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Barnes & Noble Founder Wants to Take Retail Division Private

Posted by Unknown on from the that's-one-way-to-die dept.

The times haven't been the kindest to B&N: retail sales are down and the Kindle is outselling the Nook. Joining Best Buy and Dell, B&N might be going private. From the article: "Barnes & Noble’s largest shareholder, Leonard Riggio, made an offer Monday to buy out the struggling company and take it private ... Essentially, it would split the company in two: one half would be Riggio’s private brick-and-mortar stores and related assets, the other the publicly-traded Nook and college bookstore management division."

4 of 131 comments (clear)

  1. Blame the market bulls ... by oztiks · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Public companies are getting abused on the stock market so bad being private means they can actually run the business properly without having to worry about squeezing to make every Q more profitable according to analyst projections and "expected" profits.

    Apple should do the same but having 1bn outstanding shares at $400 a piece means even their whopping $130bn in the bank wont even save them from the onslaught.

    1. Re:Blame the market bulls ... by peragrin · · Score: 5, Interesting

      The trick is wall street MBA and EMBA's are basically stripping companies bare destroying assets for short term goals, and personal profits.

      Take Circuit city. The MBA's backed by wall street stripped the company to the bones, stole all the cash and pushed it into bankruptcy.

      After a bad year(2008) and falling stock prices circuit city management came up with a plan to cut expenses by $10,000,000 over the next 3 years. They fired the top 3,000 salesmen and hired 2,500 fresh salesmen in the summer of 2009. Wall street bounced the stock back up, and management paid themselves $5,000,000 in bonuses for that year.

      2009 ended with predicitably even lower sales.(firing your best salesmen does things like that).

      6 months later it was completely gone.

      Wall street supports and and encourages self destructive behavior. Wall street isn't about long term investing any more. It is about millisecond long trades taking up 75% of all trading volume.

      Seriously if wall street cut HFT for one day the volume would collapse.

      --
      i thought once I was found, but it was only a dream.
  2. B&N Also need to get "with the times" by inflex · · Score: 5, Interesting

    If B&N want to improve their chances of success in the online/eBook market, they really need to sort out their PubIt side of matters. Currently unless you're in the US, or have gone through the extensive red-tape to obtain a US business cred, you are not permitted to get on board with directly publishing via PubIt. Conversely, Amazon and Kobo both allow international publishers to work directly through them.

    While small publishers outside of the "Big 6" don't contribute a lot financially, as individuals there are however many many thousands of us, and a lot of our potential readers do have Nook units.

    TLDR; B&N (PubIt) needs to be open for international publishers.

  3. Re:Is it really news for nerds or stuff that matte by timeOday · · Score: 5, Interesting

    B&N is a company that valiantly strived to make the transition from bricks-and-mortar to the Internet, just as we are constantly chiding outmoded companies like Kodak for failing to do (or the RIAA for actively fighting, when it comes to music). By releasing the Nook line of e-readers, B&N took a leap into leading the transition of print publication away from paper. I for one bought a Nook for my daughter a couple years ago, and she reads on it all the time. Yet still they are gradually falling by the wayside, like all the other big booksellers that pre-date the Internet. For all we blame top management for failing to make the transition, re-inventing a running company seems to be all but impossible.