Nook Owns A Quarter Of The eBook Market, Says Barnes And Noble

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It’s been steadily turning out this way for some time now, and every time something like this happens I feel just a little better for the industry–publishing for the online market just gets better and better. And the folks out at Barnes and Noble are trumpeting a pretty big win; apparently, Nook now holds fully 25 percent of the ebook market in the United States.

But this impressive development didn’t come without some serious down side. Not only were profits down that same 25 percent from the previous quarter, Barnes and Noble further announced they’d be canceling the dividend to get cash back into the digital services arena.

Though that may not be Barnes and Noble’s only use for said cash; there was some talk about picking up some of the shuttered Borders locations following Borders’ closing of same, as Barnes and Noble has recently diversified outward into games and educational toys as well as physical books, which have seen some pretty hefty drops of late. Plus, of course, it’s the perfect venue to help people get their hands on a Nook, complete with sales reps to explain features and operations, though it remains to be seen how many stores they pick up being as Borders stores were often in the same general area as Barnes and Noble stores.

Barnes and Noble does have quite a lot of competition in the ebook market (likely prompting the heavy cash infusions Barnes and Noble is committing to the field), and most of it is coming from tablet producers like Apple and Google, with a good chunk coming from online book retailer Amazon. While Amazon was in the same boat as Barnes and Noble–a bookseller building a tablet–Google and Apple were much the reverse, tablet makers looking for a bookseller.

Still though, the future looks pretty nice for epublishing in general, with lots of platforms to support it and plenty of sales already going in that direction.