Barnes & Noble retreats from tablet wars as Nook sales plummet

Barnes & Noble will stop manufacturing its own Nook tablets, marking the end of its expensive attempt to compete alone with deep-pocketed rivals Amazon.com, Apple and Google in the tablet wars.

The top US bookstore chain reported another quarter of dismal results on Tuesday, led by a 34 per cent drop in sales of Nook devices and e-books business, and said it expects sales to continue to decline this fiscal year at its bookstores.

Shares were down 17.5 per cent to US$15.53 in afternoon trading.

Barnes & Noble will still make and design black-and-white readers like the Nook Simple Touch, which it says are more geared to serious readers, who are its customers, than to tablets.

But it is looking for a partner to make its Nooks, acknowledging that competition is too fierce to fight alone.

“We want to move away from taking on all that risk ourselves,” Barnes & Noble chief executive William Lynch told investors on a call. “It was very capital intensive to build our own tablets.”