From Insider Monkey:

Microsoft Corporation apparently didn’t really do anything, but Barnes & Noble, Inc. shares spiked last week with a rumor that floated which said that Microsoft, which owned a 17-percent stake in NOOK Media LLC – the Barnes & Noble subsidiary that creates the NOOK e-reader tablets and related content – was making a $1 billion offer to buy the entity outright and take it over.

. . . .

However, we  at Insider Monkey received word from a highly placed source inside Microsoft Corporation who said that the story was only a rumor, and that nothing imminent is happening in regards to Microsoft and its investment in the NOOK Media entity, or reports that it is buying out Barnes & Noble, Inc. from the operation.

. . . .

“This deal was nothing more than a rumor. Microsoft Corporation will not come out and deny or confirm for legal reasons, but the company has no intention of acquiring the NOOK unit. NOOK is closely integrated with Android (hence their recent Google Play feature) and there is no way it could be ported to Windows 8. This was simply something TechCrunch rushed to report with no fact-checking.”

Link to the rest at Insider Monkey

For most of the people at Nook, this past few days will have been a real up-and-down experience.

Barnes & Noble has made no secret that it wants to sell Nook. That creates an air of uncertainty among Nook employees wondering what kind of new bosses they’ll have.

When the Microsoft rumor hit, people got excited or nervous, but many thought they would have jobs for awhile because of deep MS pockets. If the rumor is now quashed, they’ll feel pretty flat. This may make some prospective Nook purchasers look at the company as damaged goods.

It’s not a great time for morale in Nookville.

From Good Ereader:

Barnes and Noble e-readers have seen unprecedented demand in the UK with the recent price drop. Blackwell’s, Sainsburys, Asda, and Foyles shops are all reporting that the Nook Simple Touch is sold out in almost all retail locations. This is one of the first times in the entire history of Barnes and Noble that the company has seen such elevated levels of demand. Even the main B&N website is showing the e-reader as “Sold Out.”

The main reason the Nook Simple Touch is seeing critical success is due to the dramatic price drop. Last week, Barnes & Noble slashed the price of its original Nook Model from £79 to £29 in a bid to win market share in the UK.  Not only has the discounted Simple Touch seen success with the price drop, but the brand name is at record levels of [visibility].

Link to the rest at Good Ereader

From Forbes:

Barnes & Noble is reportedly considering selling the remaining stake in its tablet business to Microsoft, setting up an interesting couple of questions. What exactly would be left for Barnes & Noble–and wouldn’t it bear an uncomfortable resemblance to deceased Borders?

. . . .

Should Barnes & Noble sell the Nook, it is left with the slow growing, if not decreasing, business of selling books. Barnes & Noble recognizes its difficult position, that the business is mostly about how low Amazon–the industry’s largest player in the industry–can drive prices. To compensate, Barnes & Noble began shrinking its store footprint in 2011, dropping to 691 big-box stores last years from 720 in 2010.

The retail business is still the company’s largest unit. It brought in some $4.85 billion in sales last year. That’s down troublingly in the past three years, from $4.95 billion in 2010. Amazon, meanwhile, expanded sales nearly doubled to $61.09 billion from $34.2 billion.

Link to the rest at Forbes

From The New York Post:

A new tablet to rival the iPad and Kindle is struggling to be born, but the birth may not be a pretty sight.

In a deal that could mark the demise of Barnes & Noble’s Nook e-reader, Microsoft is mulling a $1 billion offer for the battle-torn device and its digital content, according to a report this week.

Microsoft’s plan would likely eliminate the Nook’s physical e-reader tablets at the close of the current fiscal year next spring, as they are powered by Google’s Android operating system.

Instead, the software giant would concentrate on using the Nook’s digital contents for apps and enhancements to its own Windows software and devices.

. . . .

“This would give people a reason to buy the Surface — if you already have a PC and had the online bookstore hooked into Windows, [Amazon’s] Kindle could start to look unnecessary, ” an industry banker told The Post yesterday.

. . . .

This year, the Nook revenue is expected to fall 10 percent, to $1.091 billion — widening the loss to $360 million as the tablet devices are phased out, according to the documents.

In the fourth quarter, the Nook had a 1.9 percent share of the global tablet market, making it the No. 5 tablet player behind Apple, Samsung, Amazon and Asus, according to data from IDC. By the first quarter, it had slipped out of the top 5, replaced by Microsoft.

Link to the rest at The New York Post

From TechCrunch:

Microsoft is offering to pay $1 billion to buy the digital assets of Nook Media LLC, the digital book and college book joint venture with Barnes & Noble and other investors, according to internal documents we’ve obtained. In this plan, Microsoft would redeem preferred units in Nook Media, which also includes a college book division, leaving it with the digital operation — e-books, as well as Nook e-readers and tablets.

The documents also reveal that Nook Media plans to discontinue its Android-based tablet business by the end of its 2014 fiscal year as it transitions to a model where Nook content is distributed through apps on “third-party partner” devices.

. . . .

A deal to buy the digital assets of Nook Media is the natural next step for Microsoft, which first announced a plan to work with Barnes & Noble on its Nook devices and content in April 2012, ponying up $300 million at the time to help. That plan included an additional $180 million advance to develop content for its Windows 8 devices — which Nook has been doing.

To date, there have been 10 million Nook devices sold, including both tablets and e-readers, with more than 7 million active subscribers.

. . . .

Nook’s decline seems to have helped alter company strategy. Barnes & Noble founder Leonard Riggio proposed buying back the whole of the company’s retail operation.

The documents TC has seen values B&N at $1.66 billion. When Nook Media was first formed, the valuation of that division alone was $1.7 billion. When Pearson invested $85 million at a 5 percent stake in January, it was valued at $1.8 billion.

Link to the rest at TechCrunch and thanks to Barb for the tip.

Passive Guy has no idea whether this is true or not or, if true, whether an acquisition will ever come to pass.

If this news is true, PG expects Big Publishing to hail the arrival of someone to save them from Amazon. Unfortunately for this hope, Microsoft has a terrible track record with acquisitions and, other than Xbox, hasn’t had a successful new product launch for a very long time (PG doesn’t think a new version of Windows or Office qualifies as a new product).

Additionally, PG has participated in partnerships with Microsoft in the past and doubts Big Publishing has what it takes to do that.

Nook is undoubtedly being considered as a way of  trying to spark some sort of sales for the Microsoft Surface (MS’s tablet in case you haven’t heard of it). If Nook doesn’t do that in a big way and a big hurry, expect it to sink beneath the Redmond waves where most past acquisitions lie.

For indie authors, PG thinks dealing with them is not in Microsoft’s DNA. The best outcome for indies would be if MS ignores Nook Press for a long while.

From Barnes & Noble Press Releases:

NOOK Media LLC, a subsidiary of Barnes & Noble, Inc., the leading retailer of content, digital media and educational products, today announced its best prices ever for the acclaimed NOOK HD and NOOK HD+ in celebration of Mother’s Day and the recent addition of the popular Google Play digital content experience on the lightweight 7- and 9-inch high definition tablets. Through Mother’s Day, May 12, NOOK HD is available at the amazing price of $149 (8GB) and $179 (16GB), and NOOK HD+ is offered at the spectacular value of $179 (16GB) and $209 (32GB) at Barnes & Noble bookstores and on NOOK.com.

. . . .

“In recognition that the best gift for Mother’s Day is now even better, we’re proud to offer this special limited-time offer for our award-winning 7- and 9-inch tablets,” said Jamie Iannone, president of NOOK Media. “NOOK HD and NOOK HD+ are not only beautifully designed, lightweight devices with stunning displays, they now offer customers the most reading and entertainment content we’ve ever offered, at the best prices ever.”

Link to the rest at Barnes & Noble Press Releases

From Business Insider:

Barnes & Noble got a lot of buzz a few days ago when it released a big new software update for its Nook HD tablet.

The software update adds the Google Play store, which is the online shop for Android phones where Google sells apps, music, movies, magazines, etc. That makes the Nook update a great deal for Nook owners. They now have access to much more content than they did through Barnes & Noble’s own limited app and content store.

. . . .

But it’s also a bad sign for Barnes & Noble, which is still working through the uneasy transition from physical bookstore to hardware manufacturer and seller of online goods and services.

. . . .

[At first], instead of using Google’s services and apps, Barnes & Noble tried to create its own Nook-branded ecosystem.

It didn’t really work. The first Nook tablet didn’t have an online store for buying music, movies, TV shows, etc. You could load content from other sources using a SD card or plugging the Nook into your computer, but that was hardly as convenient as directly downloading stuff like you could with the Kindle Fire. The Nook HD, which launched last fall, was Barnes & Noble’s first device to finally include a way to directly download some of that content, but the selection wasn’t nearly as good as Amazon’s.

. . . .

Barnes & Noble’s Nook division continued to collapse, with digital content and device sales down 26%, according to the company’s last earnings report.
Like Amazon, Barnes & Noble’s strategy was to sell its devices for super cheap –– the Nook HD now starts at $149 –– and lock users into an app and content ecosystem. The new Nook update essentially turns the Nook into just another bargain Android tablet packed with Google’s services and content, and that’s really bad news for Barnes & Noble if it wants to continue selling its own digital content on its own hardware.

Barnes & Noble won’t make a penny off stuff people buy through Google Play; all that revenue goes through Google instead.

. . . .

It’s a major Catch 22 for the Nook business. Either offer the best stuff through Google Play and miss out on revenue from digital content, or risk losing customers to Amazon because the Kindle Fire offers more content and apps for about the same price.

Link to the rest at Business Insider

PG recently read another article about Nook which stated Nook has about 25% of the ebook market. As PG recalls, this is a number that Barnes & Noble puts out. He believes this vastly overstates Nook’s real market share.

Passive Guy informed Mrs. PG today that, in less than four days this month, her one book on KDPSelect had more borrows on Amazon than the total of all of her book sales through the Nook Store during the entire month of April.

Kobo sales have always lagged far behind the Nook Store to the point where PG doesn’t see the sense of spending the time to list more of Mrs. PG’s books than he put up initially.

For Mrs. PG, at least, the arguments against listing ebooks exclusively on Amazon to get the benefits of KDPSelect because she would lose sales on other stores aren’t making a lot of sense.

From engadget:

Well, this process seems a bit counterintuitive, eh? This morning, Barnes & Noble introduced a new scheme for getting Nook customers to visit the company’s retail stores. The promotion nets you one free e-book when you purchase another, but — and this is where the offer tripped us up a bit — you can only make your electronic purchase with a cashier in a physical store.

Link to the rest at engadget and thanks to Joshua for the tip.

This story made PG wonder if Barnes & Noble cashiers are lonely.

From David Gaughran:

The Kindle’s share of the US market is far larger – with most observers pegging it at between 60% and 65% (most of the rest is split between Apple and Barnes & Noble, with Google, Sony, and Kobo combined perhaps getting around 5%). But how much of that have self-publishers grabbed?

Amazon is famously tight-lipped about such matters, so we have to put the pieces together ourselves. As such, the method is necessarily crude, but it’s the best I’ve got.

. . . .

In August 2011, Amazon launched the Kindle Indie Store, which showcases hand-picked work in a variety of genres from KDP authors. It also has a Top 100 list, ordered by Sales Rank, just like the regular Kindle Store Top 100.

By comparing the position of self-published work in the Kindle Indie Store Top 100 with it’s overall Sales Rank, we can get a pretty accurate idea of what proportion of the top-selling books are self-published.

When the Kindle Indie Store first launched, I tracked the Indie Top 100 for a few weeks. Invariably, the book that was #100 in the Indie chart was around #400 to #500 in the overall Kindle Store – meaning that, at the time, roughly 20% to 25% of the top-selling items in the Kindle Store were self-published e-books (and those numbers held up throughout the list).

. . . .

Today, you’ll see that the book at #100 in the Indie chart is #346 in the overall Kindle Store – meaning that 29% of the top-selling items in the Kindle Store are self-published e-books – and that proportion has been stable enough recently.

The Kindle Store contains more than just e-books, with things like digital subscriptions to the New York Times, magazines, blog subscriptions, and games regularly appearing in the Top 100. If you were to subtract all of those, and try and isolate e-books, that figure (easily) goes north of 30%.

This staggers me. 30% of the top-selling e-books on Amazon are self-published, beating out the biggest authors from the largest publishing houses in the world – as well as titles from Amazon’s own imprints (which aren’t included in the Indie Top 100).

This roughly tallies with the limited data we do have from Amazon, who recently announced the top-selling Kindle Books of 2013 (January to March). Seven of the Top 20 were self-published (and that’s not counting formerly self-published work, or Amazon imprint books).

. . . .

Now we can start putting the pieces together. When we factor in the respective market share of Amazon and Barnes & Noble (and Kobo), that leads to the following estimate (which might be conservative): self-publishers have captured 25% of the US e-book market.

Link to the rest at Let’s Get Digital