- By MICHELLE CHAPMAN AP Business Writer
Jun 7, 2019
Barnes & Noble is being acquired by a hedge fund for $476 million and will be taken private.
The national chain that many blamed for the demise of independent bookstores has been ravaged by Amazon.com and other online sellers, but remains a critical outlet for publishers.
On Friday, it was acquired by Elliott Management and, in a twist, will likely become a national chain with a business model more akin to that of a local bookstore.
Elliott bought Waterstones one year ago, a national U.K. book chain that has successfully navigated through the online/e-reader revolution by returning a lot of autonomy to the managers of its nearly 300 stores, who can select books that they believe local readers want.
The man who runs that U.K. chain, who will become CEO of Barnes & Noble, said that is what he has in mind for Barnes & Noble.
Leonard Riggio acquired the century old Barnes & Noble in the 1970s, including its flagship Manhattan store, in the 1970s. He pursued aggressive expansion throughout the 1980s and established Barnes & Noble as a national phenomenon with the acquisition of B. Dalton Bookseller and its 797 locations in 1987. It became the nation’s second-largest bookseller and began selling books online in partnership with IBM and Sears.
The company continued to gobble up other larger booksellers like Doubleday Book Shops and also BookStop, which ran discount superstores in Texas.
By 1993, Barnes & Noble was a publicly traded company that was upending the publishing industry.
The company tried to ride the digital transformation of books, rolling out its own e-reader, the Nook, in 2009 and offering more than a million books on its website.
But Amazon.com, which began as an online market place for books, was relentless and its Kindle e-reader is dominant today. The company has cut into sales of both Barnes & Noble and independent book sellers alike.
