Barnes and Noble is dying - and taking books with it

Publishing

Barnes and Noble has gotten a lot of hate in the past for putting small book stores out of business, but they're in for a taste of their own medicine. Barnes & Noble is losing money and acquiring more debt, thanks to competitive pricing and convenience from the online retailer Amazon. Since it's launch of the profitable college textbook division, Barnes and Noble's stock value has plummeted nearly 40% and the company only has $13.4 million in cash compared to $32 million since last year. What's worse though is they have $192 million in long term debt, which is triple the long term debt that they had a year ago. What people are slowly realizing though, is that if Barnes and Noble goes out of business the book industry will fall with it. Currently, publishers rely on large initial orders, quantities in the five figure area, which small businesses can't match. This means that publisher have to switch from printing as many copies as they hope to sell to printing as many as they know they can sell making it harder for emerging authors to get started.

Source article: https://newrepublic.com/article/133876/pulp-friction