Barnes & Noble, Destroyer of Indie Bookstores, Is Now Printed Books' Last Great Champion

For years, Barnes & Noble was the scourge of independent booksellers everywhere, driving them out of business with its strip mall superstores. Then along came Amazon with its bookstore-killing Kindle and all of a sudden Barnes & Noble was recast as the last great hope of (paper and ink) book lovers everywhere. When this magazine visited the subject in 2010, it was already clear that the company, and its main brick-and-mortar competitor Borders, were in the fight for their lives as more and more consumers turned to the Internet. Borders never jumped on the technology bandwagon and last year it finally succumbed. In a last-ditch Hail Mary of its own, Barnes & Noble launched its Nook e-reader in late 2009. Now it's in the home stretch, explains today's Times - either the Nook succeeds in saving the company's physical bookstores, or else they too are gone the way of the dinosaurs.

In the past two years, the chain, headed up by Dallas native William Lynch Jr., has shed almost half its bookstores, begun reconfiguring the remaining outlets (he plans to phase out the CD and DVD sections), and plowed millions into Nook's 300-person Silicon Valley operations. But despite coming late to the party, the Nook seems to have secured a beachhead in the e-book market, about a 27 percent share. The Kindle, on the other hand, which boasted a nearly 90 percent market share several years ago, now finds itself closer to the 60 mark, says the Times..........
http://nymag.com/daily/entertainment/2012/01/barnes-noble-facing-down-amazon.html