Barnes & Noble Plans to Move Away From Nook Hardware

A report by the New York Times says that Barnes & Noble is planning to start moving away from developing Nook hardware.  Barnes & Noble isn’t getting out of the hardware game entirely, according to the NYT’s source, however, it is going to focus on licensing its content to other companies, such as Microsoft and Samsung, for inclusion in their tablets.  This is definitely a shift in strategy for the company, who developed quite the tablet, but as you can imagine it’s hard to compete against tech giants such as Apple and Google who essentially have unlimited resources to throw around.

This news comes after Barnes & Noble warned that when it reports fiscal 2013 third-quarter results on Thursday, losses in its Nook Media division — which includes sales of e-books and devices — will be greater than the year before and that the unit’s revenue for all of fiscal 2013 would be far below projections it gave of $3 billion.

Despite the bad news, the company isn’t in imminent danger.  It still has 677 stores nationwide and is only planning to close 15 of them (the unprofitable ones).  The company is also still responsible for roughly one quarter of the digital sales of books and even more when it comes to magazines.