toys and games and gift departments, as well as the 2014 holiday season extending into January 2015, offset the sales decline from store closures. Excluding the impact of this timing difference, Barnes & Noble said holiday sales would have declined approximately 1.6% from the prior year.



“Core” same-store bookstore sales, which exclude sales of Nook products, increased 1.7%. Total comparable bookstore sales, including Nook products, declined 0.6%. Same-store sales comparisons are not impacted by the calendar timing difference.



“We were very pleased with our overall holiday sales results," said Michael P. Huseby, CEO of Barnes & Noble, Inc. "Our core comparable bookstore sales were better than our expectations, even as we cycled against the improved core sales trends that began this period a year ago. Our retail booksellers performed at an outstanding level for our customers this holiday season, which is reflected in our results.”



Based on the better than expected retail core comparable bookstore sales performance, the company now expects full-year retail core same-store bookstore sales to be approximately flat. Barnes & Noble is maintaining its previously issued outlook on total retail same-store bookstore sales to decline in the low-single digits and college same-store sales to decline in the low-single digits.