PW reports bleak holiday book sales
There’s really nothing new or surprising from Publishers Weekly about holiday sales from the nation’s two largest booksellers: Barnes & Noble and Borders. I got my usual email update yesterday and in this article, PW said sales were bad for both booksellers:
Store sales fell 5.2% at Barnes & Noble in the nine week holiday period ended Jan. 3, dropping to $1.1 billion. Same store sales at the nation’s largest bookstore chain fell 7.7%; B&N had predicted that comp sales would fall between 6% to 9%.
By most accounts B&N is still in pretty good shape with an impressive balance sheet, good leadership and tight control over spending. Borders fared a little worse over the holiday shopping season, which only seems to add insult to injury to the chain after a year of ups and downs:
B&N performed better than Borders where total sales fell 11.7% and superstore comps were down 13.6%.
Another large bookselling chain, Books-A-Million managed to pull through the holidays in a little better shape than its larger competitors, as this PW article states:
Books-A-Million managed to out-perform its larger rivals over the holiday season, limiting its drop over the nine-week period to 2.5%, with sales falling to $127.5 million.
As I said, there’s nothing really new or surprising in these figures from PW. We all knew this holiday shopping season would be one of the worse on record. And now that the holidays are over with, things might get worse for the large chain stores because the remaining winter months are typically pretty slow. The only thing book retailers can do is wait out this economic storm for sunnier days ahead!
Related Posts
- Special Holiday Edition: “Friday” Link Love 12/25/08
- Borders, Barnes & Noble get a boost for the New Year
- Holiday Link Love 07/05 (Better late than never)
- Dirty Little Secrets: Part 2
- Profits at HarperCollins take a dive
Read More: Publishing News, Reading
