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Barnes & Noble Company Overview

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Submitted By bridgetr23
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ABSTRACT

Barnes & Noble is a Fortune 500 company, and a leader in their field. The business is multi-faceted; in addition to their paper & ink product offering, the company also has a strong DVD, magazine, and eBook base; the wide variety of products offered may help the company to continue exhibiting strong growth in the future. In 2009, Barnes & Noble introduced the Nook e-reader, a device that would allow the company to enter the quickly growing market of electronic books. The Nook was an instant success, with sales of the device and of electronic books skyrocketing for the first few years.
Barnes & Noble responded to this success by pouring additional resources into the Nook product line, enhancing the device and partnering with other tech giants in order to ensure the Nook remained the best e-reader on the market. However, as other competitors entered the market with lower prices and different options, Nook sales began to fall. This paper examines the history of Barnes & Noble, the evolution of the Nook product line, and the current questionable profitability of the Nook line. Barnes & Noble is a large and successful business with humble origins. The company was originally established in the early 1900s by the son of an Illinois book-printer, and was acquired by Leonard Riggio in 1971. Riggio was an innovative bookseller and entrepreneur, who at the time owned and operated a highly successful chain of college bookstores. When he purchased the floundering Barnes & Noble name, Riggio instituted his tried and proven bookselling methods—as well as many new marketing and sales techniques—and built Barnes & Noble into the number one bookselling chain in the country. To this day, Len Riggio is acknowledged to be the mind and motivation behind Barnes & Noble’s success, and he remains involved in day-to-day business as the company’s Chairman of the Board.
Len

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