Barnes & Noble does business -- big business -- by the book. As the #1 bookseller in the US, it operates about 650 superstores throughout 49 states and the District of Columbia under the banners Barnes & Noble, Bookstop, and Bookstar, as well as about 200 mall stores using the names B. Dalton, Doubleday, and Scribner's. The company's GameStop subsidiary is the #1 US video game retailer with about 1,500 stores under the names Babbage's Etc., GameStop, and FuncoLand. Barnes & Noble owned about 75% of online book seller barnesandnoble.com after purchasing Bertelsmann's interest in 2003; Barnes & Noble then purchased all remaining shares and took the company private in May 2004.
Barnes & Noble dates back to 1873 when
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BDB changed its name to Barnes & Noble in 1991. With superstore sales booming, the retailer went public in 1993 (the college stores remained private). It bought 20% of Canadian bookseller Chapters (now Indigo Books) in 1996 (then sold in 1999).
The bookseller went online in 1997, and in 1998 sold a 50% stake in its Web operation subsidiary to Bertelsmann (which it re-purchased in 2003) in an attempt to strengthen both companies in the battle against online rival Amazon.com.
Also in 1998 Barnes & Noble agreed to buy #1 US book distributor Ingram Book Group, but the deal was called off in 1999 because of antitrust concerns. Also in 1999 barnesandnoble.com went public and Barnes & Noble bought small book publisher J.B. Fairfax International USA, which included coffee-table book publisher Michael Friedman Publishing Group. Later that year the company bought a 49% stake in book publishing portal iUniverse.com (later reduced to 22%). It also bought Riggio's financially struggling Babbage's Etc., a chain of about 500 Babbage's, Software Etc., and GameStop stores, for $215 million.
The company's Babbage's Etc. subsidiary (renamed GameStop, Inc.) acquired video game retailer Funco for $161.5 million in 2000. In 2001 Barnes & Noble joined barnesandnoble.com in acquiring a majority stake in magazine subscription seller enews.com.
In February 2002 the company completed an initial public offering of its
The bookstore chain has been decreasing in profit in the US over the past 20 years. Most of the books retailers are shutting down their operations and only a few are still operating in the country. Barnes and Noble has become the largest bookseller in the book retailers industry. The firm has integrated its business philosophy into web presence though eBook marketplace. This business strategy assisted the firm to be able to reach a large scale customers and remain as a strongest competitor in the book retailing market.
Proprietary e-Reader NOOK and NOOK tablet have decent 15% market share among all tablets and e-Readers (Greenfield********)
Still, the company has been facing many external environmental issues in the recent years which have caused financial net losses of 27.2 million for quarter three of 2016 and closed more than 70 stores around the country as shown in Appendix A). Barnes & Nobles has always been known for its mega bookstores, so changing brad identities will be difficult to do. Starting in Fall 2016, Barnes & Noble is introducing a new store concept in several locations across the country featuring a contemporary aesthetic where books remain the hero, an expanded food and beverage offering, including wine and beer, and a major commitment to hospitality featuring table-side service. The new stores will also include a special mobile experience for both booksellers
When Leonard Riggio opened Barnes & Nobles he wanted it to be more of a social gathering verses just a bookstore. It was a BIG HIT, one of a kind. 1995 Amazon.com emerged. In 1997 Mr. Riggio launched the barnesandnoble.com in order to keep up with the customers wants. This is a continual battle Barnes & Nobles is fighting, constantly changing their company to fit the world around it.
After analyzing the Barnes and Noble Inc. financial statement, I found out that the financial of this company is declining. The management creates a business plan that includes new innovative and creative ideas to attract customers, and increase their finance. Barnes and Noble seems to run the risk to have its equity decrease, by looking at the income statements we could determine a net income decrease of $24,446 in a year period. After analyzing this I realized that Barnes and Noble might be force to closed their business between five to seven years.
Barnes & Noble's beginnings can be traced to 1873, when Charles M. Barnes started a book business from his home in Wheaton, Illinois. In 1917, his son, William, went to New York to join G. Clifford Noble in establishing Barnes & Noble. During the height of the Great Depression, what later became the Barnes & Noble flagship store was opened on Fifth Avenue at 18th Street in New York City. This store developed a worldwide reputation for excellence by serving millions of customers with its comprehensive selection of general trade books, academic titles and textbooks, and medical books. Barnes & Noble, Inc. (NYSE:BKS) is a Fortune 500 company, the nation’s largest retail bookseller and a leading retailer of content, digital media and educational
It is difficult for Barnes & Noble to compete with Amazon based on the current performance of the company. Amazon started an online print book retailer and gradually moved into the e-book industry ahead of other competitors. Furthermore, Amazon has a well-established distribution channel far more expansive and functional than Barnes & Noble. From the consumer perspective, younger generations prefer reading e-books rather than print books due to the portability, size, and low price. Although there is an increased initial cost, e-books are less expensive than print books. If Barnes & Noble wants to increase its efforts in the e-book industry and compete with giants like Amazon, the company has to invest a large amount of money to transform from
In March 2009, Barnes & Noble acquired Fictionwise, a leader in the eBook marketplace. Headquartered in New Jersey, Fictionwise was founded in 2000 by Steve and Scott Pendergrast. In July 2009, Barnes & Noble launched the world's largest eBookstore as part of its overall digital strategy. In October 2009, Barnes & Noble introduced Nook™, the world’s most advanced eBook Reader. It was awarded as the Best New Gadget of 2009 in January 2010.
Amazon.com: The Brink of Bankruptcy Jeffrey Bezos, formerly a senior vice president for D. E. Shaw & Company, founded Amazon.com in 1994. D. E. Shaw is a Wall Street-based investment bank, and Mr. Bezoswas assigned to find good Internet companies in which to invest. During the summer of 1994, he stumbled across a Web site that showed the number of Internet users was growing by 2,300 percent per month. He quickly realized the vast potential of the Internet, and began putting together a list of possible products that he could sell on the World Wide Web. He eventually narrowed his list to music products and books. Although music products and books both had enormous potential, he eventually selected books because he believed that he could
Barnes opened his first book business in Wheaton, IL. In 1917, his son, William joined G. Clifford Noble in New York to form the bookstore, Barnes & Noble. They opened their first store during the Great Depression. Even during this era, they became known worldwide as the experts in many types of books, and offering a great reputation to customers. During the 1960s, the modern-day founder of Barnes & Noble, Leonard Riggio, had started a small bookstore of his own, the Student Book Exchange, in Manhattan’s Greenwich Village. (barnesandnobleinc.com) In the 1970s, Riggio acquired the Barnes & Noble trademark name and flagship store. Under Riggio’s ownership, the company became the first for many things in its industry. They were the first bookstore to advertise on television, the first to advertise New York Times bestseller books at discounts, and expand into larger markets with smaller stores. To meet high customer demand, they began publishing their own reissued out-of-print books at affordable
A worldwide, retailer of video game products, consumer electronics and wireless services, GameStop originates from Babbage 's, a software retailer that began in Dallas, Texas. The switch from Babbage 's to GameStop happened when a series of mergers began. “As a rapidly growing global gaming entertainment, consumer electronics, and wireless services retailer with more than 6,600 stores worldwide, GameStop is a family of specialty retail brands that makes the most popular technologies affordable and simple.” (GameStop, 2016). These thousands of stores that GameStop has opened are stationed throughout the United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and Europe. Barnes & Noble’s went public in February of 2012 with GameStop on the New York
Founded as Babbage’s in Dallas, TX in 1983, was purchased by Barnes and Noble in 1999, and merged with Funco, Inc. in 2000 still under Barnes and Noble. GameStop separated from Barnes and Noble/Funco in 2004 and acquired EB Games in 2005. In those short 22 years, GameStop grew to have 4,490 retail stores worldwide and own 21% of the $11.5 billion gaming market in USA (+11% of the $9.6 billion worldwide markets). The gaming market includes software, hardware, accessories, and merchandise for PCs and video game consoles. While retail PC game sales have steadily declined since 1998, video game/console sales have continued to increase with competitive differentiation apparent in the game categories, console styles, etc. On
With the rise in popularity of the Internet, the death of books was prophesized. The demise of Borders, once the most viable rival to the behemoth book chain Barnes & Noble could be read as a symptom of this cultural phenomenon. However, another of Barnes & Noble's rivals, that of Amazon.com is thriving. Amazon.com introduced a new model of profitability for online retailers, first beginning with books and then branching out into digital books and other forms of goods and services. By some book enthusiasts, Borders was much beloved. "Though it was a chain, with hundreds of locations around the world, during its best years it maintained the feel of a great, expansive local bookstore, the 800-foot space multiplied by 10 or 20 (and much better organized). The choices were manifold, the employees passionate, the adventure always beginning" (Leopold 2011:2). How did this change?
Unlike many other recent business failures, such as Tyco International Ltd., WorldCom, or Enron, the failure of the Borders bookstore is a sad tale of a well-meaning enterprise that slowly began to fall behind the times, and was eventually overtaken by its more astute competitors Amazon and Barnes & Noble. Borders began as a small, independent Michigan-based bookstore that eventually evolved into a chain store with a national reputation. But its failure to keep abreast of technology proved to be its undoing. Rather than attempting to sell its books online under its own label, unlike its major competitor Barnes & Noble, Borders outsourced its online sales to Amazon.com, thus diluting its brand name (Sandburn 2011). Borders had already been a slow mover into the business of selling reading material online, allowing its competitors to establish inroads into the market.
Barnes & Noble started their exploration of internet business opportunities in the 1980s after the establishment of Trintex. Before that, the company simply used mail-order catalogues where it located lists of their products. Trintex, on the contrary, was B&N’s first experience in online retailing, which was launched as a joint venture between Sears and IBM. However, the company’s own website was launched only in May 1997. Although Barnes and Noble mainly specializes on the books retailing, its services and developments are not limited by this. For example, the company provides a wide range of audio and mp3 audio books: