For Sale: Barnes & Noble

By Geoff Duncan August 4, 2010

Image used with permission by copyright holder

Bookseller Barnes & Noble is just starting to get into the thick of the ebook and ereader market with its Nook electronic readers and electronic bookstore…but now that the company seems to finally have built up a good head of steam, the board of directors has dropped a bit of a bombshell: they plan to “evaluate strategic alternatives,” including a possible sale of the company, in an effort to boost the price of Barnes & Noble shares, which the company believes to be undervalued.

“As the world’s largest bookseller, Barnes & Noble has an iconic brand and unique competitive advantages we believe will position the company to succeed over time in a rapidly changing market,” the Barnes & Noble board wrote in a statement. “The Board has concluded that a review of strategic alternatives is the appropriate next step to take full advantage of our compelling digital opportunities and to create value for shareholders, customers, and employees.”

Barnes & Noble founder and single largest shareholder Leonard Riggio has said he’ll look into assembling an investor group with an eye towards acquiring the company. The Board has set no timetable for its strategic review, and doesn’t intend to comment any further unless an offer is put on their table.

In addition to its digital marketplace, Barnes & Noble runs over 700 bookstores in the United States.

Barnes & Noble may have trouble finding buyers: the entire book industry has been in tumult for years: first, companies like Barnes & Noble used scale to put many smaller booksellers out of business, then companies like Amazon.com used the Internet to undercut the sales advantage of brick-and-mortar retailers. Now Amazon has established itself as a leader in the ebooks market with the success of its Kindle line; Barnes & Noble is in the ebook business too, but so are Sony, Borders, and, of course, Apple.

Topics

Emerging Tech

Former Digital Trends Contributor

Geoff Duncan writes, programs, edits, plays music, and delights in making software misbehave. He's probably the only member…

Computing

This AI cloned my voice using just three minutes of audio

acapela group voice cloning ad

There's a scene in Mission Impossible 3 that you might recall. In it, our hero Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) tackles the movie's villain, holds him at gunpoint, and forces him to read a bizarre series of sentences aloud.

"The pleasure of Busby's company is what I most enjoy," he reluctantly reads. "He put a tack on Miss Yancy's chair, and she called him a horrible boy. At the end of the month, he was flinging two kittens across the width of the room ..."

News

Digital Trends’ Top Tech of CES 2023 Awards

Best of CES 2023 Awards Our Top Tech from the Show Feature

Let there be no doubt: CES isn’t just alive in 2023; it’s thriving. Take one glance at the taxi gridlock outside the Las Vegas Convention Center and it’s evident that two quiet COVID years didn’t kill the world’s desire for an overcrowded in-person tech extravaganza -- they just built up a ravenous demand.

From VR to AI, eVTOLs and QD-OLED, the acronyms were flying and fresh technologies populated every corner of the show floor, and even the parking lot. So naturally, we poked, prodded, and tried on everything we could. They weren’t all revolutionary. But they didn’t have to be. We’ve watched enough waves of “game-changing” technologies that never quite arrive to know that sometimes it’s the little tweaks that really count.

News

Digital Trends’ Tech For Change CES 2023 Awards

Digital Trends CES 2023 Tech For Change Award Winners Feature

CES is more than just a neon-drenched show-and-tell session for the world’s biggest tech manufacturers. More and more, it’s also a place where companies showcase innovations that could truly make the world a better place — and at CES 2023, this type of tech was on full display. We saw everything from accessibility-minded PS5 controllers to pedal-powered smart desks. But of all the amazing innovations on display this year, these three impressed us the most:

Samsung's Relumino Mode
Across the globe, roughly 300 million people suffer from moderate to severe vision loss, and generally speaking, most TVs don’t take that into account. So in an effort to make television more accessible and enjoyable for those millions of people suffering from impaired vision, Samsung is adding a new picture mode to many of its new TVs.
[CES 2023] Relumino Mode: Innovation for every need | Samsung
Relumino Mode, as it’s called, works by adding a bunch of different visual filters to the picture simultaneously. Outlines of people and objects on screen are highlighted, the contrast and brightness of the overall picture are cranked up, and extra sharpness is applied to everything. The resulting video would likely look strange to people with normal vision, but for folks with low vision, it should look clearer and closer to "normal" than it otherwise would.
Excitingly, since Relumino Mode is ultimately just a clever software trick, this technology could theoretically be pushed out via a software update and installed on millions of existing Samsung TVs -- not just new and recently purchased ones.