Barnes and Noble Announces Spring Results: eBooks Climbing, Stores Suffering

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Numbers have just emerged for Barnes and Noble, and the store’s results are showing what we’d all kind of figured would happen: everyone loves ebooks, and loves them to the deep, deep detriment of their print matter equivalent. Just how deep is the love for ebooks? The numbers are pretty impressive.

In fact, they’re sufficiently impressive that sales of ebooks, year to year, went up four times. Yes, that’s right: they quadrupled. Physical goods saw some pretty nice gains as well, up fully 37 percent in that same period to a healthy $198 million, which only sounds contradictory until you consider that most of the “physical goods” sold were Nook readers. However, there was also a pretty solid sales factor going into toys and games, which most Barnes and Noble locations offer yet don’t take up a whole lot of room on the sales floor.

The clear dog, however–and sufficiently clear of a dog that it led to a net loss for Barnes and Noble of fully $57 million–was the print matter, which brought down an otherwise rosy sales picture filled to the brim with gains.

Frankly, I do a lot of reading myself, both on a screen and on good old fashioned dead tree matter. And while I’m still pretty fond of my dead tree reading, it’s easy to see why more people want ebooks. They go anywhere. You can carry dozens in a space the size of the palm of your hand if you’re reading from a cell phone display. About the only downsides to an ebook is its limited portability (carrying an ebook reader hands-free can be a tall order) and its limited effectiveness during power outages, which a lot of us have seen lately thanks to things like Hurricane Irene or the various thunderstorms out there. Still though, there’s plenty of value in ebooks, and a lot of us are discovering the benefits.

What about you guys? Think that ebooks will eventually completely supplant print? Or will there always be a place for a little good old fashioned dead tree reading? We’ve got a comments section all set up for this sort of thing, so head on down and tell us what you think!