"What works in Jacksonville, Florida, isn't necessarily going to work in Hawaii."Īnd he sees advantages for Barnes and Noble in the fight with Amazon, where the customer interaction is limited to buying things online. "In chain bookselling, you need to try and get the best store for each location," Daunt told The Associated Press.
His main goal is to have each Barnes & Noble store be more tailored to the local market, rather than operate as a massive homogenous chain. To reverse that decline, new CEO James Daunt will try to replicate what Waterstones has done in Britain. Its revenue peaked in 2012, and it has fallen every year since. as of last year, it is smaller than when it acquired of B. "I've been quoted as saying that it's in the long-term interest of the overall book business that Barnes & Noble not just survive but grow and prosper." "Today, we stand together in common cause to promote and support bricks-and-mortar bookstores," said Teicher. Teicher heads the American Booksellers Association, the group representing independent book shops, and a bitter rival of Barnes & Noble. Last year, Riggio was brought on stage by Oren Teicher for BookExpo 2018 in New York City. The company has cut into sales of both Barnes & Noble and independent book sellers alike. 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.īut, which began as an online market place for books, was relentless and its Kindle e-reader is dominant today. The company continued to gobble up other larger booksellers like Doubleday Book Shops and also BookStop, which ran discount superstores in Texas.īy 1993, Barnes & Noble was a publicly traded company that was upending the publishing industry. It became the nation's second-largest bookseller and began selling books online in partnership with IBM and Sears. Dalton Bookseller and its 797 locations in 1987. He pursued aggressive expansion throughout the 1980s and established Barnes & Noble as a national phenomenon with the acquisition of B. Leonard Riggio acquired the century old Barnes & Noble in the 1970s, including its flagship Manhattan store, in the 1970s. chain, who will become CEO of Barnes & Noble, said that is what he has in mind for Barnes & Noble. 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. 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.Įlliott bought Waterstones one year ago, a national U.K.