Monday, March 4, 2013
Leonard Riggio has made a bid for the store's retail assets, including the Bethesda location.
Barnes & Noble Inc. Chairman Leonard Riggio is seeking to buy the bookselling giant's retail assets, CNN Money reported. Should the bid be approved, the sale would include the Bethesda location. According to the report, the bookstores have struggled as the popularity of e-readers increases. Holiday sales at the company's bookstores and websites dropped nearly 11 percent last year, according to the report. Barnes & Noble said it has put together an independent committee to review the proposal and to oversee any negotiations, The Los Angeles Times reported. The company in January said it would close some of its retail stores over the next 10 years, though a spokeswoman told Patch that there were no plans to close the Bethesda location. The …
Wednesday, January 30, 2013
The bookstore giant will close retail stores across the country in coming years, but a spokeswoman says there are no plans to close Bethesda's iconic downtown location.
Bookstore giant Barnes & Noble has plans to whittle down its retail stores, going from 689 stores to about 450 to 500 across the country in 10 years, according to news reports. Mitchell Klipper, chief executive of Barnes & Noble's retail group, told The Wall Street Journal that Barnes & Noble has plans in the works to close existing stores and cut back on opening new ones, evening out to a loss of about 20 stores per year, The LA Times reported. But according to a Barnes & Noble spokeswoman, Bethesda residents have no cause for concern. The iconic Bethesda Row retail store, a downtown Bethesda landmark, is not among those that will be closed. Retail bookstores are facing challenges from the growing popularity of e-books, The LA Times …
Monday, April 4, 2011
Independent bookstores may be just the place where one might unexpectedly meet friends and neighbors or pick up an interesting, off-beat title.
About three weeks ago or so, we happened to watch “Hannah and Her Sisters,” an old Woody Allen movie from the mid-1980s on one of the movie channels. It’s supposedly one of Allen’s best; we somehow missed it the first time around. Two things immediately jumped out that had nothing much to do with the movie’s theme: the scenes where Allen (or another character) made calls from a pay phone booth in Manhattan and, second, the numerous ‘chance’ meetings at small, quirky looking book stores. It brought home — jarringly — the stark differences between the 1980s and today and was reinforced last week with the good news that independent bookstore Politics and Prose will remain in local hands right here in Chevy Chase thanks to the sale to Bradley …
