Barnes & Noble, the largest chain of bookshops in the US, said sales of physical books are sliding sharply at its stores and it no longer expects any of the company's growth to come from that traditional business.
The company is pinning its hopes instead on the Nook e-reader, a rival to Amazon's Kindle, and on sales of e-books for the device, which it promised to double to US$1.8 billion ($2.1 billion) this year.
B&N's latest quarterly results showed the accelerating changes in the way books are read and sold, and underscored the difficulties facing traditional bookstores.
The company posted a loss of US$56.6 million for the period, slightly narrower than the US$62.5 million it lost in the same quarter last year, and said it would remain in the red for the financial year as a whole.
Same-store sales were down 1.6 per cent, as surging sales of toys and games and Nook readers failed to make up for the decline in books.
