An ebookstore with about 300,000 German-language titles is accessible from the device. Users can also shop for ebooks from the individual booksellers’ websites. (By contrast, the German Kindle store contains about 150,000 German-language ebooks.) The Shine supports EPUB, PDF and TXT files. The Telekom cloud provides users with unlimited storage of ebooks they purchase from the partners, and 25 GB of storage for ebooks bought from other retailers.  The telecommunications provider also has over 11,000 free Wi-Fi hotspots in Germany.

The German tech industry body BITKOM estimated last fall that 800,000 e-readers were sold in Germany in 2012, and it expects that to rise to 1.4 million units in 2013. Today’s press release announcing the new device also says that about 11 percent of Germans read ebooks on mobile devices.

The companies involved in the deal suggest that, while Amazon is too large a competitor for any one of them to go up against, by banding together they have a better chance. In the press release, Thalia CEO Michael Busch describes such a partnership as “unseen before” and says: “Every company has to consider its strategic approach and interests and choose the partners that will serve these interests best in order to compete with the mighty U.S. online retailer giants.”*

“The aim of the partnership is to create a competitive, single internet platform for digital products, especially for digital reading,” Weltbild’s Carol Haff told German book trade publication Buchreport.

*I relied primarily on Google Translate and also received assistance from a couple of German speakers.

This story was updated several times Friday morning as more information became available.

The company’s overall revenues for the third quarter of fiscal year 2013 were $2.2 billion, down 8.8 percent over last year. The company saw losses of $6.1 million, or -$0.18 per share, compared to earnings of $0.71 per share a year ago.

Today’s earnings come a few days after B&N’s founder, chairman and largest stockholder, Leonard Riggio, offered to buy the chain’s 689 retail stores and take them private. So how are those stores doing? Not well, but not as badly as Nook is doing. Over the holidays, Barnes & Noble bookstore chain saw sales down at its physical stores and at BN.com as well as in the Nook segment. For the quarter, retail sales were $1.5 billion, down 10.3 percent over last year, “attributable to a 7.3% decline in comparable store sales, store closures and lower online sales.” Core comparable store sales were down 2.2 percent. The company did not break out sales at BN.com.

In response to the problems at Nook, Barnes & Noble said in the earnings release that Nook “is calibrating its business model and has implemented a cost reduction program that the company projects will significantly reduce Nook’s expenses.” As a reminder, Nook is the segment of the business that’s supposed to be doing well: Barnes & Noble spun it off, along with the college bookstores, into a subsidiary called Nook Media last year, with investments from Microsoft and Pearson. For fiscal year 2013, the company said it expects Nook Media revenues to be $2.5 billion. Previously, it had estimated revenues of $3 billion for the segment.

In a statement, B&N CEO William Lynch said the company has “taken significant actions to begin to right size our cost structure in the Nook segment, while also taking a large markdown on Nook devices in order to enhance our ability to achieve our estimated sales plans in subsequent quarters.” Lynch said Nook “remains committed” to the tablet and e-reader business, likely in response to a New York Times article earlier this week that cited an unidentified source who said Barnes & Noble would “move away” from building devices.

Lynch also said, “Without question, our bookstores have made a significant contribution to Nook’s success over the past three years. And, in turn, our award-winning line of Nook’s products have proven to be a strong driver of traffic to our stores.”

Barnes & Noble is holding an investor call at 10 a.m. ET, and we will be on the call.

Riggio’s offer would take Barnes & Noble’s 689 retail stores and BN.com private, and would exclude the college and digital businesses, which Barnes & Noble spun off into a separate entity, Nook Media, last year with investments from Microsoft and Pearson.

The offer comes at a time when Barnes & Noble’s retail and digital businesses are both struggling. The company is set to report its Q3 2013 earnings on Thursday, February 28, and has warned investors of greater-than-expected losses for Nook. It also plans to close up to a third of its retail stores over the next decade. Separately, a New York Times article on Sunday cited a “person familiar with Barnes & Noble’s strategy” who said the company’s poor quarter “has caused executives to realize the company must move away from its program to engineer and build its own devices and focus more on licensing its content to other device makers.”* B&N spokeswoman Mary Ellen Keating said, “To be clear, we have no plans to discontinue our award-winning line of Nook products.”

Barnes & Noble said it’s formed a strategic committee to evaluate Riggio’s offer, with Evercore Partners as financial advisor and Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison as legal advisor. The company said there ”can be no assurance that the review of Mr. Riggio’s proposal or the consideration of any transaction will result in a sale of the retail business or in any other transaction. There is no timetable for the Strategic Committee’s review.”

*Also see my ebook predictions for 2013.

The WSJ notes that “the chain shut an average of about 15 stores a year in the past decade, but until 2009 it also was opening 30 or more a year,” with a peak of 726 stores in 2008. Klipper may have chosen to talk to the WSJ to show investors that the company has a plan. He said that fewer than 20 of the chain’s retail stores are unprofitable, and “we’re going to be around a long time” because consumers read both print and ebooks (this is a point that the company has been pressing for awhile, based on its own research).

Barnes & Noble spokeswoman Mary Ellen Keating noticed that the chain’s store closure plan hasn’t changed and said, “It should be noted that in 2012, Barnes & Noble opened two new prototype stores and in 2013 plans to test several other prototypes, as well. Barnes & Noble has great real estate in prime locations and the company’s management is fully committed to the retail concept for the long term.”

Barnes & Noble is threatened by the shift to online book shopping at Amazon. The company has rolled out a host of Nook e-readers and tablets that face stiff competition in a market dominated by Kindle e-readers and saturated with cheap tablets from Amazon, Google, Apple and others. Barnes & Noble just delivered a terrible holiday earnings report, showing Nook, BN.com and retail sales all down, with a particularly large decline in Nook device sales. The company plans to spin off the Nook and college stores into a separate unit called Nook Media, with Microsoft and Pearson both holding stakes.

When Borders, then the nation’s second-largest bookstore chain, went bankrupt and liquidated all its stores in 2011, it seemed as if it could be good news for Barnes & Noble, which would have a chance to grab former Borders customers. But it appears that former Borders customers largely switched their book buying over to Amazon.

Mankins tells the Boston Globe, “Ideally I’d find an innovator who enjoys reading, understands the community benefits that bookstores provide, and isn’t afraid to do things differently to nudge the store and the industry in different directions.”

A few HackerNews users expressed interest in possibly buying the store; plenty of others offered ideas to save it. Here are a few of the suggestions:

• Lease the Espresso Book Machine, which prints out-of-print and self-published titles on demand. (Several independent bookstores, like the Harvard Book Store in Cambridge and McNally Robinson in New York, lease them.) “The machine is so expensive. The lease on it is more than our rent,” Mankins responded, but notes a future owner might be able to rig a cheaper POD machine using laser printers and binding tools.
• Open a members-only bookstore/coffee shop: “I’ve always dreamed of hybrid book store/coffee shops. Perhaps ones that sell subscription access, becoming for-pay lending libraries with a book inventory that adjusts to patron demands. That way you have recurring revenue off each customer, and you can hope people sign up for it like they do for gym memberships and then don’t show.”
• Offer coworking space. “I would kill for a bookstore environment with coffee and decent chairs. As it is, I do most of my work in a Barnes and Noble, and my back hates me for it,” one user wrote. Another: “Become a hacker/student-centric coffee shop that enables freelancers, et al, to work in a less frenetic environment than Starbucks.”
• Buy a MakerBot 3D printer and charge people to use it.
• Just get referral fees from Amazon. “I tend to walk into (South African) bookstores to buy Wired’s UK edition and browse books for a while until I know what else I’d like to read. At that point I write down the book’s title and later download it for my Kindle. I’ve often thought that bookstores should have QR-codes with amazon referral links that make my purchases easier.”

Photo courtesy of Flickr / ButterflySha

Amazon will release Ferriss’s book on November 20, amid media coverage that the company probably isn’t thrilled about. Articles in Publishers Weekly, the Wall Street Journal and now the New York Times have focused on low print sales of Amazon NY’s first big title, Penny Marshall’s memoir My Mother Was Nuts, and bricks-and-mortar bookstores’ refusal to carry Amazon titles.

As Amazon attempts to sign big-name authors in the future, it will have to convince them that print distribution isn’t important. The 4-Hour Chef may be sold at few places other than Amazon. Barnes & Noble, the largest bookstore chain in the U.S., won’t stock Amazon titles in its stores, and many independent bookstores refuse to do so as well. And while Amazon is making its New York titles available as ebooks to other retailers through distributor Ingram, few rivals are biting. The ebook edition of My Mother Was Nuts, for example, is for sale at Kobo but not at Google, Barnes & Noble’s Nook store or Apple’s iBookstore.

Ferriss says he is not worried. He is cross-promoting The 4-Hour Chef, which Amazon will release on November 20, within his earlier two Crown titles. He announced on his blog today that the digital editions of The 4-Hour Workweek and 4-Hour Body will be updated with a sample chapter from The 4-Hour Chef, and The 4-Hour Chef will contain excerpts from the two earlier books.

“This is something that I effectively brokered. It made such straightforward business sense to cross-promote between the books,” Ferriss told me. He said it wasn’t hard to get Crown to agree to include the sample chapter of 4-Hour Chef in the earlier titles, though the Crown ebooks won’t include buy links back to Amazon.

Those articles, Ferriss told me, give the impression that he “didn’t know what he was getting into, and was very enthusiastic, and is now having second thoughts — which is completely, 100 percent inaccurate…I remain as enthusiastic and optimistic about this book as I was in the beginning.” People assume that success “means #1 New York Times bestseller,” he said. “I’ve never said that. I would love to have a #1 New York Times [bestseller], but the New York Times list skews heavily toward books that have reporting from multiple retail outlets. And therefore, I’m not pinning all of my hopes on the NYT list, nor did I ever do that. From the very first time that I considered working with Amazon, I had to come to terms with the fact that I might not sell print through retail.” On his blog, he writes, “Fiction: My goal is to have The 4-Hour Chef hit national bestseller lists. Fact: My goal is to have all three of my books on the lists at the same time.”

I asked Ferriss what he thinks about Barnes & Noble’s no-Amazon-books-in-stores policy — after all, the policy is partially having its intended effect at least in terms of media coverage like the articles I linked to above. “I’m not clear on what they are trying to prevent, or hoping to,” he said. “Do I blame them? No. If I were in their shoes, would I do the same thing? Maybe. I’m much more curious about what Barnes & Noble’s ten- to twenty-year plan is, as opposed to why they’re doing this with Amazon.”

When Ferriss originally signed up with Amazon, he expected “blowback” from the traditional publishing industry and retailers, he told me (and the NYT). “I’m very convinced this book will succeed in terms of the sheer number of units moved to readers,” he said. “I think it could sell as many [copies] or more than my previous two books. Am I going to have the same channels of distribution? No, I won’t, necessarily, because there are people who have blacklisted it…I think that no matter how well I do — even if I sell a million Kindle copies, for instance — there will be people in the book trade who call it a failure because they’re using different metrics.”

Photo courtesy of Flickr / Tim Ferriss

“Customers are going to pay for value. In the long term, we’re going to see ebooks worth something,” Michael Serbinis, CEO of Kobo, said. “We see a very healthy business.” As for changes in pricing models, “we just see them as fluctuations in this long-term evolution.”

Jamie Iannone, president of digital products at Barnes & Noble, agreed that “for quality works, customers are really willing to pay for ebooks”. “We [and publishers] have been sensitive to the value of the book,” he said, adding: “Even people that buy ebooks still read a lot of physical books – (which is) very different from other industries.”

Santiago de la Mora, director of print content partnerships for Google in Europe, the Middle East and Africa, said ebooks are just at the beginning of adding “tremendous additional value relative to the print book.” He mentioned functions like translations, locations, definitions and highlights (all of which are available in Google’s recently updated Play app for Android). “The ebook is a boon to the industry because, in some cases, it’s an enhanced product [over] print.”

Venkat Valliappan, head of books at Indian e-commerce site Indiaplaza.com, said ebook prices must remain low in India. “[International] publishers sell print books in India at [lower] prices and the same should be true for ebooks,” he said. The volume of Indian customers that international publishers will gain by keeping their ebook prices low “has to be given the utmost importance. That’s why the major publishers have accepted [lowered prices] in the past couple of years,” he said, claiming: “India has bailed out their business at an international level.”

Similarly, booksellers noted differences in the types of devices that consumers are looking for. “Our customers, when they’re frequent readers, just want e-readers. That’s very clear,” said Elodie Perthuisot, director of books at French bookstore chain FNAC. And she said they “don’t hesitate to spend thirty more euros to get the very new device. It’s not a matter of price, it’s a matter of content.”

Valliappan, meanwhile, said “the majority of the Indian public are looking for multiple functions, not just an e-reader. E-reader companies should look at multiple functions.”

Kobo doesn’t see the e-reader market plateauing. “We’re seeing triple-digit growth on dedicated e-ink e-readers,” Serbinis said, adding that users who buy Kobo devices buy five times more books annually compared to customers using a Kobo app on a third-party platform.

De la Mora cautioned that publishers and booksellers shouldn’t forget about smartphones: “There are more than one billion smartphones in the world.” As for device choices, “the consumer will decide, but it has to be made easy for them to access the content”.

Photo courtesy of Shutterstock / Thomas Bethge 

BookStats 2012 collects data from 1,977 book publishers in four sectors (trade/consumer, school/K-12, higher ed, and professional/scholarly). Some top-level findings:

• Ebooks made up 15 percent of trade publishers’ net sales revenues, or $2.074 billion, in 2011, compared to just 6 percent ($869 million) in 2010. Ebooks also account for 15.5 percent of trade publishers’ unit sales, with 388 million units sold — up from 5 percent (125 million units sold) in 2010. (Note: “Ebooks” here is defined as “all primary e-formats: ebooks, enhanced ebooks and paid mobile apps.”)

• Trade book sales are relatively flat. Trade publishers pulled in a total of $13.97 billion in revenues in 2011, compared to $13.90 in 2010 — a 0.5 percent increase.
• The total U.S. book market decreased slightly. Revenues from all book publishers were $27.2 billion in 2011, compared to $27.9 billion in 2010.
• Publishers are selling more books, though. While revenues were down slightly, unit sales were up 3.4 percent, to 2.77 billion books sold in 2011. (One reason for that could be more cheap ebooks.)
• Children’s/young adult books saw the highest growth of any category. Sales increased 12 percent in 2011, to $2.78 billion. The growth was driven largely by popular YA series like “The Hunger Games.”
• Bricks-and-mortar bookstores are still publishers’ primary sales channel. Physical bookstores accounted for 31.5 percent of publishers’ total net dollar sales in 2011 — but that was down 12.6 percent from 2010.

• Publishers’ direct-to-consumer sales nearly doubled, with revenue from direct sales hitting $1.1 billion in 2011 — up from $702 million in 2010, an increase of 58 percent. The AAP tells me that most of those direct sales were concentrated in the trade and higher education sectors.

Notes: BookStats is published jointly by the Association of American Publishers and the Book Industry Study Group. (In the past, the groups conducted separate annual surveys.) The report is the most comprehensive look at the U.S. book publishing industry to date, incorporating net sales revenue and unit data reported 1,977 U.S. publishers. The report tracks sales and units by format (physical, digital, bundles); category; and channel. The full BookStats 2012 report is available for purchase here.

The charts illustrating this post were created by me, not by BookStats.

Photo courtesy of Shutterstock / Borys Shevchuk

A host of reading-related startups to launch recently — Subtext, Readmill, Findings — focus on social and sharing but don’t touch on the down-and-dirty, selling-more-books part.

Bilbary and Jellybooks are different. Both have UK-based, book-publishing-backgrounded founders and neither has Silicon Valley investors or big funding. I’m not saying that’s a good or bad thing — just that the sites are in early stages and somewhat barebones for now.

Bilbary, founded by former UK bookstore chain Waterstones managing director Tim Coates, focuses on an issue that big trade publishers need serious help with — selling e-books direct to readers. “It’s fascinating to see the predicament that publishers are faced with,” Coates told me in December. “It’s kind of like the last act of Hamlet, standing in the wings while everybody kills each other and they’re all going to lie dead.” Except hopefully most of them will still be alive and selling e-books direct through Bilbary. In beta, the site is available in the U.S. and has 343,604 e-books available for sale from non-agency publishers. The site will add about 100,000 more titles from agency publishers in coming weeks, Coates told Publishers Weekly, then expand to titles from international publishers, self-published and out-of-print books.

Eventually, Bilbary plans to expand to e-book rental, browsing, advanced search options and features like curated “shop windows” created by booksellers and librarians. It’s a big task, and if the company is able to sign up enough publishers and actually launch an e-book rental initiative, the site could help publishers compete against Amazon (NSDQ: AMZN).

For now, the browsing and discovery experience is terrible — with titles like The World Market for Parts of Electrical Apparatus for Switching or Protecting Electrical Circuits, Board, Panels, Consoles, and Bases Used for Electricity Control: A 2011 Global Trade Perspective ($520.62) nestled up against The Runaway Countess ($6.08) and Evolution of the Primate Brain ($234.50). Categories are much too broad — click “Fiction” and you get 79,155 e-books with no way to drill down other than by author. Yes, it’s in beta, but the user browsing experience is going to have to become infinitely better for consumers to be able to use this site in any real way. If that part can be handled, however, the site has high ambitions and is out the door before the oh-so-delayed publisher-backed Bookish has even launched.

Next up is Jellybooks, which focuses heavily on book discovery. Founder is Andrew Rhomberg, who was previously director of content acquisition at txtr. The home page is simply rows of book covers, designed to facilitiate book discovery the way it would happen in a physical bookstore. When a user clicks on one of the covers, he or she can read the first 10 percent of the book, DRM-free, and can share that sample with friends and across social networking platforms.

At the core of Jellybooks’ business model is half-priced group buying deals. Those are not available in this release, but in a future release the site will offer e-book deals and bundles.

Beyond that, the site will not focus on selling books directly at retail prices. Rhomberg calls Jellybooks “the ultimate show-rooming experience,” where users discover books and then buy them elsewhere (except for the deals available through the site). Each book sample has buy links to various retailers at the end.