Why Buy a Book When You Can Own the Whole Store?

As I have mentioned previously, last August bookstore chain Barnes & Noble started looking around for possible buyers. That search may be over, but not because the company has found a buyer–quite the opposite.

On Monday, March 7th, Reuter’s reported that B&N shares fell to $11.60, a two-and-a-half-year low, and $.40 below the share price that made the company go looking for a new owner. This makes the company extremely unattractive to potential purchasers, especially with chairman Riggio showing no signs of loosing the reins.

In the meantime, B&N’s best hope, the Nook, is sucking up current dividends, even as the company projects spending another $150 million on Nook development this year. The Nook is second only to Amazon’s Kindle as an eBook platform, but that’s not saying much: the Nook has yet to find a niche among book buyers as profitable as Amazon’s Kindle.

If you are not quite ready to buy a bookstore chain, how about a movie?

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Pan’s Labyrinth director Guillermo del Toro has been trying to fund a film adaptation of H.P. Lovecraft’s classic horror novella “At the Mountains of Madness” since forever. There were even rumors that Tom Cruise had agreed to star.

Unfortunately, Universal Pictures–which had funded some pre-production and seemed interested in making the film–and del Toro failed to see eye-to-eye on the ratings issue, with del Toro’s desire for the artistic freedom to make an R-rated film pitted against the studio’s need to capture a PG-13 audience.

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More likely to see the big screen is John Scalzi’s Old Man’s War, which was recently picked up by Paramount Pictures. Currently, Wolfgang Peterson (Troy, The Perfect Storm, Air Force One) is set to direct an adaptation by David Self. Scot Stuber (Battleship, 47 Ronin, Safe House) will produce the film, assuming all goes well. One thing that Old Man’s War has going for it is lots of sequel material. Scalzi has four books in print set in the OMW universe and at least one of them, Zoe’s Tale, is PG-13-ready.

And, just because I can’t not mention it, Charlie Sheen is hiring.