Barnes & Noble Inc. swung to a loss and reported a decline in sales in the first full quarter since completing the separation of its college business.

Shares fell 7% in after-hours trading.

Barnes & Noble completed the spinoff of its college bookstore group into a new publicly traded company, Barnes & Noble Education Inc., in August.

But the core company has continued to struggle, on Thursday reporting a 4.5% slide in sales to $895 million during its fiscal second quarter. Retail sales, which includes brick-and-mortar stores and online, fell 3.1% to $861 million, hurt by lower online sales. Comparable sales—a key sales metric that excludes newly opened or closed stores—declined 1%, but would have fallen 0.5% excluding Nook products.

Nook, the struggling e-reader business, said sales slumped 32% to $43.5 million amid lower content sales.

Over all, the company reported a loss of $39.2 million, or 52 cents a share, compared with a profit of $12.3 million, or 12 cents a share, a year earlier.

On a continuing operations basis, per-share loss was 36 cents a share.

Looking ahead to the current holiday quarter, Barnes & Noble said comparable sales—a key sales metric that excludes newly opened or closed stores—increased 1.1% through Black Friday weekend.

Write to Chelsey Dulaney at Chelsey.Dulaney@wsj.com

Subscribe to WSJ: http://online.wsj.com?mod=djnwires

(END) Dow Jones Newswires

December 03, 2015 17:25 ET (22:25 GMT)

Copyright (c) 2015 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.
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