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B&N to Sell Sterling Publishing

There’s a rumor going around today that, if true, would mean that Barnes & Noble has decided that digital is the future. The WSJ is reporting that their sources say that Sterling Publishing is up for sale.

Barnes & Noble bought the house in 2003 as part of their push into book publishing. The estimated cost was around $115 million.

Sterling Publishing had around 4500 titles in print when it changed hands in 2003, and it looks to have grown since then. It now has over a dozen imprints covering fiction, children’s books, crafts, and a line of books published under the imprint of various Hearst magazines (Cosmopolitan, Country Living, Popular Mechanics, Seventeen, Town & Country, and more). Assuming B&N worked to keep this publisher healthy, someone is going to snap it up pretty quickly.

So, is this sale a sign that B&N wants to invest the capital elsewhere is is it s sign that digital is the future?  I think it’s a little bit of both. Digital has the potential of growing into a major revenue stream, and book publishing as a whole does not. Look at publishing industry stats over the past few years.  What category has been growing in leaps and bounds? Ebooks.
But what is the rest of the market doing? At best, it’s holding steady. Some market segments look to already be in decline.

So investing that capital in digital today means that B&N might be able to catch the rising tide. There’s no guarantee, but there’s a good chance that ebooks will succeed.

Of course, B&N isn’t getting out of publishing entirely. They still have PubIt, the self-pub service they launched last year. And they continue to publish B&N Classics, a line of public domain books that have been enhanced with additional content.

BTW, one comment I came across when reading about the purchase of Sterling  was that some publishers were upset that one of their main distribution channels was moving into direct competition. Curiously enough, I don’t recall that comment being made about PubIt, and that says that publishers didn’t understand the threat of self-publishing at the time. I wonder if they do now?

via The WSJ

image by avinashkunnath

 

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Comments


Mike Cane January 4, 2012 um 6:38 pm

B&N does that while Amazon moves in the opposite direction. Someone is on the wrong page.

PubIt is B&N’s doom. They don’t make the same money there as they do with Agency price-fixed books. The math is against them. Unless they have some grand plans in software that we haven’t heard of, they are just doomed.

fjtorres January 4, 2012 um 6:41 pm

They *are* on different pages: Amazon has money to spend and B&N clearly *needs* money.


fjtorres January 4, 2012 um 6:39 pm

Hmm… Given my pre-existing suspicions, I smell a fund-raising drive.
Apparently the Liberty media loan isn’t looking to be enough of a bridge to solvency.


Barnes & Noble to Sell Off the Nook? – The Digital Reader January 5, 2012 um 10:00 am

[…] · No Comments · hardware news /* */ Yesterday I reported on the rumor that B&N wanted to sell off Sterling Publishing, and naturally I assumed that B&N had decided that digital was the future. Today I learned that […]


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