Bad news for Barnes and Noble: Nook revenue drops 32%

On Christmas morning children will unwrap their gifts to find a shiny new tablets and e-readers, but this year the Nook is not likely to be one of them.

Revenues for Barnes and Noble’s Nook e-reader division went down 32 percent to $109 million, according to its most recent earnings report. That’s not good for a business that it competing against both Amazon’s Kindle and the general tablet market.

Barnes and Noble only sold $51 million worth of the e-readers, which in itself represents a fall of 41 percent year over year.

The company has otherwise suffered personnel losses while dealing with its Nook failures. In July, then chief executive William Lynch quit after having served the company for three years. He left saying that he believed there was a good executive team in place and that he looked “forward to the many innovations the company will be bringing to its million of physical and digital media customers in the future.”

But the company seems committed to the e-readers despite having announced in June that it would outsource the production of its color e-reader devices to an outside company. It then turned around in August and said it was dedicated to the color tablets “no matter how they’re produced.”

We’ve speculated in the past that Microsoft would take on this production responsibility as it has a stake in the Nook division. Pearson jumped in on that partnership almost a year ago when it bought a fiver percent stake of its own in Nook Media.