Burned Unoble
Barnes & Noble knows how to buy and sell … stocks
In the mid-1990s, when Amazon.com burst onto the scene as a pioneer in Internet book-selling, Barnes & Noble's days were supposed to be numbered. The rapidly expanding bookstore chain, controlled by brothers Stephen and Leonard Riggio, was saddled with a suddenly outdated retailing model—selling products in bricks-and-mortar stores—and with a suddenly outdated product. Who, after all, would buy expensive, bulky books bound up in paper and cloth at a time when eBooks would soon be available for download at a fraction of the cost?