As Hastings Entertainment reported a 9.1% decline in book comparable store sales for the first quarter ended April 30, the multimedia retailer announced that it will begin selling e-books from its gohastings.com Web site sometime in the third quarter of the current fiscal year (August-October). For the entire company in the quarter, sales fell 3.8%, to $124.1 million, and net income declined to $413,000 from $1.0 million. Higher gas prices that reduced disposable income plus a weak lineup of new movies and books were cited by Hastings as key factors in the declines.
According to Hastings, new release book content fell 22% in the quarter; Hastings explained that it defines new release content as titles for which it buys more than 1,000 copies. In addition to the poor new book lineup, Hastings attributed the 9.1% decline in book comps to an 8.6% decline in new book sales and a 19.6% drop in used books; the declines came across all formats. The company attributed the decline in part to strong movie tie-in books in last year’s comparable quarter that were not repeated this year. The decreases were partially offset by increased sales of value books, which increased 8.7% for the period. Hastings also noted that with sales of rental books soft, it will stop renting books and CDs.
Monday morning, Hastings had no additional information about its e-book plans. It did say that despite the weaker than expected first quarter it still anticipates net earnings per share for the year to be between 22 cents and 37 cents.
