Barnes & Noble Booksellers is an American bookseller with the largest number of retail outlets in the United States. The company operates approximately 600 retail stores across the United States.
Barnes & Noble operates mainly through its Barnes & Noble Booksellers chain of bookstores. The company's headquarters are at 33 E. 17th Street on Union Square in New York City.
As a result of a series of mergers and bankruptcies in the American bookstore industry since the 1990s (notably the liquidation of their main competitor Borders), Barnes & Noble has become the United States' largest bookstore chain and the only national chain. Previously, Barnes & Noble operated the chain of small B. Dalton Bookseller stores in malls until they announced the liquidation of the chain in 2010. The company was also one of the nation's largest manager of college textbook stores located on or near many college campuses when that division was spun off as a separate public company called Barnes & Noble Education in 2015.
The company is known by its customers for large retail outlets, many of which contain a café serving Starbucks coffee and other consumables. Most stores sell books, magazines, newspapers, DVDs, graphic novels, gifts, games, toys, music, and Nook e-readers and tablets. The company offers publishing and self-publishing services.
History 19th century: foundations A major part of what would become Barnes & Noble was founded in 1886 as a bookstore called Arthur Hinds & Company, located at 4 Cooper Institute in the Cooper Union Building in New York City."Barnes & Noble to Move", The Bookseller and Stationer, January 1. 1922 p. 13The Noble Legacy: The Story of Gilbert Clifford Noble, Cofounder of the Barnes & Noble and Noble & Noble Book Companies by Betty N. Turner. iUniverse: 2006 , 9780595374786, page 71 In the fall of 1886, Gilbert Clifford Noble from Westfield, Massachusetts, who had graduated from Harvard College earlier that year, was hired to work there as a clerk.The Noble Legacy: The Story of Gilbert Clifford Noble, Cofounder of the Barnes & Noble and Noble & Noble Book Companies by Betty N. Turner. iUniverse: 2006 , 9780595374786, page 65
In 1894, Noble was made a partner, and the name of the shop was changed to Hinds & Noble.The Noble Legacy: The Story of Gilbert Clifford Noble, Cofounder of the Barnes & Noble and Noble & Noble Book Companies by Betty N. Turner. iUniverse: 2006 , 9780595374786, page 101
20th century: expansion 1900–1919 In 1901, Hinds & Noble moved to 31–35 W. 15th Street."Barnes & Noble to Move", The Bookseller and Stationer, January 1, 1922, p. 13 In 1917, Noble bought out Hinds and entered into a partnership with William Barnes, son of his friend Charles Barnes; the name of the store was changed to Barnes & Noble soon after.The Noble Legacy: The Story of Gilbert Clifford Noble, Cofounder of the Barnes & Noble and Noble & Noble Book Companies by Betty N. Turner. iUniverse: 2006 , 9780595374786 page 151 Charles Barnes had previously founded an Illinois bookstore in 1873 that would later evolve into the Follett Corporation after William Barnes left the company. Barnes and Noble's official history cites this 1873 Illinois bookstore founding as part of its history.
1920–1939 In 1930, Noble sold his share of the company to William Barnes's son, John Wilcox Barnes. Noble died on June 6, 1936, at the age of 72.The Noble Legacy: The Story of Gilbert Clifford Noble, Cofounder of the Barnes & Noble and Noble & Noble Book Companies by Betty N. Turner. iUniverse: 2006 page 153 In 1932, at the height of the Great Depression, the bookstore moved its flagship location to 18th Street and Fifth Avenue, which served as the company's flagship location until its closure in 2014. The Noble family retained ownership of an associated publishing business, and Barnes & Noble opened a new publishing division in 1931.
1940–1959 In 1940, the store was one of the first businesses to feature Muzak. It underwent a major renovation the following year.The Late Age of Print: Everyday Book Culture from Consumerism to Control by Theodore G. Striphas. Columbia University Press: 2009. 978-0-231-14814-6 p. 64 That decade, the company opened stores in Brooklyn and Chicago. William Barnes died in 1945, at the age of 78, and his son John Wilcox Barnes assumed full control. The company underwent a significant expansion between the 1950s and the 1960s, opening an additional retail store on 23rd Street in Manhattan, as well as shops near the City University of New York, Harvard, and other Northeast college campuses.The Late Age of Print: Everyday Book Culture from Consumerism to Control by Theodore G. Striphas. Columbia University Press: 2009. 978-0-231-14814-6 p. 65
1960–1979
John Barnes died in 1964, and the company was sold to the conglomerate Amtel two years later.Reluctant Capitalists: Bookselling and the Culture of Consumption by Laura J. Miller. University Of Chicago Press: 2007 p. 47 The business was purchased in 1971 by Leonard Riggio, who has been credited as one of the founders, for $1.2 million. By then, it consisted only of "a significantly reduced wholesale operation and a single retail location—the flagship store at 105 Fifth Avenue." The publishing operation was sold separately by Amtel to Harper & Row. In 1974, Barnes & Noble became the first bookstore chain to advertise on television, and a year later, the company became the first bookseller in the United States to discount books, by selling The New York Times best-selling titles at 40% off the publishers' list price. Between the 1970s and the 1980s, Barnes & Noble opened smaller discount stores, which were eventually phased out in favor of larger stores. They also began to publish their own books to be sold to mail-order customers. These titles were primarily affordable reissues of out-of-print titles and selling them through mail-order catalogs allowed Barnes & Noble to reach new customers nationwide.
In November 1974, editors of the British-produced Guinness Book of Records, claimed on the BBC One television program Record Breakers that the Fifth Avenue store of Barnes & Noble had overtaken that of London's Foyles bookshop to become the world's biggest bookstore.Record Breakers. Presented by Roy Castle. Co-presented by Norris and Ross McWhirter. BBC 1. Broadcast on Tuesday November 19, 1974.
1980–1999 Barnes & Noble continued to expand throughout the 1980s, and it purchased the primarily shopping mall-based B. Dalton chain from Dayton Hudson in 1986, for an estimated $275 million to $300 million. Solveig Robinson, author of The Book in Society: An Introduction to Print Culture, wrote that the purchase "gave [Barnes & Noble] the necessary know-how and infrastructure to create what, in 1992, became the definitive bookselling superstore."Robinson, Solveig. The Book in Society: An Introduction to Print Culture. Broadview Press, November 15, 2013. , 9781770484313. p. 260. The acquisition of the 797 B. Dalton bookstores turned the company into a nationwide retailer, and by the end of fiscal year 1999, the second-largest online bookseller in the United States. B&N's critics claim that it has contributed to the decline of local and independent booksellers. The last B. Dalton stores ceased operations in January 2010.
In 1989, Barnes & Noble purchased the 22-store chain Bookstop.
In September 1993, Barnes & Noble became a publicly traded company by issuing $77 million worth of stock on the New York Stock Exchange under the BKS ticker symbol. The company remained on the stock exchange until competition from Amazon decreased their stock value and in August 2019, Elliott Management purchased all of the company's stock and took the company private.
Before Barnes & Noble created its official website, it sold books directly to customers through mail-order catalogs. It first began selling books online in the 1980s through an early videotex service called "Trintex", a joint venture between Sears and IBM, but the company's website was not launched until May 1997. BarnesandNoble.com went public in 1999.
2000s
In 2004, it was reported that the reading of books was on the decline in America, with the number of non-reading adults increasing by 17 million between 1992 and 2002. Despite this, Barnes & Noble said that its retail store business was expanding in the book market. Beginning in 1999, Barnes & Noble owned GameStop, a video game and electronics retail outlet. The company distributed its shares in GameStop in late 2004, spinning it off into its own company in an attempt to simplify its corporate structure.
CEO Leonard Riggio stepped down in 2002, naming his younger brother, and former acting chief executive of BarnesandNoble.com, Stephen Riggio, to succeed him. Some corporate governance experts noted that this appointment could cause a conflict of interest, but the company board noted that Riggio's experience at the company made him the right person for the job. Stephen Riggio stepped down from the position in 2010.
2010s In 2010, website president William Lynch was named CEO. He began development toward the company's electronic book store and the introduction of its electronic book reader, the Nook. Steve Riggio stayed on as vice chairman. When Lynch resigned in mid-2013, he was replaced by Chief Financial Officer Michael Huseby early the next year. Following the spinoff of Barnes & Noble Education, Huseby departed to head the new firm; his place was filled in mid-2015 by Ronald Boire, who departed one year later. Demos Parneros was named Barnes & Noble's Chief Executive Officer in April 2017 after having joined the company as Chief Operating Officer in November 2016; however, he was fired in July 2018 for "company policy violations" without severance and was immediately removed from the company's board, at the advice of a law firm hired by Barnes & Noble. On August 28, 2018, Parneros filed a lawsuit against Barnes & Noble, claiming wrongful termination.
After the bankruptcy and closure of its chief competitor, Borders, in 2011, Barnes & Noble became the last remaining national bookstore chain in the United States. This followed a series of mergers and bankruptcies in the American bookstore industry since the 1990s, which also saw the demise of Waldenbooks, Barnes & Noble's own subsidiary B. Dalton, and Crown Books, among others. Barnes & Noble's largest physical bookstore rival is now Books-A-Million, which does not operate in the Western US. Barnes & Noble also faces competition from general retailers, especially from Amazon.com, and from regional and independent booksellers. Amazon has even opened its own physical bookstores, once again creating a second national bookstore chain.
Barnes & Noble began reducing its overall presence in the 2010s, closing its original flagship store in early 2014. In mid-2014, the company announced it would separate its Nook Media division from its retail store division.
In 2018, the company closed 400 of its retail locations, as its business seemed to be going through a decline. In February 2018, Barnes & Noble permanently laid off 1,800 full time employees at an annual cost savings of $40 million per year. According to TechCrunch, the company essentially fired their entire full time staff at all their stores, who would be making an average of $22,000 per year (~$11 per hour), and were replaced by part time workers earning close to minimum wage. In the 2018 fiscal year that ended in July, the company's overall losses reached $17 million.
Some media accounts noted the retail chain's apparent loss of focus, with one article noting:
While it's easy to blame Barnes & Noble's troubles on Amazon.com, the fact is the book industry has been on a roll. According to the American Booksellers Association, a trade group representing independent bookshops, year-to-date sales through August 6 actually rose 5% among its member sellers.