Barnes & Noble investor Sandell presses for bookseller’s sale

This content has been archived. It may no longer be accurate or relevant.

From Fox Business:

An activist investor wants Barnes & Noble Inc. to try again to sell itself, arguing the bookseller needs an owner who can invest in its beleaguered operations.

Sandell Asset Management  has recently started buying a stake in the New York bookstore chain and is already among its 10 biggest investors, according to people familiar with the matter.

. . . .

Even though physical bookstores have declined in popularity in the U.S. in the internet age, Sandell reckons they aren’t going away and that Barnes & Noble’s status as the only national chain could attract a well-heeled private-equity firm or another retailer.

. . . .

The company has explored several possible deals to sell or break itself up over the years, including a buyout attempt by its chairman, Leonard Riggio. But none of the plans came to fruition and the stock has slumped 60% in the past two years, with the company’s market value plunging to just above $500 million.

Like many retailers, Barnes & Noble has struggled to compete with Amazon.com, which dominates the online sale of physical and digital books. For the fiscal year ended in April, Barnes & Noble’s revenue declined 6.5% to $3.9 billion, while earnings rose to $22 million. The bookseller, which currently has more than 600 stores, said it expects sales at stores open at least a year to show a percentage drop in the low single digits in fiscal 2018.

Link to the rest at Fox Business and thanks to Nate at The Digital Reader for the tip.

35 thoughts on “Barnes & Noble investor Sandell presses for bookseller’s sale”

  1. Buy low, pump it up any way you can (like rumors!), then sell it quick before the bottom falls out.

    I don’t see Jeff going for it, too much overhead for what little if any gain.

  2. As an author I pulled all of my self pubbed titles from Nook today, after several years and over six figures in royalties.

    B&N’s refusal to stock the current NYT #2 bestseller was a factor. When I asked for the book in my hometown store I was sneered at by the customer service rep and told to ‘order it online’. You can be sure he would gleefully have showed me to the dozen copies of Mein Kampf they are happy to stock.

    Of course I’m not naive enough to think that an Amazon physical store wouldn’t do the same with this popular title – but at least I can successfully sell my books on the KDP platform, that buys them some leeway.

    I suppose this is just long winded proof that I’m a hypocrite too. Never mind.

    TLDR; I hope Barnes and Noble and their new activist investor go broke.

    • Mi!o’s self-published book? Amazon’s been suggesting it to md for a couple if weeks now, and some other right-wing works. It’s as if we stopped dating and don’t know each other any more.

        • 11 days ago hit #2 in Hardcover non fiction. self published too, don’t you know. Hardcover for $18 sitting #3 overall at Amazon. Oddly enough $9.99 Kindle sits at #315 overall. The sales have been there, to the dismay of many. Was released in early July I think.

        • They have every right not to sell it in stores if they wish, I’m not THAT big of a hypocrite. But I question the capitalist chops of such a decision and I believe they deserve to fail and cost their investors millions. After years of crying about online sales their reps now pointed me online to make my purchase – which I won’t do from them of course.

          In the words of Michael Jordan years ago when pushed as to why he wasn’t more of a big mouth political athlete; “Republicans buy shoes too.”

          • B&N might not be not carrying it because of the political content, but because it’s self-published and they can’t return unsold copies. We’ll never know. Does your local B&N carry alt-right works printed by the Big 5?

            • I have 5 of my paperbacks in B&N. They order 3 at a time, when the stock is out, they order 3 more. Yes I have returns held back on my commission statements; but they aren’t stocking hundreds of them like in the old days. But, convenient excuse I must admit.

              Milo had a Big 5 contract, but of course people like you got that dropped with your alt-left nonsense.

              Unsubscribe.

            • Does your local B&N carry alt-right works printed by the Big 5?

              Ha-ha. Good one.

              When was the last time the Big 5 published an alt-right book?

              Not that it’s relevant anyway, because Milo keeps saying he’s not alt-right, and points out that many on the alt-right hate him because he’s a) gay and b) Jewish, so he’s rather unlikely to join their club.

              ‘Alt-right’ has simply joined ‘fascist’ as a generic left-wing word for ‘people we don’t like.’

    • Patterson?
      A band of curators of literature?
      The randy Penguin?
      A national realtor?

      Once the price drops enough some enterprising soul will step in. But that day is still a ways off.

      Borders had several serious bidders. They just needed minimal concessions from the BPHs. They didn’t get them because the BPHs thought Borders customers would just shrug and go to B&N. (They thought wrong.) When the time comes for B&N the BPHs will have to cough up whatever concessions are necessary to keep some reduced form of B&N alive.

      A buyer will be found.
      Eventually. Just not soon.

      • “Once the price drops enough …”

        And there’s the joke, Sandell seems to think a buyer might pay as much $12 a share while it’s currently under $8.

        B&N will either be a fire sale or simply fold me thinks.

        • Unless Riggio prefers to literally run it into the ground it’ll be a fire sale while there’s still some value left.

      • “They just needed minimal concessions from the BPHs. They didn’t get them because the BPHs thought Borders customers would just shrug and go to B&N. (They thought wrong.)”

        Part of the problem with an assumption like that is that not everyone who was close to a Borders is (or was at the time) close to a B&N. We had a Borders Express close enough that I walked to it most days on my lunch break. The nearest B&N is a good hour away at least. So simply transitioning like that wasn’t an option for me or a heck of a lot of other book buyers in my area. And that kind of gets to the underlying problem that people who live in major metropolises forget that not everyone lives in a major metropolis.

        • 75% of all BORDERS stores were within a mile of a B&N.
          Their customers chose, for some reason, not to shop at B&N. Both before and after the bankruptcy.

          • The one thing that made me not shop at B&N was that they wanted me to pay for their loyalty discount card. Borders did not.

            I would have ended up handing them more money than paying full shelf price on books – and since I only found one or two a year there, just not worth it. Started just adding to the wish list for Amazon until free shipping is reached. (Which goes slowly, since most purchases there are now ebooks.)

              • The worst part about it is that if you don’t buy the loyalty card, the nice employee who offers it to you suffers, and can even be fired after encountering enough refusals. Knowing that makes the purchasing process a VERY negative one. I know the cashier has to offer it, and I really don’t want it, and we both suffer. People will shy away from negative purchasing experiences.

            • I didn’t mind paying for a loyalty card when I made regular trips to B&N and walked out with a shopping bag full of books.

              Then I switched to ebooks, where there was no discount with a loyalty card.

              But the thing that made me most angry was searching for a physical book online, finding that it was available in my local B&N, then getting to the store and discovering the price was significantly higher than the online price with no wiggle room. Immediate gratification wasn’t that important. I could wait for Amazon to deliver it. At a lower price.

          • A couple reasons I preferred to shop at Borders rather than B&N: Borders had the titles I wanted more frequently. They also would work with small press authors to stock our print books. B&N couldn’t be less interested. They also ran multi-author events, even for those of us not pubbed by the NY5. B&N said they would, then stonewalled. Borders was altogether more customer friendly in my local pair of stores than B&N is to this day. Try this non-customer-orientation thing often enough, and your customers migrate elsewhere.

  3. Reminds me of the recent article about the closing of Logos Books in Santa Cruz. The owner said this about selling the store…

    I was hoping that maybe there was some high-tech guy out there with lots of money who always wanted to run a good bookstore. But it didn’t happen.

    He didn’t detail that he owned the building, hadn’t been charging the bookstore (which he owned) market rent, NEEDED to charge market rent because retirement, and hadn’t drawn a salary from the business in over a decade. Thus, “some high-tech guy with lots of money” was leaving out the subtext of “and not much in the way of brains.”

    Which is what is being discussed here. The investor in question is hoping to find someone with lots of money and lots of ego who is for some reason suffering a failure of their ability to critically analyze a business.

  4. “Physical bookstores aren’t going away.”

    Sure. Here’s an interesting nugget from an article about a used bookstore closing in Norman Ok.

    When she decided to close the store, Townly called the district manager of Half Price Books, but she was told their stores are having financial difficulties as well, and wouldn’t be able to purchase her stock.

    http://www.normantranscript.com/news/business/book-stall-closing-its-doors-soon/article_57ef35c6-76b1-5c4c-b22f-21a933fb09f8.html

    Townly took over The Book Stall about 20 years ago, and she has subsidized the business with her own money since then. But now, she said she can’t keep it up and she is starting to get older.

    “It’s just not making that much money,” Townly said. “It’s just not worth it anymore.”

Comments are closed.