Barnes & Noble: A History of Bookselling and Education
Barnes & Noble Booksellers is an American bookseller with the largest number of retail outlets in the United States. Barnes & Noble operates mainly through its Barnes & Noble Booksellers chain of bookstores. 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. The company's official history shows the company being founded in 1873, when Charles M. Barnes founded a book business in Wheaton, Illinois.
The Early Years and Expansion
In 1917, Barnes' son, William, joined G. Clifford Noble to form Barnes & Noble. In 1901, Hinds & Noble moved to 31-35 W. In 1930, Noble sold his share of the company to William Barnes' son, John Wilcox Barnes. Noble died on June 6, 1936, at the age of 72. 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. In 1940, the store was one of the first businesses to feature Muzak. John Barnes died in 1964, and the company was sold to the conglomerate Amtel two years later.
The Riggio Era: Innovation and Growth
The business was then 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.
Riggio steered Barnes & Noble from an era of bonded leather books through the proliferation of free information in the Internet age, and the advent of online booksellers. Now after more than half a century getting books on and off shelves and into the hands of thousands of people in America and across the world, Riggio is turning the final chapter on the book selling business.
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.
Read also: Exploring Bryan/College Station
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." 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.
Challenges and Adaptations in the Digital Age
When super bookstore chains rose in the 1990s, Riggio kept Barnes & Noble on the leading edge and helped the company to maneuver rough waters like the transition brought on by digital publishing and the popularity of e-books. Barnes & Noble responded to the latter by introducing its Nook e-reader, hoping to capitalize on this growing market. As recent as last fall, the Nook division recorded a $17-million loss, as sales plunged 22 percent.
According to Riggio, "It was not Amazon's delivery of books that changed things as much as it was the Internet itself, because the things that people would have to find in books were now available online and free. In fact, even today, authors that I speak to do more of their research online than they do in libraries."
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 claimed 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. CEO Leonard Riggio stepped down in 2002, naming his younger brother, and former acting chief executive of BarnesandNoble.com, Stephen Riggio, to succeed him. He began development toward the company's electronic book store and the introduction of its electronic book reader, the Nook.
Read also: Academic Life at Rutgers
The Rise of Barnes & Noble Education
Barnes & Noble formerly had a subsidiary, Barnes & Noble College Booksellers, that specialized in operating campus bookstores at colleges and universities.
After going public in 2015, Barnes & Noble Education (BNED) pivoted our educational upbringing toward a new generation of services and solutions to help satisfy institutional and student needs - creating innovative academic programs such as First Day® and the Adoption Insights Portal (AIP) as well as fresh retail approaches such as All Things College.
BNED has a long, rich legacy of serving the education industry. It began in 1965, when founder Leonard Riggio opened his first bookstore, the Student Book Exchange, in New York City’s Greenwich Village. Three years later, Mr. Riggio opened the first on-campus, contract-managed bookstore at Queensborough Community College, with additional contract-managed campus stores following soon after. In 1971, Mr. Riggio acquired the flagship Barnes & Noble trade name and within a few years expanded the company’s reach to more than 40 Barnes & Noble College on-campus stores in New York, New Jersey and Pennsylvania.
Barnes & Noble College Grant Programs
Since BNC launched the grant program in 2015, more than $1.4 million has been awarded to priorities that directly benefit the University community, with a focus on programs related to books and reading. This year, the grant program distributed $165,000 across 11 University initiatives from nine Penn State campuses.
“Barnes and Noble College continues to be an outstanding partner in furthering Penn State’s educational mission across the communities we serve,” said Margo DelliCarpini, vice president for Commonwealth Campuses and executive chancellor at Penn State.
Read also: An Inside Look at Barnes & Noble
To target its investments for maximum impact across Penn State’s colleges and campuses, Barnes and Noble College works through the Corporate Engagement Center to announce the grant program and facilitate funding requests and awards. This latest call for proposals resulted in 38 requests.
Examples of initiatives supported by these grants include:
- Engineering Ahead at Penn State Abington and Penn State Berks: Started in 2016 as a National Science Foundation-funded project designed to address the national need to diversify the STEM workforce.
- Financial Literacy Boot Camp at Penn State Behrend: Hosted by Penn State Behrend’s Center for Financial Literary, a boot camp will prepare high school teachers to deliver upcoming state-mandated financial literacy education launching in 2026. This support will be directed to students with financial need, many of whom are already carrying significant debt from their undergraduate education or who have families depending upon them.
- Madlyn L. Hanes Library Resources: The Madlyn L. Hanes Library will use grant funding to connect students, including pre-service teachers, as well as local educators and other adults in the Harrisburg area, with more resources within the vibrant world of children’s nonfiction and writing.
- Scholarships for Essential Course Materials at Penn State Hazleton: To help students, particularly those in developmental math courses, to hit the ground running at Penn State Hazleton, the campus will provide scholarships for essential books and course materials.
- Student Success Center School Supply Initiative: Each fall, nearly 25% of first-year students across Penn State start their journey in the Division of Undergraduate Studies (DUS), rather than in a specific college or major. The Student Success Center’s school supply initiative is designed to support undergraduates struggling to afford basic school supplies, such as notebooks and pens.
Barnes and Noble College has a particular interest in programs that are related to books or reading, have ties to Penn State campuses, focus on Penn State students or local communities with financial or finance-related needs, and have the possibility of engaging the local Barnes and Noble College campus bookstore.
Navigating the Modern Bookselling Landscape
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.
On October 3, 2018, the board of directors announced that they would entertain offers to buy the company. Among the potential buyers was Leonard Riggio, who owned at the time approximately 19% of Barnes & Noble stock. In March 2020, Barnes & Noble announced that it would temporarily stop selling magazines and, likewise temporarily, close 400 of its 620 stores due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Approximately 12 Barnes & Noble stores had closed completely following Elliott Advisors' takeover of the company.
In 2023 the CEO, James Daunt fostered a new approach to retail, allowing stores greater autonomy in choosing their layout, and also making them more similar to independent stores, in atmosphere and in layout. The Wall Street Journal cited Daunt's background running Daunt Books, an independent bookseller in the UK, as one major basis for his approach as CEO to new strategies for developing the retail business. The article asserted "The idea behind the new Barnes & Noble is to make the national chain more like a collection of 596 local indies. The famous one in my neighborhood [Upper West Side of Manhattan] used to symbolize the company’s past. Now it offers a peek at its future.
Additional Ventures and Services
Barnes & Noble maintains a separate publishing business in addition to its retail stores and other entities. Barnes & Noble's publishing company got its start by reissuing inexpensive versions of out-of-print books, and made a push to expand the unit in 2003. Barnes & Noble often publishes and sells books at a lower cost than competitors, and sells lines of inexpensive books like Barnes & Noble Classics and the leather-bound Barnes & Noble Collectible Classics collection which it has published since 1992.
The company has expanded business by acquiring several firms over the years, including J.B.
The Barnes & Noble Café
In 1993, Barnes & Noble signed an agreement to serve Starbucks coffee in each of its existing and future cafes. In 2004, Barnes & Noble began offering Wi-Fi in the café area of selected stores, using SBC FreedomLink (now the AT&T Wi-Fi network). In 2016, Barnes & Noble announced plans to open four concept stores in 2017 that featured cafés twice the size of its usual food spots, as well as bars offering wine and beer. Restaurants would also include a waitstaff and a full menu for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. The restaurants were expected to revive sales growth.
The Barnes & Noble Review
It was launched in October 2007 by Barnes & Noble CEO Steve Riggio and James Mustich Jr., publisher of the book catalog A Common Reader. Regular contributors to the magazine have included book critics Michael Dirda, Brooke Allen, Laura Miller, and Adam Kirsch, as well as prominent writers in fields outside of literary criticism, such as political journalists Chris Hayes and Ezra Klein, philosopher A. C. Grayling, music critic Robert Christgau, and cartoonist Ward Sutton.
The Nook E-reader
Barnes & Noble Nook (styled NOOK) is a suite of e-book readers developed by the company, based on the Android platform. The Nook competes with the Amazon Kindle, Kobo eReader, and other e-reader offerings and color tablets with reading apps, such as Apple's iBooks for iOS devices. Various Nook models feature a 6-inch, 7-inch, or larger touchscreen. Version 1.3 of the Nook introduced Wi-Fi connectivity, a web browser, a dictionary, chess, and sudoku games, and a separate, smaller color touchscreen that serves as the primary input device. The Nook also features a Read in Store capability that allows visitors to stream and read any book for up to one hour while shopping in a Barnes & Noble bookstore.
In June 2014, Barnes & Noble had previously announced that it would spin off its Nook Digital division into a separate publicly traded company, but as of 2016, Nook remains a part of Barnes & Noble. That same month, the company announced a partnership with Samsung Electronics to make Nook tablets, as the bookseller moved forward with plans to revamp its digital business. Samsung and Barnes & Noble introduced the Samsung Galaxy Tab 4 Nook 7.0 in August 2014, followed by the Samsung Galaxy Tab 4 Nook 10.1 in October 2014.
tags: #barnes #and #noble #state #college #history
