There is no way back to profit for booksellers and publishers, because fewer people are buying paper books, nowhere near enough to sustain the existing industry, and authors can simply publish direct via schemes like Amazon. They've tried overpricing ebooks, taking things off Amazon, setting up their own online readers/stores (nook). Every publisher is now having real trouble making money, every bookseller also, and significantly cutting jobs - the industry is being turned upside down at every level and no-one except some big brand name authors has a viable business model. Those that are not affected because they live in a profitable niche like academic publishing will meet the same challenges soon, because they are driven by the introduction of computers and the internet, which has radically changed how people write, and how they read.
Of course the management handled this incredibly badly, and have extracted huge fees for passively overseeing the death of the company, and the story is correct in saying it is not bleeding out, but the demise of Barnes and Noble and other booksellers like it is not, it is the inevitable consequence of the shift of content online, and the huge and ongoing disruption across a range of industries that the internet and free copying of information has brought.
Ironically this may lead in the short term to the resurgence of small bookstores who sell second hand copies of books, at least until a generation grows up which has never bought a paper book, just as they have never bought a paper newspaper or magazine. But in the long term I think new mediums will arise more suited to the medium of production and transmission - now everyone in the world can access the store of the world's knowledge in their hand, mostly for free and share their thoughts with others, again for free - this will radically change our perception of culture, and our consumption and production of stories, so the disruption is just beginning.
I've worked in the publishing industry in the UK - it is experiencing long term decline. To illustrate this, see the multitude of publishers merging, cutting staff and closing imprints. Very few publishers are making money any more. The story is the same for bookstores - there is one significant UK-wide chain now (Waterstones).
The article you cite doesn't even show healthy figures - it shows a bump in 2015, then fall to almost zero growth in 2016 for the UK, and a dramatic decline in growth for the US from 2015 to 2016. Hardly signs of a healthy industry. This is just the kind of cherry-picked data the industry has been deluding itself with for years. The figures produced by the industry are unreliable, and the interpretation of those is equally suspect, as evidenced by the article you've found. They've tried to manipulate stats by doing things like pricing ebooks higher or just below physical books for example.
Barnes and Noble will close soon (as this article predicts), as will all the other big brick and mortar booksellers, and soon after that mass-market paper books are doomed as Amazon has little incentive to promote them over ebooks, and no interest in sustaining publishers.
There is no way back to profit for booksellers and publishers, because fewer people are buying paper books, nowhere near enough to sustain the existing industry, and authors can simply publish direct via schemes like Amazon. They've tried overpricing ebooks, taking things off Amazon, setting up their own online readers/stores (nook). Every publisher is now having real trouble making money, every bookseller also, and significantly cutting jobs - the industry is being turned upside down at every level and no-one except some big brand name authors has a viable business model. Those that are not affected because they live in a profitable niche like academic publishing will meet the same challenges soon, because they are driven by the introduction of computers and the internet, which has radically changed how people write, and how they read.
Of course the management handled this incredibly badly, and have extracted huge fees for passively overseeing the death of the company, and the story is correct in saying it is not bleeding out, but the demise of Barnes and Noble and other booksellers like it is not, it is the inevitable consequence of the shift of content online, and the huge and ongoing disruption across a range of industries that the internet and free copying of information has brought.
Ironically this may lead in the short term to the resurgence of small bookstores who sell second hand copies of books, at least until a generation grows up which has never bought a paper book, just as they have never bought a paper newspaper or magazine. But in the long term I think new mediums will arise more suited to the medium of production and transmission - now everyone in the world can access the store of the world's knowledge in their hand, mostly for free and share their thoughts with others, again for free - this will radically change our perception of culture, and our consumption and production of stories, so the disruption is just beginning.