Life is tough for anyone who has to earn a living right now, and it’s double tough for retailers. Even though Barnes and Noble is the de facto 2000 pound gorilla in the brick and mortar book biz, it’s not enough. With no profit on best sellers thanks to Wal Mart, and online competition from the likes of Amazon, just holding market share in the declining print business is impossible. BN was late to the game in eBooks with yet another proprietary reader, and new competition in that space is popping up almost daily. All of these factors could make the massive amount of retail space BN holds a huge liability. So, management thinks it’s time to sell? Since they mis-timed everything else, why not?

Barnes & Noble has said this week, somewhat surprisingly, that it plans to put itself up for sale after suffering large losses in the battle for leader in the digital books market.

After the news, shares of the company jumped as high as 27 percent, finishing the day up 19 percent.

Founder and largest shareholder Leonard Riggio said he would consider being part of an investment group that could purchase the company. (After Dawn)

With the #1 eabook reader, Kindle, likely to shatter the $100 price barrier soon, and a wave of cheap tablets on the way to market, pushing an also ran proprietary reader is a terrible strategy. Operating so many large square footage outlets devoted to selling ink on dead trees with the market rushing to the electronic does not make sense. There are plenty of opportunities remaining, but the BN management, and most other book retailers continue to not get it. The wave is cresting. It’s time to ride it or drown.

If you’re a big publisher who can’t see past the dead trees on shelves business model, your goose is already cooked. While the old school music labels and Hollywierd managed to have copyright laws written to guarantee their ownership of their back catalog in any format forever, the right to to distribute electronic copies of old titles owned by authors doesn’t exist. In fact, many big name authors are self publishing electronic copies of their old works without giving a cut to their original publishers.

A bunch of really well known authors, working via their agents, have decided to route around their publishers and offer some of the most popular books of all time as ebooks directly on Amazon’s Kindle, without going through a publishing house. Among the books released through this effort are works from Philip Roth, Martin Amis, Vladimir Nabokov, Hunter S Thompson, John Updike, William Burroughs and Saul Bellow along with many others. Basically, some of the biggest names in literature from the 20th century. (Techdirt)

Of course, new author contracts include the publishers right to distribute “all formats”. That makes me wonder why any writer would want to play with any publisher.  Unless there’s a 100% guarantee you’ll have a permanent spot on the very scarce shelf space at the mega retailers, self publishing in ebook and print on demand format makes more sense.