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Barnes & Noble: a history
Barnes & Noble shares surged more than 30pc on Friday after US billionaire John Malone made a $1.02bn (£630m) offer to buy the struggling book chain. Here, we look at the history of the company.
Leonard Riggio, the company's chairman, began his bookselling career while attending New York University in the early 1960s. Working as a clerk in the university bookstore, he became convinced that he could do a better job serving students, and he opened a competing store of his own. With a small investment, Riggio established the Student Book Exchange in Manhattan's Greenwich Village in 1965. The store quickly became popular in New York.
By the 1970s, Riggio’s thriving business, which included six other college bookstores, acquired the flagship Barnes & Noble trade name and flagship bookstore in Manhattan, which had fallen into decline. Within a few years, Riggio transformed the Fifth Avenue store into "The World’s Largest Bookstore", with 150,000 textbook and trade titles. Riggio’s commitment to students continues today through Barnes & Noble College Booksellers, a wholly owned subsidiary of Barnes & Noble that operates more than 600 college bookstores on college and university campuses in 50 states, serving nearly 4m students and more than 250,000 faculty.
Innovations
In 1974, Barnes & Noble was the first bookseller in America to advertise on television. Aired in the New York market, the Barnes & Noble “Of Course! Of Course!” commercials won awards.
In 1975, the company took a bold and audacious step by becoming the first bookseller in America to discount books by offering New York Times bestsellers at 40pc off publishers’ list prices. Barnes & Noble expanded on that idea by opening a 40,000-square-foot Sale Annex directly across from its flagship store.
The company began to expand in the New York/Boston markets by opening smaller discount bookstores. In addition, it acquired two local chains, BookMasters and Marboro Books, which were converted to Barnes & Noble discount stores. Initially, these stores expanded to 50 locations. They were eventually phased out in favour of the company’s larger-format book superstores.
The acquisition of Marboro Books gave Barnes & Noble a foothold in the growing mail-order business, which served as a platform to reach customers nationwide. This business served as a laboratory that revealed undercurrents of demand, prompting Barnes & Noble to begin publishing its own books for sale to its growing mail-order customer base. These titles were primarily out-of-print books that were reissued in high quality, affordable editions.
Expansion
Through the 1980s, Barnes & Noble experimented with different store formats and sizes, seeking to develop a suburban superstore version of the original Barnes & Noble store. In 1987, the company made its largest acquisition when it purchased B Dalton Bookseller from Dayton Hudson. This acquisition of 797 retail bookstores thrust the company on to the national scene, making Barnes & Noble a nationwide retailer overnight and the second-largest bookseller in America. The company also acquired Doubleday Book Shops from the Bertelsmann Company and the rights to the Scribner’s bookstore trade name from Macmillan.
To further evolve its superstore strategy, Barnes & Noble purchased BookStop, a company operating discount book superstores in Texas, in 1989.
The Book Superstore
In the early 1990s, the company refined its superstore concept and established the modern generation of Barnes & Noble superstores, which today represent more than 96pc of retail sales.
Further enhancing the stores’ appeal are cafés, which through an exclusive arrangement with Starbucks, distinguish Barnes & Noble as the only bookseller serving this coffee brand.
Barnes & Noble became a publicly traded company in 1993.
Internet Retailing
The company has been selling direct to consumers for more than 25 years, beginning with its mail-order catalogue in the 1970s. In the late 1980s, Barnes & Noble tested selling books online in an early generation venue called Trintex, a joint venture between Sears and IBM. In the mid-1990s, it sold books on CompuServe and later opened a full-fledged book superstore on America Online in March 1997. The company’s website, www.barnesandnoble.com, was launched in May of that year.
Book Publishing
The company began its publishing efforts by reissuing affordable editions of out-of-print titles. Its editions of The Gentle Art of Verbal Self-Defense by Suzette Haden Elgin and The Columbia History of the World by John Garrity have sold more than 250,000 and 1m copies, respectively.
In 2001, Barnes & Noble purchased SparkNotes.com, a leading study aids website, offering free online access to literature notes and more than 1,000 study guides on everything from literature to chemistry to computer science. SparkNotes converted its top study guides into print publications, and they have rapidly become bestsellers.
In 2003, Barnes & Noble purchased Sterling Publishing. For 60 years, Sterling has been a publisher of non-fiction books.
eBooks
In March 2009, Barnes & Noble acquired Fictionwise, a leader in the eBook marketplace. Headquartered in New Jersey, Fictionwise was founded in 2000 by Steve and Scott Pendergrast. In July 2009, Barnes & Noble launched its eBookstore as part of its overall digital strategy. In October 2009, Barnes & Noble introduced "nook", an eBook Reader.