We return to another of the hot topics of recent months: what does investor Ron Burkle and his investor-friends at Aletheia Research want with Barnes & Noble now that they have built 19 percent and 17 percent blocks of the company’s stock, respectively? Are they looking to take control of the company, force it private, or simply overthrow the Riggio family from control? Yesterday Burkle filed with the SEC to indicate the acquisition of more shares, accompanied by a letter that he sent to the BN board. He makes it clear that he would like to “wag[e] a successful proxy […]
Bookstores
Barnes & Noble Discover Award Finalists
The bookseller announced the contenders for their annual Discover Awards, to be presented on March 3: FictionBarb Johnson, More of This World or Maybe Another (HarperPerennial)Victor Lodato, Mathilda Savitch (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)C. E. Morgan, All the Living (Farrar, Straus & Giroux) NonfictionDave Cullen, Columbine (Twelve)Toby Lester, The Fourth Part of the World: The Race to the Ends of the Earth, and the Epic Story of the Map that Gave America Its Name (Twelve)Neil White, In the Sanctuary of Outcasts: A Memoir (William Morrow)Release
Newton Children's Store for Sale; NAIBA Defends Sales Reps
The children’s bookstore connected to Newtonville Books The Lizard Tale, in Newton, MA is up for sale. Newtonville Books owner Mary Cotton notes, “We just renewed the lease, so we can pursue this sale in a leisurely manner with the hope of finding someone whose passion for children’s literature matches my passion for adult literature and the literary programming we provide the community through Newtonville Books.” The New Atlantic Independent Booksellers Association has given voice to the concerns of their members in an open letter to publishers: “Restricting field reps to large stores will give publishers a skewed view of […]
Amazon Removes Macmillan Buy Buttons
Many have wondered how Amazon would react to the biggest publishers’ efforts to challenge the etailer’s loss-leader price point for new releases in ebook form and move broadly to an agency model for selling ebooks, with Apple’s iBookstore but also broadly across accounts. And, as reported earlier, the speculation intensified after the WSJ played a video of Steve Jobs assuring Walt Mossberg that Amazon would need to sell ebooks at the same price as Apple because “publishers will actually withhold their [e]books from Amazon…because they are not happy with the price.” Sometime late Friday Amazon took the lead on withholding, […]
More On Barnes & Noble Stock, Sony Says Reader Sales Quadrupled
Meanwhile, on the continuing story of Aletheia Research and the Yucaipa Cos. toying with bookselling stocks, in the first three weeks of January (and especially on January 20), as Ron Marshall was closing his deal to run A&P and discussing his experiences at Borders, Aletheia bought another 268,000 or so share of Barnes & Noble. That boosts their stake to 15.71 percent of shares.SEC filing Deputy president of Sony’s Digital Reading Business Division Fujio Noguchi said at a press conference their Reader sales “quadrupled on a year-over-year basis” in 2009. It was the bestseller at their Sony Style online store […]
Borders Fires Another 10 Percent of Corporate Staff
Borders is eliminating another 124 positions from their corporate staff–about two-thirds of those from the company’s Ann Arbor headquarters–along with 40 positions at their warehouses, announced by e-mail, and confirmed to the Ann Arbor News. The company had signaled earlier in an internal memo we cited last week the need for further “adjustments to our cost structure.” Spokesperson Anne Roman says, “This is a situation where the company is adjusting its payroll to the realities of what its sales situation is.” SVP of human resources Shereen Solaiman wrote to employees, “While at this time we do not plan further wide-scale […]