Barnes & Noble retreats from tablet war

The book selling company said it retreats from heavy tablet war after spending hundreds of millions of dollars trying to catch up with Amazon and Apple in the market. Barnes & Noble stated their losses nearly doubled for the last period. Losses were reaching levels which hurt the companys core business of book selling. Not surprisingly, Barnes & Noble said it would stop producing its own color tablets, in favor of co-branded devices made by third-party manufacturers.

However, company is keeping the manufacturing of the black and white version of its Nook e-reader which records most of the sales. The withdrawal of tablet market comes as a disappointment for the Chief Executive William Lynch. Companys shares sunk more than 17% yesterday, lowering the year to date gains to only 3.45%.

Despite slowing retail store sales for Barnes & Noble, company still makes profits from diversifying into toys, games and other products. Although company indicated a vast reduction in stores would take place in upcoming years which could reach to a total of 30% cutback.

The tablet war seems lost for the book seller mostly because its tablets cant match the applications offered by the giants in the business. Adding to this low-cost marketing model and smaller customer base are enough reasons for the failure in that vastly growing segment. The fierce competition customer awareness and support are critical for a jump from bookstore to consumer electronic manufacturing business.

“Barnes & Noble was attempting a very ambitious pivot from being a book retailer to being a consumer electronics manufacturer and retailer,” said Sarah Rotman Epps, an analyst at Forrester Research Inc.”They never had the customer base. Some followed them, but not enough. The hardware wasnt the problem.” she added for the Wall Street Journal.

The inability to offset losses anymore than already company did, triggered giving up the tablet manufacturing for Barnes & Noble.