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Barnes & Noble is acquired by a hedge fund for $ 476 million and will be private.
The national channel, which many criticize for the loss of independent bookstores, has been ravaged by Amazon.com and other online vendors, but it remains an essential outlet for publishers.
On Friday, it was acquired by Elliott Management and, in a sense, will likely become a national chain with a business model closer to that of a local bookstore.
A year ago, Elliott bought from Waterstones, a British national book chain that has successfully crossed the revolution of electronic readers and digital readers by offering a great deal of autonomy to the directors of its nearly 300 stores, which can select books they want, according to local readers.
The man who runs the British channel, which will become the CEO of Barnes & Noble, said that was what he was planning for Barnes & Noble.
Leonard Riggio acquired Barnes & Noble in the 1970s, including his flagship store, Manhattan, in the 1970s. He continued his blazing expansion throughout the 1980s and made Barnes & Noble a national phenomenon with the same name. acquisition of B. Dalton Bookseller and its 797 sites in 1987. Became the second largest bookseller in the country, he began selling books online in partnership with IBM and Sears. .
The company continued to engulf other major booksellers such as Doubleday Book Shops and BookStop, which operated discount hypermarkets in Texas.
In 1993, Barnes & Noble was a publicly traded company that was shaking up the publishing industry.
The company has tried to ride the digital transformation of the book by deploying its own electronic reader, the Nook, in 2009 and offering more than a million books on its website.
But Amazon.com, which was originally an online market for books, was relentless and its Kindle ebook reader is dominant today. The company has reduced the sales of independent booksellers and booksellers Barnes & Noble.
Last year, Rigen was introduced on stage by Oren Teicher for BookExpo 2018 in New York.
Teicher heads the American Booksellers Association, the group representing independent bookstores and a fierce rival of Barnes & Noble.
"Today, we are united in a common cause to promote and support classic bookstores," said Mr. Teicher. "It has been said that it is in the long-term interest of the book industry that Barnes & Noble is not content to survive, but that he is developing and prosperous. "
But Barnes & Noble suffered.
With about 630 retail stores in the United States last year, it is less important than the acquisition of B. Dalton Bookseller in the late 1980s. Its revenue peaked in 2012 and has declined every year since.
To reverse this trend, new CEO James Daunt will attempt to replicate what Waterstones has done in Britain.
Its primary goal is to make every Barnes & Noble store more responsive to the local market, rather than operate as a massive homogeneous chain.
"In bookstores, you have to try to find the best store for each location," Daunt told The Associated Press. "What's working in Jacksonville, Florida, will not necessarily work in Hawaii."
And he sees benefits for Barnes and Noble in the fight with Amazon, where customer interaction is limited to buying products online.
Waterstones organizes several simultaneous events in its stores, making it "a" place of entertainment to discover books and enjoy the peculiarities of a bookstore. "
Elliott will pay $ 6.50 for each Barnes & Noble share, a premium of approximately 9% over the company's closing share price on Thursday.
The sale, valued at approximately $ 683 million, including debt, is expected to close in the third quarter if the regulators and shareholders have approved it.
After that, there is still a long way to go to recover, if that is possible. Some industry observers are skeptical, including Mike Shatzkin, CEO of Idea Logical Company, a consulting firm in the book business.
He described the entire retail model for any retail chain as "a 20th century concept" extinguished by the Internet.
"It does not surprise me that Barnes and Noble's management never came to this conclusion because they built their fortunes by building larger stores," he said. "And I'm not sure Waterstone will lead them to a different approach."
However, retailers like Target and Walmart have managed to do this, partly using their traditional stores as starting points for quick delivery of products purchased online.
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