Barnes & Noble products that have virtual pages and power buttons for reading have become horror stories for the company. The demand for the company’s Nook is quickly disappearing and the company, based in New York just posted a loss of $118.6 million for the quarter ended April 27.
The loss was more than twice its loss a year earlier and much worse than analysts on Wall Street had expected. The company now has made plans to exit the tablet manufacturing business completely, though it will continue to sell the products.
The revenue from the Nook fell 34% since the same quarter in 2012 and revenue from e-book sales fell by 9%. An impairment charge of $18.3 million was taken by the company on tech gadgets in what is equal to an admission that the Nook ended up on the e-book war’s losing side.
One analyst in the industry said that Barnes & Noble was not able to compete with the likes of Amazon, Apple, Google, Samsung and other makers of e-readers in making necessary investments in order to excel in the business.
B&N even was giving away its Nook e-readers to those people buying a new Nook HD+ tablet, but after assessing results from the latest quarter decided it would abandon the production of tablets to a third party, while continuing its own e-reader production, which usually have just black and white screens and limited capabilities of web browsing.
