Barnes & Noble Drops, Amazon Stops
PublishersLunch

The clobbering of Barnes & Noble's stock continued yesterday after our post following their conference call, down over 19 percent for the day on trading volume more than four times higher than usual. It was the largest one-day drop in the bookseller's shares since November 2001.

At current prices that leaves the company's market capitalization at a little over $750 million (and remember that it was just 9 months ago that the company itself decided the BN College unit was worth $460 million).

In a rough day across Wall Street, Amazon shares declined as well, down approximately 7.5 percent. As many people in the book business already know, Amazon suffered in different fashion yesterday afternoon, experiencing a rare site malfunction that left the US version of the etailer's site unavailable for orders for a matter of hours. The company first acknowledged the site problem in a posting on a message board for third-party sellers at 3:47 Eastern time.

Accounts of how long the outage lasted are anecdotal, running from two to five hours. The company has acknowledged they experienced technical problems but has not commented further on what happened. Reportedly, their web services business was not affected.