According to The Verge, the answer may be “yes.” The reason, according to the article, is that recently, Barnes and Noble have essentially hosted multiple “fire sales,” each offering various discounts to apparently move more Nooks.
The discounts on Nook Media hardware and content, coming as they do the month after Barnes & Noble reported an 8.8 percent revenue drop and 2.2 percent decline in sales of Nook products from last year, doesn’t seem to be a show of faith in Nook’s future prospects. Meanwhile, parent company Barnes & Noble, which still owns the majority stake in the subsidiary (78.2 percent), also saw its retail sales drop even more precipitously and is also moving to close more stores, the latter which it says is simply business as usual. That hasn’t stopped a flurry of reports speculating that a major shakeup is looming for Barnes & Noble and Nook in the near future, perhaps that the parent company could go out of business or sell itself to another chain such as Walmart.
Interesting. I didn’t know Walmart was still eying B&N.
Either way, the future of B&N is shaky, so of course the future of Nook is shaky. It’ll be interesting to see how this all plays out.
